[HPforGrownups] Re: Chapter Discussion: Prisoner of Azkaban Ch 16: Professor Trelawney's prediction
Bart Lidofsky
bart at moosewise.com
Wed Apr 13 20:38:46 UTC 2011
No: HPFGUIDX 190222
June:
>
> I never said there didn't have to be rules in time travel. What I
> said was that there is not really any such thing as time travel
> (when was the last time you traveled in time Bart?)
Bart:
I'm always traveling in time. Unfortunately, just forwards.
June:
> so the writers
> can make their own rules when writing their stories. How can there
> be set rules for something that does not exist? JK Rowling broke
> no rules because there are no rules.
Bart:
Well, the short-short story I wrote showed that there have to be
SOME rules. Here's the basic rule in fantasy writing: outside of the
fantastic elements, the story and characters have to be as believable as
possible. Leaving an unresolvable paradox is not believable. There is
something in fantastic literature called a "time loop"; that is a
reality that is based on someone traveling back in time and changing the
past. There is often a question of how the time loop started. The
easiest way to handle it is to have the person who changes time not
change their own past (such as saving Buckbeak; whether Buckbeak
originally lived or died would not have changed the actions of any of
the time travelers).
Harry's future self saving his past self creates a problem, because
if he died before he had a chance to travel back in time, then he
wouldn't have, and therefore he would have died. The only way to resolve
the paradox is to assume that somebody else, in the original past, saved
Harry; seeing that he was drooping down, the image he saw of a stag may
have been mistaken. My best guess: Dumbledore, who seemed to know
outside time, but, being a master manipulator, managed to arrange the
time paradox.
Bart
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