Science Fiction & Fantasy Asked on July 5, 2021
The recent movie Tenet is based around the idea of "inverting an object’s entropy", to make it move backwards in time instead of forwards. A similar thing also happens in Greg Egan’s Orthogonal trilogy, set in a fictional universe where
I’m wondering if there are earlier appearances of this idea in fiction, and if so, where it was first used.
To be clear, I’m not asking about time travel stories in general (not even ones where events are experienced in reverse order) – I’m interested specifically in stories where a character travels backwards in time at a rate of one second per second, interacting with other characters and/or the world around them in real time as they do so.
An early fantasy character who lived life backwards from the future to the past is Merlin in The Sword in the Stone (1938) by T.H. White, which was revised and made part of The Once and Future King (1958). As far as I remember Merlin lived backwards in time in both versions.
Of course, as far as I remember there was no explanation for Merlin living backwards and the readers would just assume magic as the cause.
Added 01-20-2021 An early television story with a similar plot, decades before Tenet was the Star trek: The Animated Series (TAS) episode "The Counter-Clock Incident", in which the Enterprise and its crew enter an alternate universe where time goes backwards and they start getting younger.
I thought that the fictional physics was a bit illogical, but it was a dramactic production that did more or less explore the physics of backwards time decades before Tenet, although after the examples of written storeis that User 14111 suggested.
Answered by M. A. Golding on July 5, 2021
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