I'm currently watching/playing an interactive DVD game, a visual novel. The protagonist and a time-patrol agent are currently caught between time, or in a crevice outside of time. They will only spend perhaps a couple minutes caught outside of time before returning to the protagonist's world.
As I understand it, in most of these time-travel, time-manipulation, time-destruction stories, somehow nobody states the obvious: time is progressing perfectly fine. (They spent a couple minutes caught outside of time?!?)
Here's a question about the end of "Back to the Future, Part III": when Doc Brown and his family went to the future to upgrade the train, did he reach the future where Marty still had that accident? Or did he reach the new future where Marty had avoided the accident?
I suppose it depends on whether they went to the future before or after Marty chose not to race. Either that, or when Marty chose not to race, reality shifted from one future to the other future. (The future they visited shifted from one to the other.)
Comments
Time travel concepts
Regarding "time is progressing perfectly fine": In many novels that I've read that somehow contain time travel, the concept of "subjective time" or "biological time" gets introduced to distinguish between time as perceived by the protagonist and time that passes in external scenarios (and in some novels there are lots of those scenarios or alternative realities).
As to "before or after" – there is also the multiverse with branching on each decision. In that case the future would not simply shift, but the change in the past would create a new branch of reality that exists in parallel to the branch with the unchanged past, although you can usually not access the different realities by choice ("The Number of the Beast" is the only exception that I can remeber offhand).
Decidedly odd
Physicists have discovered a new phase of matter that exists in our universe but has two time dimensions. It's really the three-dimensional projection of a four-dimensional state of existence. This is useful for stabilizing qubits. !!??!! See, qubits are made up of two polarization-differentiated photons that exist in a quantum-entangled state of probability and....oh, never mind...
It's like Feynman said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics you haven't studied it long enough." :D
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I don't suppose it would make
I don't suppose it would make any difference if he never looked Marty up. Marty could exist in an inured and uninjured state. A little like a certain cat in a box. It always makes my head hurt time travel. To get over the paradoxes that can be created, there could be an infinite amount of different, valid, timelines.
Imagine that, we are all gods that created a whole new timeline with almost every decision we make! It's easy to travel forward in time, We do it all the time. It's going back that causes problems.
Leeanna
If it's 'time' to bend your mind ...
... then here is a short story to do that 'bending'. (And has a film adaptation).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies
BCTS 'bonus' - it is, in part, a transgender story.