unesp  UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL PAULISTA 

     “JÚLIO DE MESQUITA FILHO” 

Faculdade de Ciências e Letras 

Campus de Araraquara - SP 

 

 

 

 

VINÍCIUS BRIL ROCATELLI 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
PARADOX HAVOC: Time Travel in Gothic Science 

Fiction 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ARARAQUARA – S.P. 

2023 



 

 

 

VINÍCIUS BRIL ROCATELLI 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PARADOX HAVOC: Time Travel in Gothic Science 

Fiction 

   

 
Master’s thesis presented to the Board of the 

Program of Estudos Literários from Faculdade de 
Ciências e Letras – Unesp/Araraquara, in order to 

obtain the title of Master in Estudos Literários.  

 

Line of Research: Teorias e Crítica da Narrativa 

 

Adviser: Prof. Dr. Aparecido Donizete Rossi 

 
  Scholarship: CAPES 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
ARARAQUARA – S.P. 

2023 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

VINÍCIUS BRIL ROCATELLI 

 

 

PPPAAARRRAAADDDOOOXXX   HHHAAAVVVOOOCCC:::   Time Travel in Gothic Science 

Fiction 

   
Master’s thesis presented to the Board of the 
Program of Estudos Literários from Faculdade de 

Ciências e Letras – Unesp/Araraquara, in order to 

obtain the title of Master in Estudos Literários.  
 

Line of Research: Teorias e Crítica da Narrativa 

 

Adviser: Prof. Dr. Aparecido Donizete Rossi 
 

  Scholarship: CAPES 

 
 
Date of Defense: 05/02/2023 

 

MEMBERS OF THE BOARD: 

 

 

                                            

President and Adviser: Prof. Aparecido Donizete Rossi, PhD 

      Universidade Estadual Paulista. 

 
 

                                             

Board Member: Prof. Alexander Meireles da Silva, PhD 

      Universidade Federal de Goiás. 

 
 

                                                    

Board Member: Profª. Karin Volobuef, PhD 

     Universidade Estadual Paulista. 
 

 

 
 

Location: Universidade Estadual Paulista 

Faculdade de Ciências e Letras 

UNESP – Campus de Araraquara



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To myself — past, present, and future. 

 

 

 

 



 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

 

Firstly, I thank my adviser, Cido Rossi, for his generosity, unending patience, careful 

consideration, and constructive feedback. Secondly, I thank my parents, Izabel Cristína Bril 

Rocatelli and Luíz Carlos Rocatelli, for their unwavering support even though my interests 

freak them out. Thirdly, thanks are due to Paula Bugni, for being able to put up with me — a 

man who is especially gifted at burning his bridges — for over a decade now. 

Lastly, the present research was possible only due to the support of Coordenação de 

Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Código de Financiamento 

001. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

“When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it 

is present, it will be future as well”.  

Jack Womack (2000, p. 300) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

ABSTRACT 
 

This research aims to analyze the paradoxes of time travel in Gothic Science Fiction in order 

to question our hypothesis: the Bootstrap Paradox is present in determinist tales of a more 

pessimistic vein, because the past cannot be changed, only perpetuated; the Grandfather 

Paradox, present in indeterminist tales of a more optimistic vein, because the past can be 

changed, therefore tragedies, for example, can be avoided or fixed. We will be looking at a 

myriad of different fictional texts from different mediums — short stories, novels, films, 

television, and video games. In particular: Hajime Isayama’s manga series Attack on Titan 

(2009-2021), Connie Willis’ novel To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), two episodes of BBC’s 

Doctor Who (1963-1989; 2005-) — “The Day of the Doctor” (2013), and “Heaven Sent” 

(2015), Ken Levine’s Bioshock Infinite (2013), Tatsuya Matsubara’s Steins;Gate (2009), and 

James P. Blaylock’s Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992). Therefore, the present research indulges 

in the practice of comparative literature. Likewise, we are going to be drawing from the 

critical writings of scholars such as Fred Botting, David Wittenberg, Brian Aldiss, Adam 

Roberts, James Gleick, and the like — specialists from the fields we are studying (time travel 

fiction, Science Fiction, and Gothic literature). 

 

Keywords: Paradox; Time Travel; Science fiction; Gothic. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

RESUMO 
 

A presente pesquisa tem por objetivo analisar os paradoxos da viagem no tempo na literatura 

de Ficção Científica Gótica para questionar a nossa hipótese: o Paradoxo Ontológico está 

presente em histórias deterministas de uma veia mais pessimista, porque o passado não pode 

ser mudado, somente perpetuado; o Paradoxo do Avô, presente em histórias indeterministas, 

pois o passado pode ser mudado, então tragédias, por exemplo, podem ser evitadas ou 

consertadas. Iremos trabalhar com diversos textos ficcionais de diversos tipos de mídias — 

contos, romances, filmes, televisão, e vídeo games. Em particular: a série de mangá Ataque 

dos Titãs (2009-2021) do Hajime Isayama, o romance To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998) da 

Connie Willis, dois episódios da série Doctor Who (1963-1989; 2005-) da BBC — “The Day 

of the Doctor” (2013), e “Heaven Sent” (2015), o vídeo game Bioshock Infinite (2013) do Ken 

Levine, o vídeo game Steins;Gate (2009) do Tatsuya Matsubara, e o romance Lord Kelvin’s 

Machine (1992) do James P. Blaylock. Portanto, a presente pesquisa faz uso da prática da 

literatura comparada. Com isso, iremos buscar apoio na escrita crítica de diversos pensadores, 

como Fred Botting, David Wittenberg, Brian Aldiss, Adam Roberts, James Gleick, e outros 

— especialistas nos campos relevantes para a nossa pesquisa (ficção de viagem no tempo, 

Ficção Científica, e literatura Gótica). 

 

Palavras – chave: Paradoxo; Viagem no tempo; Ficção Científica; Gótico. 

 

 

 



 

 

SUMMARY 

 

1. INTRODUCTION 11 

2. TIME ODDITY 13 

3. HEROIC CONSERVATION 34 

4. TROUBLESHOOTING PAST LIFE 51 

5. CONCLUSION 68 

REFERENCES 70 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



11 

 

1. INTRODUCTION 

 

 The genesis of this thesis was presented to the Programa de Pós-Graduação em 

Estudos Literários in its selective process phase. The impetus behind this research was to 

investigate the connective tissue between Gothic and Science Fiction, specifically in various 

works of time travel Science Fiction. However, our goal has slightly changed, because our 

interest lies in analyzing the paradoxes of time travel fiction, in particular the ones that are 

most commonly found in pop culture: the Bootstrap Paradox and the Grandfather Paradox. 

Our prime hypothesis is that the Bootstrap Paradox is present in determinist tales of a more 

pessimistic vein, because the past cannot be changed, only perpetuated; the Grandfather 

Paradox, present in indeterminist tales of a more optimistic vein, because the past can be 

changed, therefore tragedies, for example, can be avoided or fixed. 

This research does not bind itself to one specific fictional work, or one specific fiction 

writer. Instead, it aims to discuss a myriad of disparate works, comparing and contrasting how 

each text works with these paradoxes. In this way, our thesis indulges in the practice of 

comparative literature. Mainly, we picked each object of analysis based off of our own 

personal enjoyment. This made the composition of the following three chapters a pleasant 

affair. 

 Chapter one is entitled “Time Oddity: Gothic, Science Fiction, and the Paradoxes of 

Time Travel”. Therefore, we start our research by talking about the Gothic. Then, we talk 

about Science Fiction. After this, we present to the reader the counter-intuitive connection 

between these two things. Because their connections are plentiful, we have joined them as one 

— Gothic Science Fiction, a more specialized type of Science Fiction, related to dark 

aesthetics, and a little more arcane and fantastical as well. After that, we tackle the paradoxes 

of time travel fiction, which we look at in the classic manner that American philosopher 

David Lewis looks at them in his influential article “The Paradoxes of Time Travel” (1976). 

In this chapter, specifically, we are looking at the Predestination Paradox, the Bootstrap 

Paradox, and the Grandfather Paradox. We go about explaining how each paradox works by 

already analyzing several fictional texts in order to illustrate them, presenting them to the 

reader in a more dynamic fashion. 

 Chapter two is entitled “Heroic Conservation: The Bootstrap Paradox”. In it we focus 

on the topic of narrative conservation, particularly on the archetype of the hero as an element 

that seeks to preserve things as they are. This, we argue, is directly connected to the concept 

of the Bootstrap Paradox. The main texts we work with in this chapter are Hajime Isayama’s 



12 

 

manga series Attack on Titan (2009-2021), Connie Willis’ novel To Say Nothing of the Dog 

(1998), and two episodes of BBC’s Doctor Who (1963-1989; 2005-) — “The Day of the 

Doctor” (2013), and “Heaven Sent” (2015). 

 Chapter three is entitled “Troubleshooting Past Life: The Grandfather Paradox”, and 

its focus is on narratives that work with the concept of trying to rewrite time in order to avoid 

tragedies — the death of loved ones in particular. The analytical focus in this chapter lies with 

Ken Levine’s Bioshock Infinite (2013), Tatsuya Matsubara’s Steins;Gate (2009), and James P. 

Blaylock’s Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992). We close off by mentioning David Gerrold’s The 

Man Who Folded Himself (1973), which stands in stark contrast to David Lewis’ view of the 

paradoxes of time travel, a trait that leads us to a dark vision of a world affected by the 

Grandfather Paradox. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



13 

 

2. TIME ODDITY: GOTHIC, SCIENCE FICTION, AND THE PARADOXES OF 

TIME TRAVEL1 

 

Gothic literature, as Fred Botting famously asserted, is characterized by the 

exploration of negative aesthetics. Popping up in the eighteenth century, its narratives deal 

with topics considered uncivilized, primitive, vulgar, uncouth, and overall improper by a 

society whose ideals are dominated by the Enlightenment. Irrationality, superstition, 

vulgarity, decadence, and everything that is negative are its fodder. Darkness, as opposed to 

the light of rationality, therefore, is the principal trait of the Gothic mode. 

 

If knowledge is associated with rational procedures of enquiry and 
understanding based on natural, empirical reality, then Gothic styles disturb 

the borders of knowing and conjure up obscure otherworldly phenomena or 

the “dark arts”, alchemical, arcane and occult forms normally characterized 
as delusion, apparition, deception (BOTTING, 2014, p. 2, author’s 

emphasis). 

 

We referred to the Gothic as a mode and not a genre because it is still present in 

contemporary literature. The Gothic is often “applied to forms as diverse as the psychological 

novel, not to mention various Science Fiction genres” (FOWLER, 1971, p. 214). Literary 

genres are, for their part, “closely linked to specific social forms, [and] is apt to perish with 

them. But the mode corresponds to a somewhat more permanent poetic attitude or stance, 

independent of particular contingent embodiments of it” (FOWLER, 1971, p. 214). With that 

in mind, we opt to deem both Gothic and Science Fiction as hybrids of genre and of mode. 

Despite not being limited to the historical classification of either genre or form — therefore 

denoting broader literary methods —, Gothic and Science Fiction are still connected to the 

particulars of genre, and so genre-mode seems, to us, the most appropriate classification for 

them. 

 Science Fiction literature seems, at first, to be in direct opposition to the Gothic, once 

its most popular texts all involve the same, to use Ernst Bloch and Darko Suvin’s 

terminology, novum: spaceships, terraforming, intergalactic communication, robotics, and the 

like. In other words, stories that explore hypothetical new things that can be said to exist, at 

least theoretically, via the scientific method. The main difference, then, between Science 

Fiction and Fantasy lies in the former’s usage of the scientific method, and the latter’s usage 

                                                
1 An earlier version of this chapter has been published in Revista Literartes, n. 15, 2021, p. 243-260, under the 

title “Time Oddity, Paradoxes and the Gothic”. 



14 

 

of magic — substituting, then, Science Fiction’s aesthetic positivism for older, rather 

chimerical systems of belief. 

These new things are necessarily tied to positive aesthetics, once they assume, for 

example, humanity’s survival despite the looming threat of apocalyptic environmental 

changes. They also presume that humanity is not alone in the universe and, to further their 

optimism, our peaceful communication with alien species despite constantly being at war with 

our own kind. 

The Gothic, conversely, in its most common definition2, is tied to a return to the past 

— especially the Medieval times and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation moments —, 

to old things, to a vetus: ancient ruins, abandoned castles, hauntings, curses, superstition, 

wilderness, sexual deviancy, monstrosity, and the like. 

 

Gothic texts are, overtly but ambiguously, not rational, depicting 

disturbances of sanity and security, from superstitious belief in ghosts and 
demons, displays of uncontrolled passion, violent emotion or flights of fancy 

to portrayals of perversion and obsession. […] Gothic texts are not good in 

moral, aesthetic or social terms. Their concern is with vice: protagonists are 

selfish or evil; adventures involve decadence or crime. Their effects, 
aesthetically and socially, are also replete with a range of negative features: 

not beautiful, they display no harmony or proportion. Ill-formed, obscure, 

ugly, gloomy and utterly antipathetic to effects of love, admiration or gentle 
delight, Gothic texts register revulsion, abhorrence, fear, disgust and terror 

(BOTTING, 2014, p. 2). 

 

But Science Fiction is not only made up of scientific melodramas or space operas. It 

constitutes a far larger breadth of texts, such as the famous pessimistic dystopias of George 

Orwell and Margaret Atwood — worlds depicting futures dictated by fascist governments 

where the individual has lost many of their rights. These dystopian futures have a stark 

contrast to the shiny ones of Star Wars (1977-2019) and Star Trek (1966-1969), where 

humanity has terraformed other planets and become friends with aliens. 

The Gothic, on the other hand, has managed to taint even Science Fiction’s most 

positive assumptions — space opera’s quintessential work, George Lucas’ Star Wars, already 

carries, in its title, the negative aesthetics of warfare. In Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove’s 

Trillion Year Spree (1986), the argument that Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein 

(1818) created the specter of Science Fiction is introduced: “Frankenstein marked the 

beginning [of Science Fiction] and Science Fiction is a Gothic offshoot” (2001, p. 8). This 

                                                
2 We are referring to David Punter’s The Literature of Terror, Vol. 1 (1996), in whose third chapter, “The Classic 

Gothic Novels” (p. 54-86), the works of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis are analyzed. 



15 

 

means that the literary genre-mode that explores the Enlightenment of science, rationality, 

human progress and technology comes from a contradictory type of artistic expression. 

However, 

 

Gothic can be a function of a particular kind of dreadful narrative voice 

bespeaking either overwrought affect, paranoiac sensibility or perverse 
emotional deadness. As such, the Gothic genre-mode can readily be 

deployed in representations of believable worlds following natural laws 

(ALDER; WASSON, 2011, p. 3). 

 

With this, the line on the sand drawn between Gothic and Science Fiction is, at least 

slightly, erased, making their relationship more porous and complex. The fact that the Gothic 

is related to issues of the past and Science Fiction to issues of the future seems to distinguish 

them. However, this can also be easily refuted. For example, let us look at the figure of the 

monster. First, what we mean by the term is that monsters are alienated subjects of abjection: 

 

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, 

directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant Outside or 

inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. 
It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, 

fascinates desire, which, nonetheless, does not let itself be seduced. 

Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. […] But 
simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn 

toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an 

inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one 

haunted by it literally beside himself (KRISTEVA, 1982, p. 1, our 
emphasis). 

 

 So, monstrous beings are shunned and repressed by non-monstrous ones. However, 

repression does not guarantee freedom from whatever has been repressed. In fact, the 

repressed always comes back. Like Frankenstein’s monster, who comes back to his creator’s 

life to ask him the same question he had read in “Book Ten” of Paradise Lost (1667), lines 

743-746, “Did I request Thee, Maker, from my clay/ To mold me Man? Did I solicit Thee/ 

From darkness to promote me or here place/ In this delicious garden?” (MILTON, 2005, p. 

250). In other words, the monster asks its creator, Why did you make me? 

The creator’s answer, of course, would never satisfy its creature because Frankenstein 

created his hideous progeny out of his own selfishness and megalomania. The monster does 

not ask for Frankenstein’s love, though. Instead, he asks Victor to make him a female 

companion, so as not to be alone. Once denied this, the monster promptly destroys all of its 

creator’s companions, so as to give Frankenstein a taste of his own medicine. Ironically, this 



16 

 

series of unfortunate events gives both creator and creature a raison d’être: to torture each 

other until one of them dies. With this being said, 

 

Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of 

geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the 
forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come 

back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in History and the 

History of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human 
knowledge — and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the 

Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we 

have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to 
reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our 

perception of difference, our tolerance towards its expressions. They ask us 

why we have created them (COHEN, 1996, p. 20, author’s emphasis). 

 

 The main difference between Gothic and Science Fiction is their approach towards the 

unknown. The way that the Gothic treats it, is as a foreboding harbinger of chaos, this being 

the main theme in Frankenstein, for example, where science is a tool to discover the 

unknown, but when in the hands of fallible humans, it may just become a destructive weapon. 

Science Fiction, on the other hand, approaches the unknown as an opportunity to reach new 

knowledge, new frontiers through science, as seen in Star Trek. 

Science being the tool for the creation of monstrosity, in Frankenstein, is a clear 

refutation of the previous assumption that the Gothic is limited to the past. In fact, 

“monstrosity appears in the future and the past, in the mind and in culture at large, taking 

form in individual, social and textual bodies” (BOTTING, 2008, p. 131). This makes sense 

because life can never be devoid of conflict, heartbreak, fear, regret, and negativity in general. 

Then, to state that the difference between Gothic and Science Fiction is due to time implies 

that the future is totally devoid of any sort of problem, which is ludicrous. Besides, Science 

Fiction does not have to be set in the future. “Alternative History steampunk Science Fiction, 

for example, unsettles the notion that Science Fiction always occurs in a future world” 

(ALDER; WASSON, 2011, p. 4, authors’ emphasis). 

 Tim Powers wrote that 

 

Though there were precursors, books by Ronald Clark and Michael 

Moorcock and Harry Harrison, it was [K. W.] Jeter’s Morlock Night in 1979 

that really started it all — all the books and movies about extraordinary 
gentlemen in capes and top hats scurrying through foggy night-time London 

on secret errands that involve infernal devices and wonderful machines with 

elaborate scrollwork on the gears and levers (2011, p. 7-8). 

 



17 

 

 Jeter’s novel works as a direct sequel to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), 

where the cannibalistic, future human race of the Morlocks got their hands on the time 

machine, killed its traveler, and went back in time to Victorian London. Their goal, to put it 

simply, is that of cannibal colonialism — they want to enslave people and to eat them too. 

Our hero, Edwin Hocker, in chapter two, is dropped into a dystopian, war-torn vision of a 

future world where the Morlocks achieved their goal. Evidently horrified and about to die, the 

strange Doctor Ambrose saves him (and his female companion that he met in his struggles). It 

turns out that Ambrose is a devious magician who can toy with the chronology of time. But 

Hocker was put through the ringer only because that was the only way that Ambrose could 

think of to quickly dispel the protagonist’s Victorian, enlightened cynicism. At the end of 

chapter two he wonders, “What evil design of Providence could have thus doubled Creation 

upon itself, like a snake devouring its own tail?” (JETER, 2011, p.53). What follows is a race 

against time to find Excalibur and to return it to a reincarnated King Arthur, so he can destroy 

the Morlocks and the time machine to save England’s future. 

 

I believe it was early in 1976 that Roger Elwood told K. W. Jeter, Ray 
Nelson and I that a British publisher wanted a series of ten books based on 

the idea of King Arthur being reincarnated throughout the centuries, 

obligingly reappearing whenever England needed rescuing (POWERS, 2011, 

p. 8). 

 

 It is common for Arthurian novels to be retellings, such as T. H. White’s The Once 

and Future King (1958), but not only that, they are mostly thought of as having firm standing 

under the label of Fantasy. And yet here we have an example of an Arthurian novel that fits in 

Science Fiction, even though its narrative and narrator are related to the past, and magic is a 

part of the tale as well. In fact, works of steampunk fiction — a term coined by Jeter himself 

— rightfully explore bold juxtapositions of seemingly disparate elements. 

 

People sometimes assume that steampunk is an offshoot of “cyberpunk”, 

taking the high-tech future-noir adventure of the sort popularized by Bruce 

Sterling and William Gibson and moving the action back to a steam-powered 
nineteenth century. In fact steampunk fiction predates cyberpunk (though the 

name does not). […] Science Fiction historians locate the origins of 

steampunk in three novels: Jeter’s Morlock Night, Tim Powers’ The Anubis 
Gates (1983) and James P. Blaylock’s Homunculus (1986). In all three 

novels, Gothic excess takes the place that is occupied by the conventions of 

“detective fiction noir” in cyberpunk itself (ROBERTS, 2011, p. 330-331, 

author’s emphasis). 

 



18 

 

 Interesting to note here is that both Jeter and Powers’ novels are works of time travel 

fiction. The content mirroring its genre — steampunk imagines futures that never were; 

retrofuturism, visions of the future from the past created in the present. The time paradox 

present in the genre lends itself nicely to the composition of time travel fiction. In both, the 

past and the future are stitched together, making us reconsider the apparent distinction 

between them, which harkens back to Einstein’s theory of relativity and to the first three lines 

of T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton (1943): “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present 

in time future, / And time future contained in time past” (1971, p. 13). 

 All steampunk fiction is Science Fiction, but not all time travel fiction is Science 

Fiction. 

 

There are two popular [fields] in which time travel has long played a 
significant role, Science Fiction and the romance novel[3]. In modern 

romances, the time travel plot is almost exclusively a transportation medium: 

the hero or heroine is carried to or from a particular future or historical past, 

or is visited by a counterpart from that other time; some (usually) 
heterosexual liaison ensues (WITTENBERG, 2013, p. 26). 

 

Time travel fiction is also present in Fantasy. For example, in J. K. Rowling’s Harry 

Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), and in one of the earliest examples of time travel 

fiction: Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” (1843), which presents time travel through the 

influence of ghosts. In fact, 

 

Science Fiction authors are divided over the generic and/or aesthetic 

question of whether time travel counts as proper Science Fiction or as 

“mere” Fantasy, and critics have perhaps too quickly followed suit, 

continuing to debate whether time travel plots are legitimately “hard” or 
realistic (WITTENBERG, 2013, p.26, author’s emphasis). 

 

 Some prefer to categorize time travel as being Science Fantasy, once there is no 

feasible way to realize it via contemporary scientific methods. Going back to Jeter’s novel, 

Adam Roberts suggests 

 

That Jeter, not wanting to limit himself to textual riffs upon one great 

nineteenth century author, played a sort of imaginative textual counterpoint 

upon another one — Mark Twain, whose A Connecticut Yankee at King 
Arthur’s Court (1889) is the other great precursor novel in the traditions of 

                                                
3 Wittenberg uses the term romance novel to refer to novels that explore the love relationships of its characters. 

Specifically, the romantic love between the characters. To put it simply, love stories like Audrey Niffenegger’s 

The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), and Richard Matheson’s Somewhere in Time (1975).  



19 

 

time travel fiction. Although Twain’s book came out six years before Wells, 

its influence on Science Fiction has been much less. Some would not even 
call it Science Fiction, since it lacks the pseudo-technological for its 

temporal voyage: there is no machine in Twain’s story, his protagonist 

simply and inexplicably drops back in time to the Arthurian era (2011, p. 

329-330). 

 

 Throughout this thesis we will consider time travel as belonging to Science Fiction, 

because Science Fiction is not only hard Science Fiction, which means that Science Fiction’s 

value is not necessarily bound to ideas of it being an entertaining and accessible way of 

scientific marketing. What matters in Science Fiction is the fiction, not the science. 

 

The stuff isn’t disguised engineering lectures, after all. It isn’t that invention 
of a mathematical Satan, “story problems”. It’s stories. It’s fiction that plays 

with certain subjects for their inherent interest, beauty, relevance to the 

human condition. Even in its ungainly and inaccurate name, the “Science” 

modifies, is in the service of, the “Fiction” (LE GUIN, 2017, p. 758, author’s 
emphasis). 

 

 All of these, Gothic, Science Fiction and time travel, have ties to Fantasy. However, 

the focus of this thesis is the relationship between the Gothic and Science Fiction. More 

specifically, we are interested in analyzing what Wittenberg calls the paradox story4, a 

“formal turn that characterizes time travel fiction after Einstein, [which] coincides nicely with 

[John W.] Campbell’s highly influential insistence on scientific plausibility and consistency” 

(WITTENBERG, 2013, 51-52). Our goal is to analyze many different texts that explore the 

two most common paradoxes in time travel fiction — the Bootstrap Paradox, and the 

Grandfather Paradox — in works that we have deemed belong to Gothic Science Fiction. 

This means that these works are darker, and perhaps more fantastical than those that 

are more commonly associated with Science Fiction. And in that we are working under the 

assumption that paradox stories are tainted by the Gothic — full of negative, unwanted 

effects, like horror, tragedy, monstrosity, and the like. We accept the proposition that the 

Gothic creates Science Fiction, but we also believe that Science Fiction leads back to the 

Gothic, like the snake Ouroboros eating its own tail. In this way, Science Fiction and the 

Gothic have a paradoxical — and metatextual — relationship reminiscent of time loops, 

which leads us right into a discussion of the paradoxes of time travel fiction now. 

                                                
4 Wittenberg specifies that the paradox story was an invention of the pulp magazine writers of the 1930s and 

1940s. In our case, we are using the term more expansively, referring to time travel stories from any place in 

time. 



20 

 

“We are in the domain of logic, which is, let’s remember, a country distinct from the 

domain of reality” (GLEICK, 2016, p. 221). Here we are working with the standard, 

somewhat conservative model of David Lewis, whose “The Paradoxes of Time Travel” 

(1976) argues that 

 

Time travel is possible. The paradoxes of time travel are oddities, not 

impossibilities. They prove only this much, which few would have doubted: 

that a possible world where time travel took place would be a most strange 
world, different in fundamental ways from the world we think is ours (p. 

145). 

 

In his text, Lewis attempts to solve the logical problems presented by the paradoxes of 

time travel. His solutions turn what is perceived as mere flights of fancy into existentially 

relatable possibilities, not only because we are all traveling through time one second at a time, 

and thus we are all, in this way, time travelers, but also because we “[our]selves are stories — 

time travel stories” (WITTENBERG, 2013, p. 78). And so the study of the paradox story is an 

endlessly exciting, if narcissistic, endeavor. 

It is important to point out that traveling to a future time is not a problem in the 

context of Science Fiction. It is in traveling from the present to a past time that these 

paradoxes come into the front. 

 

The looming paradoxes and loops are the same in both domains but, as the 

future has only virtual existence, the contradictions have no consequences. 

Travel to the past, on the other hand, threatens the present’s conditions of 

existence (CSICSERY-RONAY JR, 2008, p. 99). 

 

A point that has been made time and time again is that reality does not have to be 

realistic to be real. No matter how ridiculous, melodramatic, and unbelievable reality is, it is 

still real. For instance, in VALIS (1981), Philip K. Dick writes that “reality is that which, when 

you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” (2011, p. 80). And fiction, for its part, has to be 

realistic only to its specific, built-in fictional universes. As such, the ways that time travel 

works in different stories differ drastically. In some, everything is predetermined and the past 

can never change, only fulfill itself; in others, determinism holds no power, instead giving its 

characters free rein over changing the past to create alternate, sometimes better, futures. 

Paradoxes are commonly defined by logical self-contradiction, which is to say that 

they are illogical and, therefore, irrational — by trying to make rational sense of them, one is 

confronted by their nonsense. “All the time travel paradoxes stem from retrocausality. Effects 



21 

 

undo their causes” (GLEICK, 2016, p. 235). Indeed, “all the paradoxes are time loops. They 

all force us to think about causality. Can an effect precede its cause?” (GLEICK, 2016, p. 232, 

author’s emphasis). 

The Predestination Paradox is an interesting one because it predates time travel 

fiction itself, but we will not be dedicating an entire chapter of this thesis to it because it is 

closely related to the Bootstrap Paradox, which will be looked at in our second chapter. 

Often, to talk about the Bootstrap Paradox is to talk about the Predestination Paradox, and so 

it would be superfluous to have separate chapters for both of them. In fact, the Predestination 

Paradox is so closely related to the Bootstrap Paradox that some consider both as different 

names for the same thing. We will, however, attempt to differentiate them slightly in this first 

chapter. As for the Grandfather Paradox, the third chapter of this thesis will be dedicated to 

it. 

The Predestination Paradox constitutes the dramatic axis of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex 

(c. 429 BC). In summary, the character of Laius receives a prophecy: he is destined to be 

killed by his own son. Wanting to avoid such a fate, he leaves his son in the wilderness to die. 

But the baby, Oedipus, is saved. Oedipus, for his part, also receives a prophecy: he is destined 

to kill his own father and become the husband to his own mother. Horrified, Oedipus runs 

away from home, unwitting to the fact that by trying to escape fate he is stepping right into its 

hands. And so he kills his own biological father and marries his own biological mother. The 

question, then, is: were Oedipus not to have heard the prophecy, would he have fallen victim 

to the same fate? 

 

The idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy is ancient, though the term is new, 

coined by the sociologist Robert Merton in 1948 to describe an all-too-real 

phenomenon: “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior 

which makes the originally false conception come true”. (For example, a 
warning of gasoline shortages causes panic buying that leads to gasoline 

shortages.) People have always wondered whether they can escape destiny. 

Only now, in the era of time travel, we ask whether we can change the past 
(GLEICK, 2016, p. 232). 

  

 The universe of Sophocles’ tragic play is one bound by determinism, which is to say 

that the characters are all slaves with no actual free will. They have no control or agency over 

their lives. Sickened by his sins, Oedipus blinds himself and decides to live a life of humility 

and atonement. It is safe to say that he is burdened by guilt. However, in a world like this, 

where people are just pawns with no free will, guilt is redundant, right? If Oedipus was just a 

toy for fate to play with, and committed crimes without knowing it, why should he, his 



22 

 

biological mother/wife, or his children/siblings, feel any sort of obligation to repent, or even 

be upset about it in the first place? Why not simply continue to live their lives in happiness 

and royal prosperity? 

The answer, of course, is that they had become (even worse) monsters (than they 

already were) in the eyes of their society and in their own eyes, once the moral boundaries 

between familial and romantic relationships of their society were transgressed. “The monster 

is transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic, a lawbreaker; and so the monster and all that it 

embodies must be exiled or destroyed” (COHEN, 1996, p. 16). Oedipus’ children/siblings, in 

fact, are innocents in all of this; then again so are their parents, Oedipus and Jocasta. “But it 

seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough” (WHITE, 1987, p. 312). 

 In the field of time travel fiction, the Predestination Paradox is explored, for example, 

in James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) movie, where a cyborg from the future has come 

to kill a woman before she can birth the child who is destined to lead a resistance movement 

in the future. By being unsuccessful in its mission, the cyborg leaves behind the robotic parts 

which make the invention of cyborgs possible in the first place; not only that, by having the 

cyborg come to the past, it also brings a man from the future to try and stop it, this man being 

the biological father of the child that will lead the resistance in the future. 

In the field of prose time travel fiction, the Predestination Paradox is explored by one 

of Science Fiction’s greatest practitioners, Ray Bradbury. In his short story “A Touch of 

Petulance” (1980), a young man is confronted with a future version of himself, who is reading 

a newspaper from the future that reveals the knowledge that he is going to kill his wife. A 

series of quick confrontations follow until the younger man accepts that he is indeed talking to 

his older self. This old man has killed his wife and has come back in time to try and warn 

himself about it, so that he can stop that from happening. Here time travel is used to explore 

the topics of regret and the doppelgänger. 

 The older self, when he is about to leave his younger self, leaves with him a parcel, 

which contains a small revolver, which the old man used to shoot his wife. The story closes 

with the following lines: 

 

“Shut the door”, said his wife. 

His face was cold. He closed his eyes. 

Her voice. Wasn’t there just the tiniest touch of petulance there? 
He turned slowly, off balance. His shoulder brushed the door. It drifted. 

Then: 

The wind, all by itself, slammed the door with a bang (2020, p. 40). 

  



23 

 

 What is implied in this ending is the suggestion of the self-fulfilling prophecy, where 

the older man has guaranteed his wife’s being murdered by himself again — motivated by 

guilt and regret, an actual harbinger of death, though not the physical death of its double. 

Virtually speaking, this version of the main character has never been in the shoes of his 

younger self and has never been warned of what was going to happen (or else he would surely 

remember it). That means that the laws of this fictional universe are not entirely dictated by 

determinism. However, the story also implies that even though disparities are possible, and 

the future can influence the past, this influence is not drastic enough to stop happening what 

has been destined to happen. So, the creation of distinctly different alternate timelines and 

alternate universes might be impossible here. When the character wonders about the touch of 

petulance in his wife’s voice, the story is toying with the idea that people are slaves to their 

own desires; that we cannot choose what we want, that we can only repress it for a while until 

we fall, inevitably, victim to it. 

 The Predestination Paradox, as we have seen, seems to be more occupied with the idea 

of information than with the figure of the time traveler. The stories that work with it do not 

have to have its action following characters going backwards and forwards through time. 

Therefore, it is closely bound to the ideas of prophecy, forethought and foresight impacting 

the present — which is always the present of the story. And it implies the sense that the past 

can never be significantly changed, only realized, much like the next paradox we are going to 

talk about. 

The Bootstrap Paradox (also known as the Ontological Paradox, or simply as a Causal 

Loop), in our view, is tied to the idea of characters traversing time, therefore making its 

protagonist the actual time traveler, so the present of the story can also be the protagonist’s 

past and/or future. The Doctor, from BBC’s Doctor Who (1963-1989; 2005-), explains the 

Bootstrap Paradox this way: 

 

There’s this man. He has a time machine. Up and down History he goes, zip 

zip zip, getting into scrapes. Another thing he has is a passion for the works 

of Ludwig van Beethoven. And one day he thinks, what’s the point of having 

a time machine if you don’t get to meet your heroes? So off he goes to 
eighteenth century Germany. But he can’t find Beethoven anywhere. No 

one’s heard of him, even his family don’t know who the time traveler’s 

talking about. Beethoven literally doesn’t exist. This is called the Bootstrap 
Paradox. […] The time traveler panics, he can’t bear the thought of a world 

without the music of Beethoven! Luckily he’d brought all his Beethoven 

sheet music for Ludwig to sign. So he copies out all the symphonies and 
concertos and gets them all published. He becomes Beethoven. And History 

continues with barely a feather ruffled. But my question is this: who put 



24 

 

those notes and phrases together? Who really composed Beethoven’s Fifth? 

(O’HARA, 2015, our emphasis). 

 

 Perhaps the benchmark story that plays with the Bootstrap Paradox is Robert A. 

Heinlein’s “All You Zombies—” (1959), which “remained unrivaled of its type until 1973, 

when David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself appeared — but Gerrold needed an 

entire novel to outdo the Heinlein story” (D’AMMASSA, 2005, p. 5-6). Either way, once the 

setting is established, the story unfolds cleverly to the realization that the protagonist is both 

his own mother and father. In essence, the protagonist is a self-sufficient character who can be 

seen as the personification of time itself and, therefore, of the same nature as God. This is 

most evident in the climax of the story, where the protagonist exclaims “I know where I came 

from — but where did all you zombies come from?” (2013, p. 16, author’s emphasis). 

The narrative, then, explores the hermaphroditic face of God, which is to say that it 

illuminates the Gothic facet of divinity — what is female cannot also be male. In this way, 

“All You Zombies—” is a nihilistic examination of the dark and monstrous side of a clueless 

deity, who is judged by the cynical eyes of a race whose ideal of beauty lies in purity, and 

ugliness in the hybrid child of Hermes and Aphrodite. In the Spierig brothers’ 2015 film 

adaptation, Predestination, this theme of bad faith judgment and prejudice is given more of a 

spotlight — the script making sure to show us how alienated the protagonist is from other 

people, and how despicable they are. 

Moving on to Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), which served as the basis for Terry 

Gilliam’s 1995 film Twelve Monkeys [which led to an American television series (2015-2018) 

of the same name], the protagonist is a nameless man haunted by the memory of a woman he 

saw as a child. She was standing at the end of a pier, watching, horror-striken, the falling 

shape of a man, who ends up dead. Shortly after, World War III starts, and a nuclear holocaust 

destroys the world. Obsessed with the image of this woman, the protagonist becomes the 

perfect candidate for time travel. 

 

The message here is that time travel is for the imaginative: an idea that 

recurs in literature, for example in Jack Finney’s Time and Again (1970). 
Time travel begins in the mind’s eye. Here, in La Jetée, it’s a matter not just 

of transportation but of survival. The human mind balked. To wake up in 

another time meant to be born a second time, as an adult. The shock would 
be too much (GLEICK, 2016, p. 242, author’s emphasis). 

  

The protagonist is revealed to be the man whose death he witnessed as a child in the 

beginning of the story through the woman’s eyes. And from the perspective of the woman on 



25 

 

the pier, he is a man of mystery, who vanishes periodically. “She calls him her ghost. It occurs 

to him that in his world, his time, she is already dead” (GLEICK, 2016, p. 243, author’s 

emphasis). In this way, she is his ghost just as much as he is hers. 

As we have seen in “A Touch of Petulance”, the Predestination Paradox can tackle the 

thematic of the double, but the Bootstrap Paradox is more commonly identified with these 

Narcissus-type meetings, where characters meet themselves. In the case of Audrey 

Niffenegger’s 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, this type of meeting is especially related 

to the myth of Narcissus, once it depicts the account as masturbatory. 

 

I’m in my bedroom with my self. He’s here from next March. We are doing 

what we often do when we have a little privacy, when it’s cold out, when 

both of us are past puberty and haven’t quite gotten around to actual girls 
yet. I think most people would do this, if they had the sort of opportunities I 

have. I mean, I’m not gay or anything (NIFFENEGGER, 2013, p. 55). 

  

The Bootstrap Paradox explores fractured identities, meaning that it roots selfhood in 

the disparate, hybrid quicksand of postmodernity — the self made up of other selves stitched 

together, like the pastiche of corpses that composes Frankenstein’s monster. In Netflix’s 

DARK (2017-2020), the antagonistic character, Adam, explains to a younger version of 

himself, Jonas Kahnwald, his motivations for acting, in the eyes of the disbelieving youth, in 

such nefarious and evil fashion: 

 

We’ve declared war on time. God is our antagonist.  We are creating a new 
world: without time, without God. How is that? In short, the God mankind 

has prayed to for thousands of years, the God that everything is bound with, 

this God exists as nothing other than time itself. Not a thinking, acting entity; 

a physical principle with which you can no more negotiate than you could 
with your own fate. God is time. And time is not compassionate.  The instant 

we’re born our lives start to trickle away, like the sand in this hourglass. 

Death is always inevitable. Our destiny is nothing but the connection of 
cause and effect. In light, in shadow (ODAR, 2019). 

  

Such an epic undertaking, of course, disfigures his morality, so Adam is willing to 

sacrifice everything, even things dearest to him, to reach the respite of timelessness. What he 

wants is to cease being. He has chosen not to be, because he sees himself as a monster — to 

use his actual terminology, he sees himself as “a glitch in the matrix”. His existence causes 

pain and destruction, for his birth is founded upon a Bootstrap Paradox, where the youngest 

son (Mikkel Nielsen) of his grandfather (Ulrich Nielsen) goes back in time to eventually 

become Jonas’s father (Michael Kahnwald). Adam, therefore, is a deformed monstrosity 



26 

 

whose character development is a dramatized exploration of Schopenhauer’s famous idea that 

humankind can want what it wants, but it cannot choose what it wants; or, as Philip James 

Bailey once put it, that the heart is its own fate. Here, too, humankind has no control over its 

desires, no matter how frowned upon by society they might be — i.e. Humber Humbert’s 

obsession with his nymphets in Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). 

As a matter of fact, in his 1959 essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita”, Nabokov writes 

about what first inspired him to write the novel, revealing that it was a newspaper story about 

“an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the 

first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: the sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s 

cage” (1997, p. 311, our emphasis). Such is Adam, but, as a character from Doctor Who 

would put it, “time travel has always been possible in dreams” (METZSTEIN, 2013), and so 

we dream of time traveling, and of being free from fate and destiny. 

These dreams have already served fiction greatly, once its universes are not limited to 

the three dimensions of space and the one temporal one to which, apparently, ours is. By the 

fact that each author makes their own rules as to how time travel works, we can see how 

writers have used the concept of String Theory to their advantage. Given the six other 

possible dimensions that String Theory ponders, scientists have concluded that this theory 

does not apply to describe exactly how our universe functions, but artists and philosophers 

need not bind themselves to such empiricisms. Therefore, fiction can often explore these other 

dimensions. 

In Poppy Z. Brite’s second novel, Drawing Blood (1993), the two main characters 

experience a kind of hallucinogenic time travel dream to a fictional world — a fictional world 

inside the novel’s fictional world. There, our two protagonists meet people from their own 

past and interact with them. Metaphorically speaking, the use of time travel here is to 

showcase Zach’s trauma from his abusive relationship with his father. As for Trevor, the 

exploration, specifically, of the Bootstrap Paradox is used to show his struggles with 

survivor’s guilt. 

Drawing Blood is a novel about hauntings. Trevor, a twenty-five-year-old comic book 

artist, is haunted by the actions of his father, Bobby, who murdered Trevor’s mother, younger 

brother and then committed suicide. Trevor, now, goes back to the house where the murders 

took place in to find out why his father did what he did and why he did not take Trevor with 

him too. It is not accurate to say that Trevor ever finds answers, but he finds Zach, a broken 

man like himself, and together they are able to move on from their ghosts, but not without 

struggling first. 



27 

 

 

“I mean, where were you on the space-time continuum? When were you?” 

“This house. That night. I saw my mother dead. I saw my brother dead. Then 

I came in here and Bobby was alive, was sitting on the bed deciding whether 
to kill me. He saw me, spoke to me, and decided he couldn’t do it. It was my 

own fault” (BRITE, 1994, p. 345, author’s emphasis). 

 

 The interesting thing here is Zach’s perception of Trevor’s feelings. Wanted by the 

FBI, Zach is a highly effective computer hacker, and so his thoughts on Trevor’s situation are 

colored by cyberpunk-like metaphors and analogies: 

  

Zach’s head was beginning to clear a little; it almost made sense. He thought 

of loops, which were computer programs designed to repeat a set of 
instructions until a certain condition was satisfied. Zach had previously 

suspected that hauntings, if they existed, might operate on much the same 

principle. This was borne out by most of New Orleans famous ghost stories, 

in which the ghost usually appeared in the same place and repeated the same 
actions again and again, such as pointing at the spot where its bones were 

buried or rolling its decapitated head down the stairs. 

The idea still seemed to make sense somehow. This was one hell of a 
complicated program, but maybe Trevor had managed to break into the loop 

(BRITE, 1994, p. 345-346). 

 

 Indeed, Trevor had broken into the loop, making him want to kill his lover in his own 

right, just like his father had done. What follows is Zach’s attempt at trying to help Trevor 

break free from that loop. 

  

“Then I’ll be dead and you won’t have me anymore”. 

“Yes I will. You’ll be right here. This place preserves its dead”. Like hitting 
a SAVE key, Zach thought, and that reminded him of loops again. Had some 

kind of homicidal loop been set in motion in Trevor’s head? 

And if it had, how could he interrupt it? 

[…] 
He’s taking me to his hell, Zach thought, and he’s going to eat me there, he’s 

going to rip me apart looking for magic inside me, and he won’t find it. Then 

he’ll fulfill the condition of the loop, he’ll kill himself. What a stupid 
program (BRITE, 1994, p. 348-349, author’s emphasis). 

 

 Zach succeeds in helping Trevor to break free from his loop. Subverting expectations, 

Zach saves Trevor in the cheesiest of ways: 

 

He thought he knew what was on that loop in Trevor’s brain. “Is it about 

love?” he asked. “Trev, do you think you have to make all this keep 
happening to prove you love me?” 



28 

 

At first he thought Trevor wasn’t going to answer. But then, ever so slowly, 

Trevor nodded. 
We’re so fucked up, Zach thought. […] 

“But I know you love me, Trevor. I believe you. I want to stay alive and 

show you. I don’t need you to take care of me; I can take care of myself. 

And if you come away with me I won’t leave you ever”. 
“How…” Trevor’s voice sounded husked out, used up. “How can I know 

that?” 

“You have to trust me”, said Zach. “All I can tell you is the truth. You have 
to decide the rest for yourself” (BRITE, 1994, p. 353, author’s emphasis). 

 

Determinism, in this novel, holds only psychological power over the characters. It is 

difficult to break from its mold, but it is not impossible. Analogous to living with mental 

illness or addiction, Brite gives his characters a positive ending. The fact that a gay couple got 

a happy ending is subversive in its own right — perhaps even more so once the novel is 

deeply entrenched in the Gothic; therefore the expectations of a positive ending are not 

expected. But then again, some might not think this a happy ending at all; instead deeming the 

happiness of gay people horrific, disturbing, and immoral in its own right. 

In E. M. Forster’s “Terminal Note” (1960) to his novel Maurice (1971), he writes: 

 

[The novel] was finished in 1914. The friends, men and women, to whom I 
showed it, liked it. But they were carefully picked. It has not so far had to 

face the critics or the public, and I have myself been too much involved in it, 

and for too long, to judge. 
A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write 

otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in 

love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this 
sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it “To a 

Happier Year” and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote — which 

by the way has had an unexpected result: it has made the book more difficult 

to publish. Unless the Wolfenden Report becomes law, it will probably have 
to remain in manuscript. If it ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a 

noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well, for there is no pornography 

or seduction of minors. But the lovers get away unpunished and 
consequently recommend crime. Mr. Borenius is too incompetent to catch 

them, and the only penalty society exacts is an exile they gladly embrace 

(2006, p. 250, author’s emphasis). 

 

Wholesome, old-fashioned, twentieth century sensibilities seem to be resurfacing. So, 

happy endings for “criminals”, toxic, and problematic people are being shunned and 

reprimanded again. Very much like the early Gothic novels that did not uphold societal 

morals and were changed in further editions [Matthew Lewis was almost incarcerated for The 

Monk’s first edition (1796)]. However, such is life and such are people — toxic and 

problematic. And to judge the quality of aesthetics via morality is nothing short of censorship 



29 

 

— either right or left, extremism is still extremism, and what we are seeing now are attempts 

from extremists at controlling people’s imaginations. 

Regardless, the Bootstrap Paradox is still being used in Gothic fiction. In Netflix’s The 

Haunting of Hill House (2018), the character of Nellie proclaims that “our moments fall 

around us like rain, or snow, or confetti” (FLANAGAN, 2018). Combining this Einsteinian 

perspective of time with the Gothic elements of Shirley Jackson’s influential novel, in episode 

five it is revealed that Nellie is stuck in an afterlife where she haunts her own past life. 

Therefore, she is always leading, and has always led herself to her present post-mortem 

torture. A similar device is used in Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) as well. 

Time, in fiction, then, functions as the Doctor (from Doctor Who) describes it: 

 

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually 
from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of 

wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff (MACDONALD, 2007). 

  

In DARK, when Adam and Jonas are talking to each other, the latter expresses an 

inability to believe that he will ever want what his older self wants, whereas the former 

exclaims that he remembers feeling and saying the exact same thing. Their exchange is 

similar to a psychoanalytic session, where the same character, in different points of his life, 

has to come to terms with both his past and his future at the same time in the present. Such a 

resemblance is natural of this mode, because 

 

Time travel is [also] a mode of psychological implication, a scenography in 
which selves meet themselves, kill their progenitors, and plumb the 

significance of their own histories for their present instantiations or avatars. 

Time travel, in essence, becomes what Lacan thought the psychoanalytic 
session was, a “realization of the [subject’s] History” in a present discourse, 

or even “the restitution of the subject’s wholeness on the guise of a 

restoration of the past” (WITTENBERG, 2013, p. 64). 

 

Thus, everything that Jonas feels, Adam has already felt; and everything that Adam is 

saying, he has already heard himself saying before, and he is saying it only because he heard a 

previous Adam say it when he himself was in Jonas’ shoes. There is no origin to the endless 

cycle of Jonas’ self-realization and Adam’s self-actualization. This is the Bootstrap Paradox, 

named so after Robert A. Heinlein’s 1941 short story “By His Bootstraps”. 

Jonas’ negative feelings toward Adam are still alive by the end of their session — and 

are further deepened as the narrative moves to its climax —, and so he tries to avoid, at all 



30 

 

costs, becoming Adam. His future self functions similarly to the monstrous painting of Dorian 

Gray in Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel. Jonas wants to change the past to avoid the future. He 

wants to kill the future where he becomes Adam, but he just might end up killing himself 

instead and becoming the monster he does not want to be. Similarly to Dorian Gray, who ends 

up killing himself at the same time he destroys his horrid picture — with the result that the 

picture’s deformities come into being in Dorian’s own beautiful countenance, turning him into 

the ugly monster he actually was. 

 However, the idea of parallel worlds is also explored in DARK, and so is the 

Grandfather Paradox. Simply speaking, there are two main worlds in the universe of the story. 

Both having originated from a third one — referred to as the origin world. In this world an 

accident happens and a scientist loses his family after having a huge argument with his son. 

Unable to accept his family’s death, the scientist builds a time machine that originates the 

other two worlds of this fictional universe. In both these created worlds determinism rules, but 

there are glitches in their matrixes — Jonas and Martha, and together they are able to go to the 

origin world, and to save the lives that the scientist wanted to save. After this happens, both 

the created worlds and their tenants disappear, once the time machine was never created in the 

first place because the scientist’s family did not die. 

 This is a melancholic but hopeful ending to the story. If determinism rules only in 

these simulated worlds, the fabric of the origin world is different, once determinism does not 

rule there. This means that we can change History and it implies that horrible tragedies were 

never destined to happen. Therefore such negative pop icons like Adolf Hitler are not 

absolved of moral responsibility. But more importantly, it means that the people lost in the 

holocaust were never born to die. Being a German show made by German people, one can 

assume why they opted for an ending that makes use of the next time travel paradox we are 

going to talk about. 

The Grandfather Paradox is where a time traveler goes back to the past and kills his 

grandfather before the latter has the chance to become a father in the first place. The question, 

then, is that if the time traveler’s father never existed, how can the son of this man come to 

exist at all, and how can someone who never existed kill anyone? The most interesting topics 

to explore in conjunction with this specific paradox are those related to branching timelines 

— multiple universes, parallel worlds, alternate histories; all of which have one thing in 

common: the exploration of the question what if? 

 



31 

 

Tim travels not only in time but also from one branch [of time] to another. In 

one branch Tim is absent from the events of 1921; Grandfather lives; Tim is 
born, grows up, and vanishes in his time machine. The other branch diverges 

from the first when Tim turns up in 1920; there Tim kills Grandfather and 

Grandfather leaves no descendants and no fortune; the events of the two 
branches differ more and more from that time on. It is a story in which 
Grandfather both is and isn’t killed in 1921 (in the different branches); and it 

is a story in which Tim, by killing Grandfather, succeeds in preventing his 

own birth (in one of the branches). But it is not a story in which Tim’s 
killing of Grandfather both does occur and doesn’t: it simply does, though it 

is located in one branch and not the other. And it is not a story in which Tim 

changes the past. 1921 and later years contain the events of both branches, 

coexisting somehow without interaction. It remains true at all the personal 
times of Tim’s life, even after the killing, that Grandfather lives in one 

branch and dies in the other (LEWIS, 1976, p. 151-152). 

 

This type of paradox is, explicitly, perhaps the oddest of them all, for it can offer us 

the slightest of opportunities to free ourselves from the responsibility of having to make 

choices and risk making the wrong ones, but it also threatens us with the possibility of making 

bad situations even worse in our attempts at fixing past mistakes. For example, what if in the 

time traveler’s mission to kill baby Hitler, he instead makes sure that Hitler grows up to be the 

tyrant we know him to have been; or what if toying with time leads to Hitler winning World 

War II? The Grandfather Paradox does not free us from responsibility or guilt. In fact, it 

enhances them. 

The most common approach to this type of paradox story is one where characters want 

to fix a past tragedy from happening. But however many times they try, they only seem to 

make it come true, over and over and over again. This is how the Grandfather Paradox is 

approached in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (2011). In the novel, the protagonist tries to stop 

JFK’s assassination. The standard narrative follows. The main character falls in love with a 

woman in the past, who of course dies, bringing him to try and save her no matter what. 

However, when he goes back to his present time, he sees that the world has come undone and 

is a lot worse than it was before he meddled with the past. And so the dramatic pathos of the 

ending lies in the hero sacrificing his relationship with the woman that he loves for the sake of 

humanity at large. This is a classic altruistic approach that, at this point, borderlines on a lack 

of imagination and creative bankruptcy. This is no fault of the concept itself. The Grandfather 

Paradox has been approached in variously creative fashions (i.e. in Tatsuya Matsubara’s video 

game Steins; Gate (2009) — which will be discussed in our third chapter —, and in the 

previously mentioned DARK). In the case of King’s novel, all the responsibility falls on the 

author’s execution, not on the concept he is working with. 



32 

 

What we have deemed the paradoxes of time travel and defined, ala (and via) David 

Lewis, as time oddities instead of impossibilities, are the result of the influence of post-

Einsteinian Physics on literature, especially in Science Fiction. This enables, in fiction, a 

“metaliterature of Oedipus and Narcissus, a literature about encountering (or reencountering) 

oneself, about meeting (or remeeting) one’s progenitors, about negotiating (or renegotiating)  

one’s personal and historical origins” (WITTENBERG, 2013, p. 64). And what it implies 

about identity is that 

 

The self is the narrative of its own time travel, a fantasmatic invention of a 

mechanism by which it completes an excursion into its own past, and 
therefore the possibility — literal in a time travel story, presumably 

fantasmatic in real life — of a consummate viewpoint upon its full series of 

cross-sections (WITTENBERG, 2013, p. 76-77). 

 

The writing of far-future utopian fiction was in vogue when H. G. Wells decided to 

explain how a contemporary person could bridge the gap of time and get to Utopia. Such a 

choice helped his 1895 novella The Time Machine to succeed, for the narrative voice and 

exploration of the scientific method were utterly contemporary and accessible to readers. The 

Time Machine, undeniably Science Fiction, however, does not present the reader with a 

utopian future, but with a highly sinister, cannibalistic version of things to come, ending with 

an apocalyptic image of a dying Earth. Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892-1893), a forefather 

to fascist thought, had an influence over Wells’ text, once the novella presents humanity as 

having gone through a process of degeneration — going backwards in the evolutionary scale. 

Here, too, the mode of time travel and the genre-mode of Science Fiction are connected to the 

Gothic genre-mode via Wells’ imagining of a hopeless future. 

 

Gothic Science Fiction is in one sense about the way the dereliction of the 
past always inflects the shiny new spaces of the present and the future. In 

Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Cassandra was gifted with prophecy by her rapist, 

Apollo; and at the same time cursed with the fact that nobody would believe 

her prophecies. The implication in the play is that people don’t believe her 
prophecies because they don’t understand them: at the level, that is to say, of 

simple semantics. I wonder about an alternate spin on this famous myth — 

that everyone knows Cassandra has been gifted by a God with the power to 
predict the future; that everybody comprehends her prophecies perfectly 

well, but that nevertheless they do not believe her. They do so not out of any 

kind of stubbornness of the human spirit, so much as the radical 
impossibility of the future manifesting itself in the present. Or to put it a 

little more precisely — what Cassandra prophesies — is, in a word, death; 

and death is something that haunts us from the past [ghosts] rather than the 

future. The eerie spaces of [Horace] Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765) 



33 

 

[sic], Gothic’s ur-text, are the repressed memories of past familial trauma 

and murder. What gives Gothic Science Fiction its peculiar, counter-intuitive 
potency is precisely the way it parses this eerie, spectral pastness as the 

future (ROBERTS, 2014, p. xii, our emphasis). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



34 

 

3. HEROIC CONSERVATION: THE BOOTSTRAP PARADOX 

 

 In Michael Moorcock’s Science Fiction novel Behold the Man (1969), the protagonist 

Karl is a troubled man whose main character traits are that he is interested in the ideas of 

psychiatrist Carl Jung, and that he is a fan of Jesus Christ. This man time travels back to AD 

28, where he searches for Jesus Christ. Thought to be a holy man, once people saw him arrive 

in the time machine, John the Baptist deems Karl a magus, and pleads for him to help them 

revolt against the Romans that are occupying their territory. When John asks Karl to baptize 

him, Karl panics and runs away to the desert, eventually arriving at Nazareth. 

 There he finds Mary and Joseph, who disappoint him, because Mary is a prostitute, 

and Joseph is a bitter man that sneers at Mary’s claims of having been impregnated by the 

angel Gabriel. Their son, Jesus, turns out to be mentally handicapped. Disillusioned, but still 

committed to the historical image that he loved of Jesus, Karl steps into that role himself. 

Gradually, then, he becomes Jesus Christ — his hero/savior complex becoming more and 

more literal throughout the novel. Eventually, Karl asks Judas to betray him, and then he is 

crucified. After Jesus/Karl’s death, his body is found missing, therefore originating the tale of 

Jesus’s resurrection. In actuality, the body was stolen by a random doctor, who hoped to see 

something miraculous, magical and special about it. But all he finds is a pathetically normal 

human body that rots like any other. 

 The figure of Jesus Christ represents what we have come to know in fiction as the 

archetype of the hero. There is a myriad of archetypes, but the most common ones are: hero, 

mentor, threshold guardian, herald, shapeshifter, shadow, ally, and trickster. These, however, 

are not always related to specific physical characters in the stories. Many characters can have 

transient roles where they wear the mask of a specific archetype for a while and then cease to 

play that role. Rather than rigid character types, archetypes are better defined as flexible 

character functions that aim for certain effects in the story. 

Archetypes can also be seen as emanations of the hero. “The other characters represent 

possibilities for the hero, for good or ill. A hero sometimes proceeds through the story 

gathering and incorporating the energy and traits of the other characters” (VOGLER, 2007, p. 

24-25). Vogler mentions Carol Pearson’s Awakening the Heroes (1991), which works with 

the idea that the hero archetype can be broken down into further sub-archetypes: innocent, 

orphan, martyr, wanderer, warrior, caregiver, seeker, lover, destroyer, creator, ruler, magician, 

sage, and fool. But at its core the hero is tied to self-sacrifice. “The word hero is Greek, from 

a root that means to protect and to serve (incidentally the motto of the Los Angeles Police 



35 

 

Department). A hero is someone who is willing to sacrifice his own needs on behalf of others” 

(VOGLER, 2007, p. 29, author’s emphasis). As described in Poppy Z. Brite and Christa 

Faust’s short story “Saved” (1998): “That figure on the cross, pale and thin and pierced: a true 

submissive, a submissive for all humanity” (2000, p. 45). 

The hero is a flexible concept, but at its most common assumption, it is like a security 

system that gets triggered every time the established world order is threatened, and then they 

die off after having gotten rid of the problem. This can be seen in the closing scene of K. W. 

Jeter’s Morlock Night (1979), where King Arthur is talking to his mentor, Merlyn, in his 

deathbed after completing his mission: 

 

Something moved inside me that made me gasp, but the pain soon passed 
away. “I’m very tired now. Perhaps you’d better go”. 

“Yes. And I’ll take the sword with me”. 

I could hardly hear him, or myself. “What will you do with it [Excalibur]?” 
“I will cast it into the underground sea here, so that it might return to you 

when you have need of it again. Farewell”. Then he was gone away from 

me. 
Only a little time had passed when the darkness folded about me like the 

softest and warmest of shrouds. And then, in that time and place — our 

Lord’s year 1892 in Victoria’s England — I saw no more (2011, p. 321-

322). 

 

 In Hajime Isayama’s manga series Attack on Titan (2009-2021)5, the archetype of the 

hero differs a lot from Jeter’s depiction of Arthur. In fact, the term anti-hero seems more 

appropriate to describe Eren Jeager, a more specialized type of hero. This hero can be of a 

wounded, more cynical kind, or a tragic one, “who may not be likeable or admirable, whose 

actions we may even deplore. […] These are flawed heroes who never overcome their inner 

demons and are brought down and destroyed by them” (VOGLER, 2007, p. 35). Isayama’s 

hero is a tragic one. 

Eren’s actions are mostly selfless and for the good of his people, but this is where the 

problem lies. His people are the vast minority in a world that ostracizes and demonizes them. 

This puts him right up against the established order of things, and to go against the 

establishment is to become a devil. To the world outside of Paradis Island, Eren Jeager is a 

monster, a blood-thirsty, genocidal maniac. To a lot of his people, Eren is the hero that will 

set them free by exterminating everyone else that is not on their island. Some of his comrades, 

                                                
5 We consider this a work of Gothic Science Fiction due to its focus on warfare, and because all of the fantastical 

elements are explained to be tied to the science of the fictional world. All except for the being that originates 

these elements. But seeing that actual science is unable to explain the origin of things, we do not see this as an 

issue to our classification. 



36 

 

however, feel guilty about the prospect of benefitting from Eren’s genocide, and so they try to 

stop him. 

It is of note that all of the people who try and stop Eren are in the military. In other 

words, people who were trained to be selfless and self-sacrificial. As is said in episode6 15: 

“You’ve got to throw out everything that person was and start over with a clean slate if you’re 

going to make a good soldier” (ISAYAMA, 2014, p. 635). It seems, then, that what makes a 

good soldier is the same quality that makes one a hero: selflessness. In this way, every major 

character in Attack on Titan can be said to be a hero. What makes a bad soldier is an inability 

to follow the military’s orders. And once Eren decides to go against his superiors’ orders, he 

is deemed a traitor, even though his actions actively benefit their people, where his superiors’ 

orders serve only to keep their kind at the borders of extinction. 

What drives Eren over the edge is the ability to access the memories of the people who 

bore his titan powers before him. So he has seen an insurmountable amount of pain that his 

kind has suffered throughout History. Imagination, which is to say empathy, can only go so 

far, and so it is impossible for any other character to understand how shattered Eren is. All 

they can see is how joyless, cold and furious he is, as though he is a horse with blinders on, 

unable to see anything but the goal of achieving freedom at any cost. 

Attack on Titan works with narrative echoes and compositional symmetry to enhance 

its main theme: the endless cycle of hatred and how History repeats. One way that it does this 

is by using time travel, specifically the Bootstrap Paradox, most apparent in episode 121: 

“Memories of the Future”, where Eren and his older half-brother, Zeke, roam around the 

memories of their father, Grisha. For context, the brothers were supposedly working for a 

common goal: that of making their kind sterile, so they can die off without birthing other 

devils like them. This is referred to as Zeke’s euthanasia plan. However, Eren betrays his 

brother, deeming Zeke’s plan too messed up for him to go along with. And so, in an attempt 

to save his brother from their father’s supposed brainwashing, Zeke takes Eren into Grisha’s 

memories, so he can show Eren just how horrible their father was as a person. 

What happens, however, is a shock to Zeke’s view of Grisha. He sees how much better 

of a father Grisha was to Eren than to him. For his part, Eren tells his brother that he is acting 

out of his own accord, and that he has always been the type of person to fight until the bitter 

end. Moreover, their presence in Grisha’s memories actually affects the events of the story. 

And so the reader sees how actions at the very start of the story were influenced by Eren and 

                                                
6 Chapters are referred to as episodes in the manga. 



37 

 

Zeke now. This has the effect of darkening the tone of the story, and it also has the role of 

stealing the blissful innocence from the beginning of the story. The way we view the 

characters, especially Eren, is also affected. 

In episode 62: “Sin”, Eren finds himself trapped in a strange place that seems, 

somehow, familiar to him. At the end of this episode, he is privy to some of his father’s 

memories, which reveal that Grisha had been in that strange place and that he had killed many 

people to acquire the power of the Founding titan. This is also where Eren remembers that he 

got his titan powers by eating his own father. Episode 121 gives the reader the full context of 

the situation, revealing that Grisha was, on his own, incapable of killing those people, those 

children. But Eren speaks to him, convincing him to kill them all: 

 

“What are you doing? Stand, father. Did you forget why you came here? 
Isn’t it to get revenge for your little sister, who was eaten by dogs? For your 

fellow restorationists. For Dina. For Kruger. You advance on to avenge 

them. Even if you die. Even after you die. Dad, you started this story. Didn’t 

you?” (ISAYAMA, 2018, p.885-887, author’s emphasis). 

 

 Later in the episode, Grisha and Zeke have a heartfelt moment, which is quickly 

followed by Grisha begging his firstborn to stop Eren from destroying the world in order to 

save Paradis Island. Grisha presents an interesting juxtaposition here. He wanted Zeke to be 

the savior of their people; he pressured his firstborn and was generally a poor excuse for a 

father to Zeke. He was so bad that he drove his own son against him. Zeke snitched on his 

parents, dooming them to be sent to Paradis, and to be unwillingly turned into mindless titans 

that prey on their own kind. From that, he became a much more loving father to his second 

son, who he only wanted to be a normal boy. But Eren turned out to be just like what Grisha 

had wanted Zeke to be. And confronted with this, he sees just what horrors his former wish 

entails. 

 The archetype of the mentor, which is to say “all those characters who teach and 

protect heroes and give them gifts” (VOGLER, 2007, p. 39), in Attack on Titan, is dealt with 

not in the characterization of a wise old person to aid and advise Eren. Rather, the story plays 

with the idea that it is his experiences, and his environment that mold him into what he 

becomes. He learns from most of the major characters, which further troubles his friends’ 

morality, because they know that they are somewhat to blame for Eren’s actions. Therefore, 

the mentor is realized as a function, “a job which several different characters […] perform in 

the course of the story” (VOGLER, 2007, p. 46). In episode 134: “In the Depths of Despair”, 

a character confronted with certain death intones the thematic truth of the piece: 



38 

 

 

“Know this — the responsibility does not lie with you alone. It is shared by 

every one of us adults. We exploited hatred. We kept feeding our 

resentment. We even thought our hate would save us. We dumped every 
problem caused by our shortcomings onto “an island of devils”. And the 

result was the birth of a monster which has now come to return our hatred 

upon our own heads” (ISAYAMA, 2021, p. 144-145, author’s emphasis). 

 

 There are no prophecies in Attack on Titan, but there is still predestination, which 

comes from Eren’s ability to look into the past and into the future. It is revealed, in episode 

121, that it was back in episode 90: “The Other Side of the Wall”, that Eren gained 

cognizance of his future actions. Though the reason was kept from the readers, this is when 

his character had a sudden turn, where he muttered: 

 

“On the other side of the walls is an ocean. And on the other side of the 

ocean is freedom. That’s what I always believed, but I was wrong. It’s 

enemies that are on the other side of the ocean. This is all exactly as I saw in 
my old man’s memories, right? Those enemies on the other side of here, if 

we kill them all does that mean we’ll be free?” (ISAYAMA, 2017, p. 377-

379). 

 

 A great deal of pain and self-loathing accurses Eren after he sees himself committing 

atrocities; he tries to look for a way to avoid the future, but is unsuccessful. His love interest, 

Mikasa, wonders at the possibility of having avoided Eren’s actions, had she but confessed 

her romantic feelings toward him. It is a nice thought born out of desperation and regret. The 

reader is also made to consider this possibility. However, in episode 139: “Toward the Tree 

on that Hill”, the final piece of information, in the final episode, is revealed to the reader. This 

being that Eren was the one to cause his mother’s horrible death in the first episode. With that 

in mind now, it is clear that everything that he was going to do, he had already done before, 

and so he was but a slave to his own destiny and desires — again, it is the Bootstrap Paradox 

in action here. The dramatic charge of the story comes from the fact that the one who wanted 

freedom the most, who fought for it the hardest, who sacrificed everything for it, never got to 

have it in life. But maybe death is freedom, perhaps the only way to truly be free. 

 Eren can be said to play the roles of hero and mentor throughout the story. Hero, 

because we follow his growth, change, and learn of his power and importance to the fictional 

world he inhabits — as well as his archetypal characterization at first. Mentor, because he 

manipulates all the characters (including himself) into doing his bidding, which is for them to 

kill him in order to make themselves heroes in the face of a hostile world. “Mentors are often 



39 

 

former heroes who have survived life’s early trials and are now passing on the gift of their 

knowledge and wisdom” (VOGLER, 2007, p. 40), and Eren’s playing the villain comes from 

knowledge and experience — gained via his ability to look backwards and forwards in time. 

Eren was able to kind of go against the altruistic ideals that were plowed into his brain 

during his formative years in the military, due to his visions of the past and the future. His 

friends, however, lacked this power and so were not privy to the myriad of experiences that 

Eren was. In this way, they were less successful at going against their military programming, 

and so ended up sacrificing Eren for the greater good of humanity, just like Eren “wanted” 

them to. The narrative builds up to Eren’s death in the way that the monstrous giants are 

revealed to have all been fellow patriots of theirs, who had been injected with a serum that 

could turn their kin into titans. And so these characters are able to get to a place where they 

can kill Eren because they were already used to killing their own people. As for Eren, he is 

able to get to a place where he can put his loved ones’ lives in danger to achieve his goal of 

saving their future lives only because he has already seen that most of them end up surviving. 

Arthur’s remark in The Once and Future King (1958), “far from being willing to 

execute his enemies, a real king must be willing to execute his friends” (WHITE, 1987, p. 

550), illustrates the hero’s altruistic trait. Eren’s selfish unwillingness to sacrifice his friends 

ironically puts them in danger — granted, not because he actually wants to put them in 

danger, but as a byproduct of what he knows needs to be done in order to protect most of 

them in the long run. What distinguishes him from Arthur, for example, is his unwillingness 

to accept things as they are, and his inability to submit. When Arthur discovers that his wife 

and best friend are having an affair, he simply bows his head down and pretends not to see a 

thing. This submissiveness, as mentioned already, is an important trait — perhaps the main 

trait — of a “classic” hero. 

 

The hero is [a person] of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? 

That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is 

everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. 
As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws 

of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in 

the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old 
days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected 

future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld 

together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death — 
the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, 

within the body social, there must be — if we are to experience long survival 

— a continuous “recurrence of birth” (palingenesia) to nullify the 

unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if 
we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks 



40 

 

from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; 

change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory 
of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified — 

and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn (CAMPBELL, 2008, 

p. 11-12, author’s emphasis). 

 

Eren’s inherent monstrosity, therefore, comes from a lack of submissiveness. As one 

of the characters puts it, “He’s a true monster. It’s got nothing to do with his titan power. No 

matter how much he’s held back, no matter what cage he’s in, no one can force him to 

submit” (ISAYAMA, 2015, p. 125, author’s emphasis). On the grand scheme of things, Eren 

maintains the status quo of the world. The story closes with Paradis Island being attacked by 

outside forces, years after the death of the entire main cast of characters. So Eren’s actions 

only served to perpetuate the world’s hatred of his people. However, his goal was simply to 

allow the people that he knew and loved to live long, happy lives, because they were his 

world. And it seems that the problems of future generations were none of his concern. 

The hero is responsible for conservation, tying it directly to the approach that time 

travel fiction authors take when dealing with the Bootstrap Paradox. The hero, in this way, 

can be seen as yet another strategy of narrative conservation — the past never changing via 

influence from the future. “In short, if characters or events in a time travel story conspire to 

change the past, very often other characters or events will intercede to forestall such a change 

or to counteract its influence: paradox will be repaired” (WITTENBERG, 2013, p. 150). It is 

more common for this idea to be explained by pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, as in: it is a 

physical law of the fictional universe that it is impossible for time to be rewritten. 

Theoretically, it can be rewritten, but it never is. Such a trait is often the dramatic axis of the 

conflict in these stories — trying to stop History from changing. 

 

A time-traveling protagonist in Poul Anderson’s There Will Be Time [1972] 
declares, “I’ve tried altering the known past and something always happens 

to stop me”; elsewhere Anderson writes that “the course of the world has 

enormous inertia”. A character in John Varley’s “Air Raid” [1977] suggests 

that “we can do things in the past only at times and in places where it won’t 
make any difference”; “events are conserved”, declares a Damon Knight 

character in “Arachron” [1954]; and in Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time [1958], 

History is subject to a “law of the Conservation of Reality”. Nearly as often, 
authors provide macrological explanations or even quasi philosophies of 

such conservation: in “Vintage Season” [1946], C. L. Moore writes that “the 

physiotemporal course tends to slide back to its norm”. Sometimes time or 
History themselves are the agents of self-healing: Bill Pronzini writes that 

time itself can “seal the apparent rent in its fabric” and even “unmurder” a 

paradoxically dead ancestor; Michael Moorcock suggests that “if one goes 

back to an age where one does not belong, then so many paradoxes are 



41 

 

created that the age merely spits out the intruder as a man might spit out a 

pomegranate pip which has lodges in his throat”. F. M. Busby provides this 
colorful allegory: “The past — it’s pretty damned solid… It’s a little like a 

compost pile — fairly soft near the surface, but packed hard further down, 

with all that time piled on top of it”. John Brunner speaks of alterations of 

the past as “sluggish events”, L. Sprague de Camp of events “too well rooted 
to be destroyed by accident”, and Connie Willis of a “tough, immutable 

past” (WITTENBERG, 2013, p. 150-151, author’s emphasis). 

 

In Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), the heroes keep History from changing 

by being “packed off out of the way before the course of History could correct itself” (p. 431). 

It does not seem far-fetched, then, to view the hero as another one of these incongruous 

metaphors of narrative conservation — a figure to keep the chaos of shifting realities at bay. 

In the case of this novel, the heroes are sent by the time-traveling device to a secure, isolated 

place where they cannot interfere and mess with the system’s plan to keep the sanctity of the 

past unsullied. It is very clear that all of the characters are pawns, supposed to play their roles 

in the program’s action plan, and that is all. None are privy to the full picture of their system’s 

masterplan. This approach is perfectly in tune with the comedic tone and parodic style of the 

novel. 

Riffing on the tropes of romantic comedy and Golden Age detective fiction, Willis 

concocts a story where Verity Kindle, a historian (which is to say a time traveler), does 

something that is supposed to be impossible: she saves a cat from drowning in the past, and 

brings it to the present. As Mr. Chiswick explains, 

  

“The space-time continuum is a chaotic system in which every event is 
connected to every other in elaborate, nonlinear ways that make prediction 

impossible. Bringing an object forward through time would create a 

parachronistic incongruity. At best, the incongruity might result in increased 
slippage. At worst, it might make time travel impossible. Or alter the course 

of History. Or destroy the universe” (WILLIS, 1998, p. 31). 

 

This is the inciting incident that leads the narrator, Ned Henry, to go back to the 

Victorian era in order to help Verity put things right to prevent altering History. Structured in 

the style of a “whodunit”, Willis draws inspiration from the tradition of detective novels 

written between the 1920s and the 1930s. More specifically, she parodies the works of Agatha 

Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham. 

 

The term “whodunit” — as in “Who done it?” “Who committed the 
murder?” — […] refers to the form of writing invented by Edgar Allan Poe 

in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), one governed by a set of 



42 

 

conventions requiring fair play in the telling of the murder and presentation 

of clues and withholding of the identity of the murderer until the end. […] 
The emphasis in the whodunit is on identifying the murderer; this means an 

emphasis on observing behavior and events, an emphasis on the plot. […] 

The art of the whodunit comes in the pursuit of the identity of the murderer 

through the skillful presentation of clues. The writer is expected to adhere to 
the standard of fair play; that is, the writer must present to the reader all 

clues essential to the solution of the crime. This does not mean, however, 

that the writer must reveal the significance of the clues. Indeed, the writer’s 
task is to deceive the reader whenever possible (OLEKSIN, 1999, p. 495, 

author’s emphasis). 

 

These characteristics apply to Willis’ novel, except for the murder. Instead, the 

identity of a murderer, or of how the body ended up dead, is substituted for the mystery of the 

theft of a piece of Victorian art called the bishop’s bird stump, and for the mystery of the 

identity of Tocelyn Mering’s husband. Who is this Mr. C she wrote fervently about  in her 

diary? His identity is conveniently made unreadable to Ned and Verity, which makes their job 

of making sure she marries who she is supposed to marry all the more difficult. 

In 1928, S. S. Van Dine published his article “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective 

Stories”, in which he specifically states that there must not be a love interest in the story, once 

the writing of detective fiction is supposed to be a purely intellectual experience, devoid of 

the clutter of sentimentality. Willis also does away with this convention, just like Dorothy L. 

Sayers, who once sang the praises of this rule right before breaking it herself. Moreover, by 

introducing time travel into the conventions of a “whodunit”, Willis’ respect for Van Dine’s 

rules is not exactly perfunctory, because she follows some of the conventions of the form, but 

it is definitely rebellious. In fact, she is extrapolating the rationality-driven style by stretching 

it with the imagined, virtually naturalistic technology of time travel. Therefore, Science 

Fiction is, in itself, a way to parody the form of the Golden Age detective novel — 

realistically executed, but conceptually fantastical. 

 

Darby and Gentilla […] built the net as a pirated ship for plundering the 

treasures of the past, and they’d tried it on everything from the Mona Lisa to 

King Tut’s tomb and then, when that didn’t work, on more mundane items, 

like money. But nothing except microscopic particles would come through. 
When they tried to take any object, even a halfpence or a fish fork, out of its 

own time, the net wouldn’t open. It didn’t let germs through either, or 

radiation, or stray bullets, which Darby and Gentilla and the rest of the world 
should have been grateful for, but weren’t particularly. 

The multinationals who’d been backing Darby and Gentilla lost interest, and 

time travel had been handed over to historians and scientists, who’d come up 
with the theories of slippage and the Law of Conservation of History to 

explain it, and it had been accepted as law that if one tried to bring 



43 

 

something forward through the net, it wouldn’t open. Till now (WILLIS, 

1998, p. 106, author’s emphasis). 

 

 Ghost stories can be seen as an early version of time travel stories, once it is about the 

interaction of a person in the present with ghosts from the past. In the case of Willis’ novel, 

Tocelyn claims that “They are here now, spirits from another time and place. I can feel their 

presence” (WILLIS, 1998, p. 113). But instead of interacting with ghosts from the past, she is 

interacting with ghosts from the future. 

 

“Do you suppose it’s haunted?” Verity said. 

[…] 

“Haunted?” Tossie said happily and gave a miniature version of a scream, a 
sort of screamlet. “Of course it is. Madame Iritosky says that there are 

certain places that act as portals between one world and the next”, she said. 

I glanced at Verity, but she looked serene, untroubled by Tossie’s having 
just described the net (WILLIS, 1998, p. 108). 

 

The time travelers are twenty-first century historians from Oxford University in 2057. 

They are working toward Lady Schrapnell’s project of restoring Coventry Cathedral, which 

has been destroyed in a Nazi air raid. Ned’s role is to look for a Victorian atrocity called the 

bishop’s bird stump. But when Verity does the impossible and misplaces a cat through time, 

Ned is drawn into a desperate attempt at History conservation, eventually leading him to the 

mystery of Tossie’s husband, and to the finding of the bishop’s bird stump. The momentary 

time displacement of Princess Arjumand is solved in chapter twelve, but its resolution only 

makes it harder for the characters to avoid Historical changes — at least that is what they 

think. 

 

“What? You don’t think I should have brought her back?” 
“I don’t know”. 

“I thought I should get her back here before there were any other 

consequences”. 

“I know”, she said, looking genuinely distressed. “The thing is you weren’t 
supposed to have brought her through in the first place”. 

“What?” I said. 

“When Mr. Dunworthy found out about the Coventry slippage, he called off 
the drop”. 

“But — ” I said. “I wasn’t supposed to bring Princess Arjumand through? 

But I thought you said the Coventry slippage was unrelated, that it was due 

to a crisis point”. 
“It was, but while they were checking it, T. J. compared the slippage patterns 

to Fujisaki’s research, and they decided the lack of slippage surrounding the 

original drop meant it was a nonsignificant event”. 
“But that’s impossible. Animate creatures can’t be nonsignificant”. 



44 

 

“Exactly”, she said grimly. “They think Princess Arjumand was nonanimate. 

They think she was intended to drown”. 
This was making no sense. “But even if she drowned, her body would still 

interact with the continuum. It wouldn’t just disappear”. 

“That’s what Fujisaki’s research was about. She’d be reduced to her 

component parts, and the complexity of their separate interactions would 
drop exponentially”. 

Meaning her poor body would drift down the Thames, decomposing into 

carbon and calcium and interacting with nothing but the river water and 
hungry fishes. Ashes to ashes. Dust to nonsignificance. 

“Which would make it possible”, Verity said, “for her to be removed from 

her space-time location without any historical effect. Which meant she 

shouldn’t be sent back from the future at all”. 
“So you didn’t cause an incongruity by taking her through the net”, I said. 

“But I did, by bringing her back”. 

She nodded. “When you didn’t come, I was afraid they might have sent 
Finch or someone after you to tell you to drown Princess Arjumand”. 

“No!” I said. “No one’s drowning anymore”. 

She rewarded me with one of her devastating smiles. 
“If she’s a nonsignificant event, we’ll take her back to the future”, I said 

firmly. “We’re not going to drown her. But that doesn’t make any sense”, I 

said, thinking of something. “Her drowning, if that’s what would have 

happened, would have had consequences, the same consequences her 
disappearance had: everyone looking for her, your going to Oxford, Tossie’s 

meeting Terence”. 

“That’s what I tried to tell Mr. Dunworthy”, she said. “But T. J. said Fujisaki 
said those would have been short-term consequences without historical 

repercussions”. 

“In other words, they would have gotten over the cat”, I said, “if I ha