Was complaining recently to my wife, brother-in-law, the milkman (etc) about the new Doctor Who's unimaginative use of time travel. The formula of the show is (basically) this: Our daring duo arrive in the past/future, encounter dangers and dilemmas, solve the problem/vanquish the foe(s), and hop into the TARDIS to do more of the same the following week.
In other words, the TARDIS is rarely used as anything other than a device to change scenes and hop to new and exotic locations. In that regard, dare I say it, it differs little from The Time Tunnel.
This, of course, is not to say that Who at its best isn’t far superior to Irwin Allen's piece of fluff - it clearly is (the swirly, psychedelic tunnel was TTT's main, if not only, attraction). Still…the chief pleasures of the time travel narrative lie (at least for me) in its mechanics. Paradoxes, encounters with past/future selves, mindboggling causality puzzles: these are the very stuff of good time travel yarns. A shame then that Who's writers have tended to shunt such enjoyable issues to the side in favour of more straightforward Sci-fi adventure (with lots of running and shouting).
It seems, however, that my moaning didn't fall on deaf ears and that the cosmos had arranged it so my wishes would be satisfied (Hoorah!). "Blink" (Episode 10, Season 3) was possibly the best episode of Doctor Who's new incarnation and certainly the most satisfying in terms of its engagement with time travel. While the motives of the creepy "Weeping Angel" baddies were slightly daft (feeding on people's future potential by sending them to live out their lives in the past…or something), the notion of the Doctor being stuck in the past trying to send hidden messages to the future (er…I mean the present) was ingenious and thoroughly enjoyable. More of this sort of thing please (and less of the Dalek-hybrid, pig-men slave bollocks we had a few weeks ago).
Actually, the episode has got me to thinkin'. While there have been quite a few decent televisual/cinematic engagements with time travel - The Terminator (1 & 2), Back to the Future (1-3), various episodes of the (original) Twilight Zone or the (original) Outer Limits1 - I have read precious few decent short stories/novels that deal with its intricacies. Wells's The Time Machine is (of course) a great and seminal "scientific romance" but what, in the last 100 years or so, is up there to match it?
Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man isn't bad I suppose, and David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself does (at least) take the subgenre's baroque possibilities to the nth degree (homosexual orgies with one's various selves anyone?) but I'm scratching the noodle to think of too many more. Haven't read Heinlein's "All You Zombies" in years but it deserves (from what I remember) a mention.
Suggestions for further reading welcome.
Tags: Time Travel, Doctor Who, Terminator, Heinlein, Gerrold, Moorcock, Wells
- I also admit a guilty fondness for Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time [back]
Kurt Vonnegut had a few based on time travel (Slaughterhouse Five and Timequake are two at least…)
June 17th, 2007 at 12:56 amPb, Forgot Vonnegut (although his stuff can only loosely be called sci-fi). I’ve read Slaughterhouse 5 on more than one occasion but not managed to get round to Timequake yet.
By the way, Vonnegut (R.I.P.) has been mentioned here before:
http://www.fustar.org/2006/04/13/130/
June 17th, 2007 at 1:09 amTime travel in Barry Malzberg’s _Scop_ {1976}, like all of the fantastic technologies in Malzberg’s books, is axiomatic, mundane and barely worthy of comment by his characters. Having dispensed with the mechanics of the phenomenon, Malzberg has free rein to explore why the ineffectual Scop keeps returning to the scene of JFK’s assassination, accosting Zapruder and raping the same woman over and over again. The technical intricacies you’re looking for are nowhere to be found, but we’d be remiss to neglect the social and personal implications of fantastic phenomena made available, even humdrum {cf. Plato’s “Ring of Gyges”}. For treating sci fi as scarcely more than a setting, I’d group Malzberg with Vonnegut and Philip Dick - trade PKD’s drug-addled paranoia for crippling neuroses and sexual hangups, and you’re more than halfway there.
Incidentally, I bought my second and third Malzberg paperbacks at Dandelion Books, on Aungier St, Dublin.
June 17th, 2007 at 6:50 pmI will watch almost anything with time bending/ travel. My quality control is almost zero. I recently sought out a pair of 1980s TV Movies about a man who inherits a watch which can stop time (The Girl, the Watch and Everything) which I remembered as fantasticaly exciting when I was 11.
They were terrible. I watched them anyway.
Some books in my library marked time machine- Moondial. A Tale of Time City (good on mechanics of keeping track of a plot running across time)
Another Fine Mess (like the Tardis, mostly used as a way of zapping us into another world- 1500s London)
Some time travel stories which stick in the brain from childhood. Provenance unknown. A man travels back in time to hunt dinos, the day after an election where facists are narrowly defeated. He steps on a butterfly. Returns to find facists have won and the letter c has been less favoured than the letter k. (This is a classic sign your parallel universe is a wrong ‘un, by the way. If you ever find yourself in Amerika, flee at once to a country with no c in its name.)
A master thief is hired to steal the greatest works of art, all in a morning. This is possible because he is given a gizmo that can stop time. His mysterious employers also tell him that he can steal all the money he likes. He does so. It turns out that he is in a quandry. On delivery of the art, his mysterious employer reveals she is an alien from the future. She has come to save some remnent of humanity’s culture. At the moment he had turned the gizmo on, a new bomb had been tested. If he turns if off he faces instant death along with all. She pushes off to the alien future with the Venus de Milo, leaving our thief, interrupted.
June 17th, 2007 at 8:37 pmWell, it’s no “Billy’s Time Bike”, but it’ll do…
June 17th, 2007 at 11:15 pmSimon, you’re referring (in the first case) to Ray Bradbury’s much imitated and parodied (by The Simpsons et al) “A Sound of Thunder”. My favourite adaptation is the EC comics one which is (like most of their Bradbury stories) well worth seeking out.
Not so sure about the second tale, although the frozen bomb dilemma was used to good(ish) effect in “A Little Peace and Quiet “, a fairly entertaining episode from the 1985 remake of The Twilight Zone.
June 18th, 2007 at 8:44 amSimon, I was equally excited about coming across a battered, vintage VHS copy of Time After Time in my local video shop’s VHS clearance sale. I dimly remembered it being on RTE when I was a child and the notion of H. G. Wells (who I assumed was some sort of Sherlock Holmes-esque detective) chasing Jack the Ripper (who I may have confused with Peter Sutcliffe) through time thrilled me no end.
Rewatching it with adult eyes was a surprisingly happy experience. It’s not bad at all, which is more than you can say for most fondly-remembered childhood faves. It may even be on DVD now so seek it out.
June 18th, 2007 at 8:54 amNiall, Haven’t read any Malzberg (as far as I know) but given that he has edited a collection called “The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time” he evidently knows his stuff.
I’m happy to forego detailed mechanics if it frees the narrative up, allowing it to get to the real thematic meat of the tale. After all, intricate discussions of mechanics can lead to the “dark side” of technobabble (although I guess you could describe technobabble as a lazily-articulated engagement with complex and interesting ideas).
The notion of technologies “barely worthy of comment” is not one readily embraced by most mainstream sci-fi movies, where technophobe characters often stand in (improbably) for “us” - reacting with distain or bewilderment to the marvels around them.
June 18th, 2007 at 9:10 amBehold the Man was great. I quite enjoyed The Time Traveller’s Wife, most of Quantum Leap and possibly my favourite Star Trek ever, Time’s Arrow (TNG).
June 18th, 2007 at 10:21 pmI’m actually quite enjoying the new Doctor Who, if only for the fact that the hairs on the back of my neck, without fail, stand on end every time I hear the theme music.
Time travel fans should note that Cineworld on Parnell Street, Dublin 1, is showing Back to the Future at 6 and 8.50 on Monday in the “monthly classic screening” slot.
I’ve booked myself in for the 6 p.m show.
June 22nd, 2007 at 1:42 amNah, I’m going to go back to 1985 and see it on it’s original release. I’ll bring you back a flux capacitor.
June 22nd, 2007 at 1:16 pmBeen there, done that. Bought the lunchbox.
If you are going back though, take a trip down to Burgerland, Limerick and get me a milkshake (and some of their “Kiddie Meal” toys).
copernicus, thanks for making those of us who live outside the big shmoke jealous.
Remember to laugh at “Please excuse the crudity of this model. I didn’t have time to paint it or build it to scale”.
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:32 pmYou should read Alan Moore’s “Time Twisters” from 2000AD. Reprinted in the Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks (still in print as far as I know).
June 23rd, 2007 at 8:27 amMartin, Much as I love Alan Moore, I never warmed to the Future Shocks (his or anybody else’s). Wasn’t the twist usually that it all took place in an alien zoo?!
June 25th, 2007 at 10:19 pmSo how was it? Were you all laughin’ like ’twas 1985?
June 25th, 2007 at 10:21 pmMoorcock’s “Dancers at the End of Time” trilogy is well worth a read for it’s fin-de-siecle take on the themes explored in Well’s “Time Machine”. It contains some of Moorcock’s most inventive and funniest writing.
Talking of “Behold the Man”, I once read a short story exploring a similar theme but can’t remember the title or author.
Basically, a time-travel agency sends time tourists back to watch Jesus’s execution. They are told to blend into the watching crowd by acting as they do - by throwing stones at Jesus as he stumbles by carrying his cross and yelling insults at him.
The twist is that one of the time-tourists suddenly realises that the entire howling, jeering crowd is made up entirely of other time-tourists.
Any idea who wrote it?
June 27th, 2007 at 9:26 amGraylien,
That’s _Let’s Go to Golgotha_, by G. Kilworth
June 28th, 2007 at 5:25 amAh, thanks. I just remembered Philip K Dick’s novel Counterclock world. It’s set on Earth, and is about what happens when time begins to run backwards and the dead start coming back to life.
Not one of his best works, but still worth a read.
June 28th, 2007 at 8:38 am