Timestream

For other uses, see Time Stream (disambiguation).

The timestream or time stream is a metaphorical conception of time as a stream, a flowing body of water. In Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, the term is more narrowly defined as: "the series of all events from past to future, especially when conceived of as one of many such series".[1] Timestream is the normal passage or flow of time and its historical developments, within a given dimension of reality. The concept of the time stream, and the ability to travel within and around it, are the fundamentals of a genre of science fiction.

This conception has been widely used in mythology and in fiction.

This analogy is useful in several ways:

  • Streams flow only one way. Time moves only forward.
  • Streams flow constantly. Time never stops.
  • People can stand in a stream, but will be pulled along by it. People exist within time, but move with it.[2]
  • Some physicists and science fiction writers have speculated that time is branching—it branches into alternate universes (see many-worlds interpretation). Streams can converge and also diverge.

Science fiction scholar Andrew Sawyer writes, "The paradoxes of time—do we move in time, or does it move by us? Does it exist or is it merely an illusion of our limited perception?—are puzzles that exercise both physicists and philosophers..."[3]

  1. ^ Jeff Prucher, ed. (2007). "Time Stream". Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 242. ISBN 978-0195305678.
  2. ^ Science fiction scholar Paul Kincaid comments, "The time machine allows not movement in time (we already live in time, and a novelist has always been able to set a story in any future or past era), but transposition in time." Kincaid, Paul (2005). "Time travel". In Gary Westfahl (ed.). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. Vol. 1. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. p. 820. ISBN 0-313-32950-8.
  3. ^ Sawyer, Andy (2005). "Time". In Gary Westfahl (ed.). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. Vol. 1. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. p. 818. ISBN 0-313-32950-8.