This weeks Sci-Fi Friday is brought to you by my friend Michael. You can find his regular blog here.
Lovely, wonderful Michael got me his post well on time. The fact this is happening on Sunday instead of Friday might possibly have something to do with me spending a weekend at the lake without any kind of internets.
Anyway, gorge the eyestalks.
Lovely, wonderful Michael got me his post well on time. The fact this is happening on Sunday instead of Friday might possibly have something to do with me spending a weekend at the lake without any kind of internets.
Anyway, gorge the eyestalks.
Recently this blog discussed the flying cars that we were all promised when the future got here. This romanticized flying car future has yet to materialize though and our continued yearning for it masks an overlooked truth: no one has been promised a flying car utopia since like, the 1950s. More recent generations were promised corporate-run dystopias, which we’ve been delivered by the way. But I don’t want to talk today about flying cars or about the cyberpunk future we live in. I want to talk about something awesome.
You know what’s awesome? Time travel is awesome. I love time travel stories! When done right, they can offer an in depth look at a setting and its characters from multiple perspectives in a short amount of in-universe time.
Groundhog Day is a great, light hearted introduction to this style of story. If you aren’t familiar with the movie, basically Bill Murray’s smarmy character is trapped in a town during Groundhog Day and forced to relive the same day again and again. Not even death is an escape for him, as he simply wakes up in bed the next day.
Why does he repeat the same day again and again? How does this time loop work? Why is it centered on Bill Murray’s character? We never get the answer to these questions in the movie; and why should we? Those questions aren’t what the story is about. The movie is really about the growth that the setting forces on Bill Murray’s character and the people he meets and gets to know along the way.
Part of what I love about Groundhog Day is how over the course of the movie, you see Bill Murray interact with several minor background characters who you might not give much thought to if you saw them walking down the street, but Bill Murray has all the time in the world to get to know the personal life stories of everyone in town and so do we as the viewers.
You know what’s awesome? Time travel is awesome. I love time travel stories! When done right, they can offer an in depth look at a setting and its characters from multiple perspectives in a short amount of in-universe time.
Groundhog Day is a great, light hearted introduction to this style of story. If you aren’t familiar with the movie, basically Bill Murray’s smarmy character is trapped in a town during Groundhog Day and forced to relive the same day again and again. Not even death is an escape for him, as he simply wakes up in bed the next day.
Why does he repeat the same day again and again? How does this time loop work? Why is it centered on Bill Murray’s character? We never get the answer to these questions in the movie; and why should we? Those questions aren’t what the story is about. The movie is really about the growth that the setting forces on Bill Murray’s character and the people he meets and gets to know along the way.
Part of what I love about Groundhog Day is how over the course of the movie, you see Bill Murray interact with several minor background characters who you might not give much thought to if you saw them walking down the street, but Bill Murray has all the time in the world to get to know the personal life stories of everyone in town and so do we as the viewers.
Figure 1 Several people on YouTube assure me this is definitely a time machine. Why doesn’t the media cover this?!
Ultimately, that movie is a romantic comedy. What if we’re in the mood for something more adventurous? There are plenty of great stories in the time travel genre that fit this qualifier as well! To name another movie that everyone will know: Back to the Future is a perfect example of this. Marty McFly has great adventures as he tries to stop his parents from breaking up and cause him to never be born because of events that he changed when he went to the past. It’s a lovely introduction to time paradoxes and definitely recommended for anyone who wants time travel itself to play a bigger role in the stories. The characters are often wrestling with what they can change in the past to affect the future without causing unintended consequences. Another standout example of this sort of film is Looper which I won’t talk about too much here, but it follows this same sort of slightly more involved time travel film.
But finally we come to my favorite sort of time travel story: the structured time travel story. Now, don’t take that to mean that other time travel stories aren’t structured, but rather it’s the type of story that spends an (often non-trivial) amount of time laying down the rules of how time travel works before the characters go and muck things up and then either have to deal with the consequences of their actions or figure out how to work within the rules to set things right. One example of this is the 2004 movie Primer, which I adore, but it’s a very difficult movie to follow specifically because of how it doesn’t hold your hand as characters are bending the fabric of space-time to their whims. Therefore, I won’t spend more time on it other than to recommend it to you.
Another lovely example of this sort of story is Steins;Gate, a visual novel (which itself is a topic I could easily write a whole blog post about) and the inspiration for this post. In this game, a group of friends accidentally invent a time machine and spend the first half of the game experimenting with it and learning the rules of the system only to find themselves in a horrible trap of their own design.
But finally we come to my favorite sort of time travel story: the structured time travel story. Now, don’t take that to mean that other time travel stories aren’t structured, but rather it’s the type of story that spends an (often non-trivial) amount of time laying down the rules of how time travel works before the characters go and muck things up and then either have to deal with the consequences of their actions or figure out how to work within the rules to set things right. One example of this is the 2004 movie Primer, which I adore, but it’s a very difficult movie to follow specifically because of how it doesn’t hold your hand as characters are bending the fabric of space-time to their whims. Therefore, I won’t spend more time on it other than to recommend it to you.
Another lovely example of this sort of story is Steins;Gate, a visual novel (which itself is a topic I could easily write a whole blog post about) and the inspiration for this post. In this game, a group of friends accidentally invent a time machine and spend the first half of the game experimenting with it and learning the rules of the system only to find themselves in a horrible trap of their own design.
Figure 2 Dr People, the time travellers' drink of choice.
What I find so powerful and attractive about the game is how the time travel allows for the player to go back in time and interact with other characters differently. A little insight here, provoking a reaction there, it all lends itself to the player developing an intimate relationship with each character, even those who at first seem ancillary.
Time travel stories are captivating and have so much more to offer than what I’ve written about here. If you’re usually turned off to Sci-Fi involving time travel I hope you’ll be intrigued to seek out recommendations of stories that are lighter on the time travel and bigger on character driven interactions. If you’ve never thought about using time travel elements in your stories before, then consider it as a specialized tool for certain settings that let you show similar (or even the same) events from an evolving perspective as your viewpoint character learns more and more about the plot of a story. Time travel, I submit to you all, is awesome.
Time travel stories are captivating and have so much more to offer than what I’ve written about here. If you’re usually turned off to Sci-Fi involving time travel I hope you’ll be intrigued to seek out recommendations of stories that are lighter on the time travel and bigger on character driven interactions. If you’ve never thought about using time travel elements in your stories before, then consider it as a specialized tool for certain settings that let you show similar (or even the same) events from an evolving perspective as your viewpoint character learns more and more about the plot of a story. Time travel, I submit to you all, is awesome.
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