Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Time check

Something cataclysmic clearly happened at the library one day between 7.10 and 7.15 - all the clocks have stopped. Luckily my basement office has a window and I can chart the shadows on the wall opposite (when it is sunny). It's also possible I have been watching too many re-runs of The X-Files. Last night's episode found our hero doggedly trying to defend his theory of time travel in a suspicious murder case involving cyrogenics and spontaneous human combustion. A heady mix I'd say.

Time travel has to be one of the most difficult/cop-out writing techniques EVER. Terminator might be one example in which it actually works - though if I think too hard about that film (and yes, ocassionally I do) it falls apart. My favourite theory regarding it is one suggested by Darryl Jones: John Connor (who we don't actually meet until T2) is his own father - that would make Kyle Reese actually John Connor from the future. 'JC' - see - 'JC' - another example of someone who is, for different reasons, his own father... Yeah...well, something has to distract me from the 18th century and I find sci-fi a nice antidote.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (No.3) has one of the sloppiest examples of time-travel-writing I've seen - if, as we are supposed to believe, time travel is possible, shouldn't someone have gone back and stopped Voldemort in the first place? I mean, if it's plausible that wanting to take too many classes is a good enough reason to use a time travel device, surely 'saving the world' would rate some consideration? Or, peradventure, to save poor Cedric Diggory at the end of number 4?

Motivation to start yet another chapter of revisions is obviously faltering...

2 comments:

Troy D'Hondt said...

Don't forget ever time travel episode/movie in the Star Trek universe.

Though I do like that in the far future the Federation actually has a "temporal police" to attempt to put things back into the right time.

Though that didn't come up in the First Contact movie.

kaley said...

Good point - the slingshot around the sun in ST4: The Voyage Home... great psuedoscience. See exactly - First contact - the problem with writing in time travel is that it's not used consistently. It's like writing magic - you really need a fairly sophisticated, well-thought-out theory right from the beginning.