Some fictions, such as H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and J. B. Priestley's Time and the Conways, represent the future as fixed, i.e., as completely determinate. Yet standard accounts of truth in fiction (in terms of possible worlds, or fictional narrators) have difficulty in accommodating this phenomenon. The problem arises in part from the difficulty of making sense of an event's being fictionally past, present or future. This chapter calls upon the resources of the B-theory of time to provide an understanding of the fictional representation of time.
Keywords: H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley, fiction, future, fixity, fictional truth, fictional time, fictional narrator, B-theory