TimeTwist Tidbits!

 

SoonerCon 2009’s theme was “Slideways in Time,” and here are some of the text pieces I wrote for its Program Book.

“—All You Zombies—” is a science-fiction short story by Robert A Heinlein.  He dashed it off in a single day, July 11, 1958.  It was first published in the March 1959 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine.  In this story, the first-person narrator is his own father, mother, and child.

Timescape is a 1980 novel by science-fiction writer Gregory Benford.  In it, doomed scientists from a dying Earth (in 1998) try to send a warning message to the past, in 1962.  The interesting thing about the message is that it doesn’t involve travel as such.  The scientists shoot a tachyon beam to the astronomical position of the Earth in 1962 with their message.

In the 1986 comics maxi-series Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons describe an alternate Earth, deviated for the worse by the presence of “real” superheroics.  If superheroes were real, they’d really screw the world up, Moore said.

The Star Trek episode “The Naked Time” ends with a cold-fusion restart of the Enterprise’s warp engines, which accidentally sends the ship and crew three days backward in time.  Fan rumor has it that “The Naked Time” was originally a two-part story and script, with the time-travel ending of “Time” leading into the Enterprise’s accidental arrival in 1969 for the beginning of “Tomorrow Is Yesterday.”  The beginning of the aired version of “Yesterday” blames the Enterprise’s time travel on the slingshot effect of a black hole’s gravitational field.

In Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the laconic Hank Morgan arrives in Camelot by simply waking up there.  At the end of the story, a jealous Merlin puts Morgan into a magical sleep until his own 19^th-century time.

In Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man, an agnostic named Karl Glogauer travels from the year 1970 in a time machine to 28 A.D., where he hopes to meet the historical Jesus of Nazareth.  Eventually Grogauer becomes the Jesus of history, with his words on the cross—“It’s a lie, it’s a lie”—misinterpreted by as “Telestai,” which is Aramaic for “It is finished,” or “It is paid.”

The Terminator films and TV series posit a future where machines have become sentient and systematically begin to eliminate humanity.  Who’ll change their oil? I wonder.

In Ray Bradbury’s classic 1952 tale “A Sound of Thunder,” the killing of a butterfly on a Time Travel Safari to kill a Tyrannosaur changes history, a presidential election, and the spelling rules of the English language.

When Harlan Ellison turned in his original script for Star Trek’s “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the Enterprise crewman who escaped to the planet was a drug dealer on the run from a Security team.  While in the past, Jim Kirk made the decision to live in the past with Edith Keeler (the future be damned).  It is Spock who prevents somebody else (not Kirk or McCoy) from saving Edith’s life.

          In a March 1986 episode of The New Twilight Zone, a story called “Profile in Silver” tells of a history professor from 2172, a distant descendant of JFK, who returns to Dallas 1963 as part of a time-travel research project.  But things go awry when Professor Joseph Fitzgerald prevents the assassination and is taken into custody himself.  He produces a silver 1964 half dollar and then time starts to fall apart.  The professor realizes that unless JFK dies, nuclear war will end life on Earth now, in 1963.

          In Superboy 85, cover-dated December 1960, a very young and inexperienced Superboy decides to change history by time-traveling to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  However, in Washington DC he first encounters an adult time-traveling Lex Luthor, who whips out a piece of Red Kryptonite that paralyzes the super youth.  Only after a commotion in the street draws Luthor’s attention does the villain realize that Lincoln has been killed, and comes to the horrible conclusion that Superboy wasn’t time-traveling to apprehend Luthor but to rescue Lincoln.  Luthor has, in effect, murdered our 16^th President.

Marvel Comics had several runs of a comic series What If? in which parallel-history stories wondered about what might happen if one or another piece of Marvel mythos were changed.  Topics wondered, “What if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four?” or “What if Captain America Became President?”

The 2004 film The Butterfly Effect focused on the idea that subjectively tiny incidents might portend large deviations in time.  Ashton Kutcher starred as a fellow enabled to time-travel along his own life.  Each “correction” he attempts leads to a disastrous conclusion.

Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle is considered the fountainhead of alternate histories.  It matter-of-factly describes a North America carved up by the Japanese and Nazi Germany after the Axis Powers won World War II.

Several episodes of Babylon 5 featured the concepts of time travel or alternate outcomes, such as “War Without End” and “Babylon Squared.”

Dr Who’s TARDIS can travel anywhere and anywhen in time and/or space, depending on the skill of its pilot (and its maintenance schedule).  Don’t forget that TARDIS is an acronym for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.

The perennial Christmas feel-good movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, is at its heart an alternative-history story.  What if George Bailey hadn’t been born?  How would Bedford Falls and its citizens be different?

The CBS comedy It’s About Time was a one-season 1966-1967 time-travel tale about a pair of US astronauts who end up in the Stone Age, which is populated by such characters as Joe E Ross and Imogene Coca.  Halfway through the (only) season, the astronauts returned to our time, accompanied by a Stone Age family.  This show’s premise allowed fish-out-of-water time jokes going both ways!

In 1966-1967, ABC provided a sci-fi show called The Time Tunnel, where two scientists became detached in time after the malfunction of the US government’s Project Tic-Toc.  Every week, while attempting to make their way home, they would end up in another crisis of times future or past.

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death is a post-modern anti-war science-fiction novel dealing with soldier Billy Pilgrim’s experiences during World War II and his journeys with time travel.  Somehow becoming “unstuck” in time, he wanders up and down his life’s timeline, living out Vonnegut’s deterministic and anti-free-will viewpoint.

In her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K Le Guin tells of George Orr, who turns to drugs to quiet his disturbing dreams.  Dr Haber, his therapist, discovers that Orr’s dreams, when directed beforehand, can alter reality.  So Haber decides to use Orr’s dreams to “fix” the world, in each instance ending up with a worse result than before.  The novel was adapted for TV, in 1980 and 2002.

There was a young woman from Bight
Whose speed was much faster than light.
So she set out one day
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.

 

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today –
Oh how I wish he’d go away!

Robert Charles Wilson’s 1994 novel Mysterium concerns a county-sized chunk of America mysteriously transported into an alternate reality.  Here the world is ruled by a strange Catholic/Greek church-government and all independent thought and action is quickly stifled.  The transformation occurs in relation to a nearby military base’s experiments on a strange “quantum shard” from outer space.

See you on Thursday, fellow time travellers!