Post A Reply
my profile
|
directory
login
|
search
|
faq
|
forum home
»
Flare Sci-Fi Forums
»
Community
»
Officers' Lounge
»
Best and Worst TIme Travel Stories
» Post A Reply
Post A Reply
Login Name:
Password:
Message:
HTML is enabled.
UBB Code™ is enabled.
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Peregrinus: [QB] The problem with most time-travel stories is that they don't work. Time travel itself is not a dramatic storytelling device. There are two leading theories on how time travel might work. One is the steady-state hypothesis, where, say, you go back in time and anything you might try to do creates the conditions that led up to your departure and nothing is changed because your changes are already history. The other is the multiverse hypothesis, in which every decision gate faced by elementary particles in the universe play out simultaneously from the Big Bang, each splitting of two new universes where each result plays out. So if you go back in time, the universe will carry on without you, but the instant you arrive in the past, you alter the quantum state of the universe and a new reality is split off that is now diverging from the one you left. You can fiddle to your heart's content, and it won't matter a jot to the present you left. So Back to the Future wouldn't work. Star Trek uses both models, and badly, throughout the entire multi-series arc. On the one hand, you have "City on the Edge of Forever". On the other, you have "Mirror, Mirror". And don't get me started on Star Trek IV. The best-done time travel story I've seen on screen was TNG's "Time's Arrow", where the time travel was incidental, and the drama made use of it (Samuel Clemens on the [i]Enterprise[/i] -- loved it), but didn't revolve around the mechanism itself, as it did in, say, "City...". The absolute best time travel story I've ever run across, period, is Spider Robinson's "All You Zombies", where -- thanks to time travel (and a sex-change operation) -- the main character is his own mother and father, as well as the bartender at the place he's drinking, and, for that matter, every other person in the story. It's great. --Jonah [/QB][/QUOTE]
Instant Graemlins
Instant UBB Code™
What is UBB Code™?
Options
Disable Graemlins in this post.
*** Click here to review this topic. ***
© 1999-2024 Charles Capps
Powered by UBB.classic™ 6.7.3