We’re going to attempt… time travel

** SPOILER WARNING **

When I wrote Falling’s climax, it didn’t even occur to me how cliched time travel was. Has there ever been a more perennial and overused subject in sci-fi, horror and the other fantastical genres we have in film, literature or entertainment?

Now I look back, I wonder if readers will get to that point and roll their eyes. There have been so many instances of time travel done well – let alone altogether – it doesn’t seem like there’s any possible new way to depict it or portray how amazing it can be.

At the time, especially during the last few rewrites when I changed things from just being cool or scary to trying to have them make sense in the universe of the story and the science of the paranormal, I was thinking in terms only of quantum mechanics, electromagnetic fields and the bioelectricity of brains.

Along with generations of keen amateur science enthusiasts, I know the real truth about time travel; the faster you travel, the more time will have passed back where you started when you get back. In other words, everyone and everything back when you left it would have aged more than you have in the duration you were gone.

That’s the effect of time dilation and it all stems from relativity. That means in one sense (as Einstein proved and the likes of Hawking popularised), you can actually travel through time, but only forward.

Picking Dale and Tim up while they stagger around the empty bridge during the climax and depositing them back when the energy of the system was reaching its highest level (ie when the bridge actually falls in 2019) is an attempt by the physical mechanics behind the supernatural phenomena to connect the electromagnetic conduit with the the highest energy output.

How it actually did so in an electromagnetic sense, I never really figured out. Better minds than mine have tried and failed to do so, going back to and including Einstein himself.

The only reasoning I could come up with was that the entity behind the hauntings and death was so powerful (again, electromagnetically speaking) it could undo and reform the spacetime substrate of the universe to a terrifying extent to achieve its aim and close the circuit.

I once wrote an article in my day job about organic evolution, and how it’s the only natural process that moves towards increased complexity, quite contrary to the second law of thermodynamics.

I wondered if there was some sort of principle in the universe that actually followed the second law of thermodynamics but – because of the weird nature of time and its interaction with extremes of matter and gravity – did so in the other temporal direction we know in our day to day lives.

It was very high minded, very hypothetical and almost certainly wrong, but it was a fun thought experiment. Star Trek: The Next Generation did it too. And so, when it came time to wrap up the action in Falling, I wondered not only if such a principle actually existed but if there was some force in the cosmos – manifesting as ghosts and monsters to both us and the characters – that could grasp and control it.

There were no DeLoreans, no Herbert Wells’, no Terminators, planets full of apes, time bandits, loopers, hot tubs or groundhogs in sight, just extreme physics. I hope that means the shock of time travel in Falling is genuine and doesn’t feel laboured or cliched, but as always, you be the judge.