I am pleased and a bit flattered to receive and to read Richard H. Jones’ book, Time Travel and Harry Potter: Time-Turning in the Prisoner of Azkaban and its Place in Time-Travel Fiction. For one thing, Jones argues rather strenuously for a version of replacement theory, rejecting both the fixed time and the divergent dimension theories advocated by many physicists. For another, it happens that he cites Temporal Anomalies in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, naming this author both in the bibliography and in the text. I received a copy of the book because of my contribution in making that available to him, and my promise to review it was incidental.
Jones is to be commended for the scope of his coverage. He admits that prior to reading the third book of the Harry Potter series he knew neither the physics nor the philosophy of time travel and had no interest in the subject, yet his work introduces many of the prominent names in both fields. He attacks the determinism of fixed time theorists and the absurdity of infinitely diverging dimensions. He recognizes the critical element in the Azkaban problem, which is how Harry manages to survive the dementor attack so as to be able to travel back and save himself from it. Further, he provides a plausible solution to this problem. Overall, it is a commendable book.
However, I hesitate to recommend it.
The work meanders to a significant degree. Having dealt with a particular aspect of the problem, he returns to it later to give much the same arguments again, leaving the reader with the feeling that that has already been covered. It clearly has been forged from the debates arising on fan forums and web sites, where Potter fans attempt to explain time travel based on “how time really works” (something of which I might be accused, but that my notion of how time really works is consistent with Jones’). Thus the feeling that he is repeating himself may arise from the fact that in such forums one usually does. Yet in saying what it already said–mostly that the “Potterverse” has a malleable history–it fails to say what we most want to know.
What he covers inadequately is his own explanation for how the problem is resolved, what he calls the Patronus Paradox. He provides a solution for Harry’s survival, suggesting that Dumbledore saw the dementors on the grounds, drove them away, and then made a secret trip with Harry back one hour, explained the situation, and had Harry cast the patronus that saved his counterpart; then Dumbledore obliviated Harry’s memory, put him to sleep, and dropped him back in the hospital wing to awaken in time to make the trip with Hermione. What Jones fails to explain is why Dumbledore follows this elaborate plan–taking the evident risk that Harry might not save himself–after having himself resolved the problem. Certainly if I consider it long enough I can devise possible explanations, what matters is that Jones does not offer one, supposing that the fact that it could have happened this way makes it unnecessary to justify it doing so. However, it is not an impossible scenario, and for my part I had decided (without thorough examination) that the book’s version was not resolvable. His solution works; he fails in making it credible.
Jones also at times fails to grasp, or at least to convey a full grasp of, the nuances of the concepts and authors he is discussing. At one point he says that there is no “grandfather paradox” in Potter because Rowling created the world such that such a paradox could not exist. However, a “grandfather paradox” is a description of a temporal problem in which a future effect has a past cause which undoes the future effect. One might as well say that addition does not exist in a particular fictional universe because the author never says it does–there will still be circumstances in which objects are combined with objects to create a greater number of objects, even if the author never calls it addition and the characters never consider the matter. The book does include such paradoxes in the comment that some time travelers have killed their alternate selves. What matters is how such problems are resolved, not whether they exist. Jones proposes a (somewhat dubious and awkward) solution not found in the text, but does not realize that he is attempting to resolve a paradox he has already claimed does not exist.
He has much the same problem with block universe theory, failing to understand that for adherents of this theory the experience of history is akin to constructing a tile mosaic: the order in which the pieces are placed is not relevant, only whether in the finished product they provide the complete picture. I fully support his objections to that conception of time, and I agree that the story told in Azkaban does not fit it, but at least I understand it. His arguments on this lack cogency because they fail to recognize the nature of the position.
It appears, too, that he misunderstands my own discussion of the film version, saying that I claim four “previous trips” akin to his own proposed previous trip by Dumbledore. My proposal is, rather, that the one trip that is made by Hermione changes history from an original through two intermediate variant forms (in which Harry joins her at the end of the first altered history to participate in the remaining ones) to a final version shown in the film. There are no erased and forgotten trips, merely erased and forgotten histories arising from the changes which impact the one trip. His guesses about what would happen if someone failed to make a trip in the second history he already made in the first also seem to miss the complexities of the problem; his theory of time is not coherent. This is the more unfortunate, because those incoherencies are mostly about peripheral matters–Hermoine’s self-duplication for classes during the school year, the casual mention that some time travelers have killed their alternate selves–which can be resolved otherwise. (For example, if the Ministry of Magic is aware before the moment of departure that a time traveler killed his former self, it would be reasonably plausible to nest a second trip within the first which prevents the incident, provided that such trip also inform the Ministry of the necessity of making that trip.) it is sloppy around the periphery, giving poor answers to the minor questions which spoil its interesting idea for the major ones, and failing to give adequate support for the solution it proposes to the major problem.
There are the usual number of typos for a first edition paperback, and the one image (a chart reminiscent of my own turned ninety degrees) might have been of better quality, but the book was an easy read and easy on the eyes. I enjoyed it, mostly from the fact that I agreed with so much of it.
