As a lover of science fiction and the time travel stories, in 2022, I started trying to write up the types/styles of fictional time travel I’ve encountered.

By no means is this exhaustive, but it’s where I got to:

  • Predestination - deterministic, will always be that way
  • Butterfly effect - changes beget exponential changes
  • Time as a force - resists change, often forcing a predetermined outcome
  • Predictably changeable - changes what you’d expect

There are also some common scenarios:

  • Causal loops
  • Stranded in another time
  • Various paradoxes
  • Diverging timelines
  • Time agencies/authorities

Ultimately, a the time travel in a story works how the writer wants it to, but what makes a time travel story good is consistency in their set rules, and the ability of the writer to use those rules to tell a compelling story.

E.g. The backwards travel of Tenet is interesting for sure, but is it necessarily as compelling as something like The Time Traveller’s wife; where the protagonist lives with a debilitating genetic disease that causes him to randomly time travel unpredictably. Both have consistent rules, and the concept of a temporal cold war is thrilling and great trailer-bait, but the threat to a mans life of being thrust into unpredictable environments with no warning or preparation ultimately ends up being the more compelling story, at least to me.

Edit 10/01/2025: Though that may be largely because Nolan neglected to give John David Washington’s Protagonist a name other than ‘Protagonist’. And a lot of it comes down to your own weighting of high-concept vs a real feeling person in peril.

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