Time Travelers Never Die

Some time travel stories throw a wrench into the gears in your head. Your mind grinds to a halt and you have to read them again, or watch them again, to see if they make sense or if they're cleverly constructed nonsense. Stories like these make us flex our philosophical muscles. Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies" is the locus classicus here.

Other time travel stories are just a heckuva lot of fun. Time Travelers Never Die, by Jack McDevitt, is that kind of story. Shel and Dave inherit time travel technology--a handheld time machine, no less, much like an ipod--from Shel's father, who has gone missing. In their search for him, they travel throughout history. They go to see Galileo, Shakespeare, Aristotle. They check out the library of Alexandria and bring back some lost plays of Sophocles. It's rather like a liberal arts version of a time travel story. Where would you go?

What about the paradox of time travel? You know, all that business about (not) killing your grandfather. Well, McDevitt humorously solves that problem with a little something he calls "the cardiac principle." A researcher makes the fateful attempt to alter the past and create a paradox and she drops dead of a heart attack. Get it? Shel tries it for himself and somehow he's dropped in the ocean. Evidently something is protecting the integrity of the timeline. If you're going to appeal to a deus ex machina, why not be like McDevitt and be up front about it--and have a good time with it, too? But don't think about it too hard. Just enjoy the story!

What Happened While I've Been Away...

It takes a while to recuperate after being buried alive under a crushing pile of papers and final exams. During my absence, the first few summer sf flicks have come and gone. I haven't the time for a full review, but I'll offer a few random and impressionistic observations:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Hugh Jackman is Wolverine. It’s fun to watch him work, and there were some nice moments here. But this film helped me to realize that I don’t want to know Wolverine’s origin. Plenty of superheroes have clear and obvious origin stories. The risk of cliché is very high. Think Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Punisher, Hulk, and so on. For me, one of the things that set Wolverine apart from the rest is that he doesn’t have a sense of purpose that depends on his origin. He’s a hero whose past is a mystery. And that’s where this film leaves him at the end, right? But it doesn’t leave us there with him, and that’s my major complaint.

I gotta add that I’m really unhappy about what they did to the Merc’ with the Mouth. Deadpool is a delightful character, so why mess so badly with him?

Star Trek. Clearly the best of the three. A great film to watch, a point deliciously made by The Onion! But J. J. Abrams hasn't forgotten where this film comes from. I enjoyed the reboot of a classic set of characters: Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, Uhuru, all recognizable yet fresh at the same time. The expected lines were delivered and enjoyed, at least by me:

"Dammit man, I'm a doctor, not a physicist."
"I'm giving her all she's got, Captain!"

Now, I'm of the opinion that the Star Trek writers use the time travel trope far too often, but at least this one didn't turn out to be a desperate race to restore the original future. No, we're in an alternate timeline, and thankfully that opens up the possibilities for the sequel.

The weak point of the film was the stereotypical villain. A Romulan lunatic out to destroy the earth? Didn't we see that in Star Trek: Nemesis? I'm hoping next time around we get a more interesting and frightening foe for the Enterprise crew to combat, and a better story, too. This film got quite a lot of mileage out of its nostalgic elements and its sheer watchability. I suspect the bar will be higher next time.

Oh, and what's the story with J. J. Abrams's obsession with red matter? Sydney ran into some of that on Alias, too, right?

Terminator Salvation. Better than Terminator 3, but not up to the standard set by the first two films. The Terminator films are all animated by killer machines and extravagant chase scenes, but only the first two manage to make us care very much about what's going on--and even to think a little bit!

I liked the way this movie channeled The Road Warrior and tricked it out in high tech, but mainly it struck me as a missed opportunity. The new guy in this film is a blend of human and machine. He doesn't know what he is, and neither does John Conner. That's some really interesting territory to explore, as Battlestar Galactica has shown, but this film goes nowhere with it. Too bad.

What did you think?

Time Travel 3: No Blasts From the Past

Many time travel stories involve traveling into the past and altering it, with the result that the future to which the time traveler returns is also changed -- whether for good or for ill (perhaps depending on which Back to the Future film one is watching).

Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (the short story, not the less than mediocre film) is the paradigmatic case here, wherein a dinosaur hunter (another familiar time travel trope) steps off a marked path and squashes a butterfly. The upshot of that seemingly insignificant change in the past is that the future somehow feels different, as Bradbury so wonderfully describes:

Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were... were.... And there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk... lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind.

Furthermore, the words on the wallsigns are spelled differently, and the wrong guy has just won the election!

As much as I love this story, it just doesn't add up. In increasing degrees of incoherence...

(1) While I buy the idea that a small change can have a dramatic effect (and this is where we get the phrase "the butterfly effect," after all), it's extremely unlikely that the ripple effect would leave the present intact enough for the same two candidates to be running for office but different enough for loser and winner to switch places. Likewise, while a change in language is possible, it's likely the change wouldn't simply be a matter of different spelling.

(2) The idea that the time travel agency could safeguard the timeline by creating a path and marking the target animals doesn't sit well with the idea that any minuscule change might be catastrophic. Surely they can't be tracking insects--and even microsopic organisms--to make sure none are inadvertently extinguished by a time traveler. Given the butterfly effect, it seems inevitable that any travel to the past would have serious repercussions in the present

(3) The past is the past (pace William Faulkner). It's already happened. So if anyone leaves the future in a time machine, their arrival in the past has already transpired and whatever they do has already been done. It isn't as if there is a pre-time-travel past (with a living butterfly) and a post-time-travel past (with a dead butterfly). No, there's just one past. So while time travelers may be able to visit the past, and if so they can certainly affect it, they cannot change it. Wanna know what that kind of time travel looks like? Watch 12 Monkeys.

If I'm right about this, then many time travel stories don't make sense, in spite of how much fun they might be. This post has to end, but I can't help observing that Back to the Future's idea that as the past changes people will fade out of a photo from the future is especially ridiculous.

Chaospet (the source of the last link) has a nice trilogy of webcomics on this issue: 1, 2, 3.

Wondering about the possibility of multiple timelines? Stay tuned.

Time Travel 2: Time Wars

A long time ago... or a short time ago... or some time in the future? One of the familiar tropes in time travel stories is the guardian of the timeline. In a world where time travel is possible, the past is seen as yet another venue for terrorists to threaten the world for the sake of their cause and for unscruplous opportunists to try to make a buck without a care for the damage they do. And this new temporal peril calls for a new kind of hero, or a force of heroes, to save the present day--or the future, depending on one's frame of reference. Future warriors fighting their battles in the past! That's pretty cool stuff.

Some classic examples of this kind of story are Poul Anderson's The Time Patrol stories and Simon Hawke's longrunning Timewars series. Also Fritz Leiber's The Big Time, which won the Hugo in 1959.

In film, we mustn't forget Timecop (1994), one of Jean-Claude Van Damme's somewhat less objectionable films, and the three (soon to be four!) Terminator films, which--like the killer robots themselves--"absolutely will not stop, ever." And we mustn't forget The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

What can you add to my list?

Killing machines chasing people through our every day landscape. Time soldiers taking the place of Robin Hood or the Three Musketeers, fighting battles with sword or musket rather than with blasters. Stories in this sub-sub-genre tend to explore the exciting prospects afforded by time travel rather than exploring its logical or physical paradoxes. And one doesn't have to think about such stories for very long to be struck by the utter implausibility of the thesis that a military operation could somehow protect the integrity of the timeline. Still, these stories do raise one of the most philosophically interesting questions about time travel: whether it's coherent to talk about changing the past. But that'll have to wait until the next post.

Time Travel 1

Time travel is one of science fiction's earliest and most enduring themes. Mark Twain gives us what is perhaps the earliest example of a person who is displaced in time in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), while H.G. Wells invents the fiction of a time machine in the aptly titled The Time Machine (1895).

Is time travel possible? In what sense? We may want to know whether time travel is physically possible, given what we now know about the nature of the universe. People have lots of interesting things to say about this. Not me, though.

Philosophers are more likely to wonder whether time travel is logically possible. And this question is intimately connected to the fascinating question of whether an sf story about time travel can be coherent. I'll be assembling several posts on these matters in the near future.

For now, see what some sf writers have to say about the use of time travel in sf at the excellent blog SF Signal.