Stephen Kings Rules for Time Travel | Magazine

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/pl_printking/?utm_source=fe...

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Stephen Kings Rules for Time Travel

By Sarah Fallon November 1, 2011 | 12:30 pm | Wired November 2011

Collage: Pilgrim; photo: Daniel Salo If youre going to travel back in time, author Stephen King says, preparation is everything. The further back you go, the more you have to think about. And if youre going to try and undo a watershed event in historythe assassination of JFK, sayyou had better be determined. Because the past will do its best to remain unchanged. Thats the premise of Kings latest novel, 11/22/63, which follows Jake Epping as he slips back through time to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from pulling the trigger. To get the details right, King talked to experts about the events leading up to Kennedys death, and he consulted with heavyweight historians like Doris Kearns Goodwin on what might have happened had JFK lived. Wired spoke with King about the mechanics of time travel, the grandfather paradox, and the scariest thing about trying to change history. Wired: Your main character is trying to alter the past, but everything gets in his way. He gets sick, his car wont start, he gets beaten up. Stephen King: Theres a kind of a rule that youd express as a ratio: The more potential a given event has to

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Stephen Kings Rules for Time Travel | Magazine

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/pl_printking/?utm_source=fe...

change the future, the more difficult that event would be to change. If you wanted to go back and speak to somebody on a street corner so that they were five minutes late to an appointmentthat might not be too hard. But if you wanted to stop the assassination of a president, that would be really difficult. The past would try to protect itself. My hero, Jake Epping, is befriended by a short-order cook who has a kind of a time bubble in the back of his diner. When you go through it, you always come out at the same time: two minutes before noon, on a day in September 1958. Originally the cook uses it to buy meat at 50s prices for his restaurant and bring it back through. He always has to buy the same meat because he goes into the store at the same time, every time. Wired: Sounds simple. King: Well, its a little bit more complex than these people realize. When Al the cook tells Jake about how you can go back to 1958 and walk around and do whatever you want, Jake asks, What if you went back and killed your own grandfather? Wired: The grandfather paradox. King: Right. And Al looks at him with wide eyes and says, Why the fuck would you want to do that? So, in a way, we bypassed that whole idea completely. But by the end of the book, they find out that what they think is basically harmless is very harmful. Wired: Sort of a butterfly effect thing? King: The butterfly effect has a part in it, but my thought was that every time you go back and change something, you create an alternate timeline. There are these guardians who stand watch over all the time portals, because they understand that whenever you go back, you damage the time-space continuum. At the end Jake meets one of them, who tells him, Every time you did this, you made the situation worse. And if you continue to do it, everything collapses. To me thats pretty horrible. Wired: But every time Jake goes through the portal, everything is supposedly reset to how it was before. King: The idea of the reset was one of the more interesting things about the book to me. You can get the idea from computers, where you can delete all this material and start over again and it never even leaves a mark. You just highlight everything, bop Delete, and its gone. Wired: Well, on a computer you think its gone, but its actually not. King: Its like in the story. They think its a complete reset, but the guardian tells Jake that it really isnt. It looked that way to you, but that stuff was still there. Wired: If you ever came across a time-travel portal, would you go through it? King: I guess the urge would be there, but no, I dont think I would. Id be afraid that the past really was a house of cards and that I might knock it down. Id be scared. Wired: And the further back you go, the more immediately dangerous it becomesthe more likely you are to be hounded by the villagers. King: Its another ratio: The further back you go, the more precautions you have to take. It would go right to the languageyoud have to be careful about the way you speak; the accents would be different. If you were to return to, say, 1858, youd really have to prepare ahead of time. Wired: How closely do you think people will analyze your time-travel mechanics? King: As The Dark Tower series was concluding, physics grad students were theorizing online about wormholes and equations and all that. Plenty of buffs, some of whom read this magazine, will say, you screwed this up, you screwed that up. People make a hobby of that kind of thing. Wired: Do you think youll work with time travel again? King: No, this is it. Absolutely not. No, thats done. Its like Apollo Creed says, Aint gonna be no rematch.

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Stephen Kings Rules for Time Travel | Magazine

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/pl_printking/?utm_source=fe...

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To Mr. Stephen King, Thank You For Being You. May you continue to keep us all enthralled with what you do, with your ideas, dreams, and desires . I know I've spent a lot of time reading your books and rereading over the years.

Nor did he claim that:) I'm looking forward to the book.

"my thought was that every time you go back and change something, you create an alternate timeline." Ummm, Stephen, you weren't exactly the first person to think that and write a story about it.

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15.11.2011 16:13

Stephen Kings Rules for Time Travel | Magazine

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/pl_printking/?utm_source=fe...

Really. Didn't read anything striking in that interview.

11/22/63 is a pretty good story, and i am certain that all the readers will like it. It is way more complex and developped than it seems...

Love Mr King and his work, have done for a number of years. I've only begun to read this book but it seems like another good one to me. It is a bit scary how much like John Major Mr King looks in the picture.

Given that 11/22/63 is ONE DAY before the debut of the best time-travel television show ever (which had a novel titled "Who Killed Kennedy"), and given that Red Dwarf (not that show) did a JFK time-travel episode, this is already well-trodden ground. But I'm always willing to see how Mr. King renders it in his brutal, gory style.

I assume were such possible I would also be subject to the effect and eventually end up in my mother's womb and blindly meet my father's sperm as it crossed the threshold of my mother's egg. I'm sure well before such an absurdity I would've lost the mental capacity to realize what was happening. Time travel is BS, although King presents a very entertaining story.

The book's terrific. Solid Q&A, Wired. That lede photo/art is tremendous.

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15.11.2011 16:13

Stephen Kings Rules for Time Travel | Magazine

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/pl_printking/?utm_source=fe...

well, if this Jake Epping guy is going after Lee Harvey Oswald -- he certainly is wasting his time..

I've gotten used to reading books on my Kindle app lately, but I own like 95% of King's books in hardcover or paperback. I think I'll have to continue the tradition for this too. It just wouldn't feel right otherwise.

But there was a rematch... Apollo vs. Rocky in Rocky II.

Right. Perhaps he was hinting that he feels like he's done with it for now, but anything could happen?

I'd walk through a time portal. Totally. It would be the break-down of consciousness, since consciousness does not exist without the arrow of time, but still I'd walk through it. I think Black Holes are time portals. You'd get good and scrambled going against the arrow of time. Space would collapse without at least the perception of it. But hey, maybe this is all about our perception and noting exists "out there" the way we think it does.

Maybe Jake can save Buddy Holly while he's waiting around for 1963?

And if you're the Andrew Northrup who was once known as The Editors of The Poor Man Institute for Democracy and a Pony, perhaps you can journey back to 2009 and restart your blog?

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Stephen Kings Rules for Time Travel | Magazine

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/pl_printking/?utm_source=fe...

Ritchie Valens and Big Bopper too!

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