Just The Caffeine Talking

Notes on Time Travel Stories

Time travel has been a fixture of science fiction ever since a young Englishman named H.G. Wells wrote his first novel, The Time Machine. Wells wasn't the first person to write about time jumps — Mark Twain did it in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court — but before Wells it was always treated as fantasy. Twain's hero is cast back in time by a blow to the head, then sent back to his own time by magic. (Thus giving the excessively literal-minded reader the chance to say "it was all just a dream." I hate that trope.)

Wells moved it into the realm of science because physicists like Einstein were starting to consider time as another dimension of spacetime. As Wells's nameless protagonist The Time Traveller puts it, you can move around in three dimensions with steamships or balloons, so why not move around in four, letting you go backward or forward in time? So time travel gained some new plausibility thanks to science.

Lately I've been thinking about time travel stories, thanks to this recent Ars Technica article about the best time travel films. I realized that "time travel stories" actually combines two distinct sub-genres, or sub-sub-genres.

The first type, and by far the most common, is exactly what H.G. Wells himself did in The Time Machine: someone uses a time machine to travel to the past or future. They get in their car ("time machine") and drive to History, do stuff there, and then drive home again. Instead of a car one can use a train, an elevator, a door, or whatever. The point is that The Past or The Future is treated as a place, where one can have adventures, meet famous dead people, make dreadful warnings about social trends, or whatever.

Authors writing this kind of time travel story tend to put significant limits on how the time travel works, because the whole point is to go back or forward in time and have adventures. If the characters can just get back in the time machine and replay their exploits over and over until they get the right result, it's not very suspenseful or exciting.

The second kind of time travel stories are those which are actually about the mechanics of time travel itself. Examples of this variety include Heinlein's "All You Zombies" or "By His Bootstraps," novels like Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself, or films like Primer. In this kind of story, the authors get to play with causality, closed time-loops, paradoxes, and so on.

As one might expect, the second type is considerably harder to write, and the ship-in-a-bottle difficulty of pulling it off at all tends to make the actual stories more clever than good.   

I wonder if we should come up with names to distinguish the two types of time travel stories. Maybe call the first variety "Time Voyages" and the second "Time Twister" stories? Suggestions are welcome.

New Paradigm Required

Forgive the interruption in service. Regular blogging has resumed.

I've noticed something about the way cities are portrayed in most comic books — and in the superhero movies based on those comics. What I noticed is how old-fashioned the cities are.

Whether you're looking at Batman's decaying Gotham City, Superman's bright and thriving Metropolis, or even the Marvel Universe's New York, all of them seem frozen in time, stuck forever in about 1970.

The City consists of a bunch of big skyscrapers — weird neo-Gothic towers in Gotham, International Style glass boxes in Metropolis, and a mix in Manhattan. Not far from the giant towers are smoky brick factories, surrounded by crime-ridden ethnic neighborhoods. Along the waterfront are warehouses, wharves, and rusty old ships. Beyond the city limits lies the countryside, a quick drive to and from the city center by Batmobile.

I was born in the mid-1960s, and this doesn't match any city I've lived in or visited in half a century.

Sure, cities have skyscrapers. Typically they're clustered in the very heart of town, while the bulk of the city consists of mid-rise buildings (five to ten stories in New York or Tokyo, three to four most other places). A handful of big cities may have a couple of distinct high-rise sections separated by lower buildings — like New York's Midtown cluster and Wall Street. But even the biggest megacities like New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, or London have enormous expanses of ordinary single-family dwellings, possibly in the form of row-houses. Spider-Man or Batman won't do very well perching on those rooftops or trying to get around by rope-swinging.

Those old brick factories are gone, either demolished completely or converted to shopping malls, condos, or office space. Modern factories are out at the edge of town, in bland windowless buildings near the Interstate. Again, the only way a non-flying superhero is going to get to a modern factory is a pretty long drive.

The whole raison d'etre for "street-level" heroes has changed, too. The high-rise parts of cities are terrible places to hang out on a rooftop looking for crimes to interrupt. Most downtowns are pretty dead at night. Now: in the current climate, it might be fun to see Batman or whoever trying to stop looters or organized shoplifting gangs in someplace like San Francisco or Portland, but somehow comics writers are reluctant to turn their heroes into glorified security guards.

Hence the focus on superheroes battling villains with superpowers who advertise their status with their own colorful costumes. Even Batman's vaunted "greatest detective" skills are mostly devoted to figuring out fairly obvious clues left by costumed lunatics, while the poor Gotham City PD has to try to work out who committed a daylight gang shooting in front of witnesses who deny they saw anything.

I think it's time for superheroes to adapt to the new urban environment. Superman, with flight and super-speed, can range across the world in search of perils to thwart, and the same goes for Marvel's heavy hitters like Iron Man.

But the "street-level" heroes like Batman, Spider-Man, the Punisher, and Green Arrow (stop snickering) are still wedded to an old paradigm, in which crime is conveniently concentrated in dense urban settings. Stealth, surprise, and an aura of mystery just don't translate well to suburban sprawl, let alone "exurbs" like most of Connecticut.

The first problem is distance. Having a Batmobile can be a positive disadvantage in big-city traffic, while poor Spider-Man must resort to riding atop trains or buses to reach outlying areas. A modern hero needs the ability to get around instantly, either with rapid flight or actual teleportation.

The second is stealth. Hiding in the shadowy alleys of downtown Chicago at night is all very well, but that doesn't translate to the suburban streets of Schaumburg. Crime-busting superheroes need a way to lurk unseen, or at least un-noticed, even in the daytime. Being a master of disguise is one solution, as is straight-up invisibility. Possibly using inconspicuous drones would give the hero a form of stealth, allowing secret observation of potential villains.

And finally, there's the issue of finding crime. Listening to police scanners or cruising around on patrol won't cut it — that just leads the superhero to the aftermath of most crimes, and by the time the yellow tape and chalk outlines have gone up there isn't much for a vigilante to do. You can just wait around for Lex Luthor or whoever to attack the Daily Planet building in a giant robot, but that's not really going to prevent much wrongdoing.

Obviously the vigilante heroes should be undercover agents — mingling in the underworld as criminals themselves, maybe even pulling off some relatively minor or at least bloodless crimes in order to build a reputation.

Now there's some potential for real suspense! All the dangers of undercover police work, except that the cops are also after you and there's no backup at all. The constant dilemma of how much crime to tolerate in order to bring down the gang leaders. Watching youngsters get drawn in and corrupted. This makes a secret identity and a masked crimefighter identity mandatory: if the other crooks ever realize that a trusted minor lawbreaker is actually the Masked Avenger, he's doomed. That seems like a way forward for superheroes.

If anybody likes to draw crime comics, get in touch.

A Curious Omission

Dr. Kelly and I went to see Denis Villeneuve's new version of Dune a couple of weeks ago. It was good — the director has shown himself in the past to be a skilled and faithful adapter of science fiction stories to the screen. Good acting, beautiful visuals, a good score . . . 

But no food! It's a little astonishing that a movie made by a Frenchman, set on a planet famed for its spice production, doesn't have any memorable food scenes. We see Paul and his mother eat breakfast in one scene, but not what they're eating. This production won't give Andrew Rea anything to re-create for a Binging With Babish video.

It's particularly disappointing to me because it means the film leaves out one of my favorite scenes from the book: the banquet in Arrakeen. I know why the scene was cut — it's talky, it's full of minor characters who don't play much part in the bigger story, and it's part of a sub-plot the director decided to drop from the screenplay.

Still, it's a pity because we miss the only dishes actually named in the book: langues de lapin de garenne, roast desert hare in sauce cepeda, aplomage sirian, chukka under glass, and "a true pot-au-oie." Translations: lapin de garenne is simply rabbit (odd to have both rabbit and desert hare in the same meal); sauce cepeda sounds like a mushroom sauce but I can't find a reference to it outside of the novel, aplomage may be an extraterrestrial creature — likely from a planet orbiting Sirius — the word to me looks like a kind of featherless bird; chukka is another fictional food; and a pot-au-oie would be potted goose (probably some kind of confit). The rabbit tongues are a particularly decadent-sounding dish, reminiscent of the Roman fondness for parrot tongues in garum. To me, the meal comes across as unpleasantly rich — suitable for a winter feast in a cold climate, but far too heavy for a hot desert setting.

Either Mr. Herbert was trying to convey that the dinner was a display by the Duke, with costly imported food that will impress the rubes; or he was showing that the Atreides have just come from a very different world and their preferred foods are out of place; or he just made up some cool-sounding dishes. My money's on the last option. 

Were I to write that scene, I'd have done things a little differently. For one thing, this is a society in which the nobility are paranoid about poison, which suggests the entrees should all be big common-pot dishes: soups, stews, maybe big baked pasta or rice dishes. Cactus dishes seem appropriate, as would dates. Make a big rabbit pie as the first course, followed by cactus soup, game birds with dates served over couscous, and fresh off-world fruit to inspire awe among the desert planet inhabitants.

Now I have to go start making dinner.

 

Mysteries of the Bride

Last week a much-reduced Crack Team of moviegoers went to the endearingly ramshackle Greenfield Garden Cinema to watch a special showing of the original The Bride of Frankenstein. It's still my favorite of all the classic Universal black-and-white monster movies. Maybe The Invisible Man is in the same league, but the rest of the pack is well behind them both.

Two things struck me while watching this showing. The first is how rushed the movie seems. There's no slow buildup, no rising tension, no mysteries to be resolved. It almost feels like James Whale wanted to blow past all the boring townsfolk-with-pitchforks parts and get to the big Animating the Bride set piece at the end as quickly as he could. Despite this, the beginning scenes of the movie are a little boring, especially since Una Merkel isn't as funny as James Whale apparently thought she was. But once Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Pretorius shows up, the movie rolls right ahead on rails and is a joy to watch.

The second thing which struck me is when the movie is supposed to take place. We begin with a frame story of Mary Shelley (played by Elsa Lanchester, who of course is also the titular Bride), telling her story to Percy Shelley and Lord Byron (played by Gavin Gordon hamming it up to the nth degree). Now, we know that this literary evening took place in 1816, and the actual novel Mary wrote is set some time in the previous century.

But the movie . . . isn't. It's hard to pin down when it's happening. The police have revolvers (post 1850s), there are recognizable electric filament bulbs in Frankenstein's laboratory (post 1870s), and the one date mentioned is the plaque on a coffin from the 1890s. But it's not 1935, nor is it any time during or after World War I. There are no telephones (except for an experimental device Pretorius uses to keep in touch with the Monster), no motor vehicles, no battling gangs of veterans. I'll tentatively place it in the Edwardian era, maybe 1910 or so. 

So how is Mary Shelley in 1816 telling a story which takes place a century later? Well, she's not called the First Science Fiction Writer for nothing. I don't know if this was a deliberate choice by the moviemakers or a happy accident, but the film The Bride of Frankenstein is literally a movie about a science fiction story. This even means any anachronisms can be explained away as Mary Shelley's fault, since she couldn't predict the dawn of the 20th century with perfect accuracy. 

Anyway, it's a cracking good movie, perfect to watch on Halloween. Highly recommended.

 

 

Movie Review: Prospect

The other night we watched the 2018 science fiction movie Prospect, made by the highly tasteful and perceptive people at DUST Studio. It was excellent. More importantly, it was excellent science fiction.

The story concerns a young woman named Cee and her father, a pair of struggling prospectors hunting for weird biological gems on an alien moon with a toxic atmosphere. They're looking for a big score which will let them escape their hardscrabble existence.

The pair run across an even more hardscrabble duo, Ezra and his nameless flunky. After a series of betrayals and counter-betrayals, Cee's father and Ezra's sidekick are dead, Ezra's got a bullet in his arm, and Cee's got him at gunpoint.

Cee and Ezra make their way through the deadly forest to the site of the mother lode of gems, controlled by a squad of mercenaries. The mercs need someone who knows how to extract the gems without ruining them, while Cee and Ezra need a lift off the moon. And then . . .

The two main characters carry the movie. Sophie Thatcher, who plays Cee, is absolutely phenomenal — simultaneously naive and tough, and utterly believable throughout the movie. Pedro Pascal, as Ezra, is a great "Long John Silver" figure, trying to manipulate Cee even as the two of them come to respect and rely on each other.

And as I said, it's good science fiction. Though the film was made in the Pacific Northwest, the environment is obviously hostile to humans. They must wear protective suits and breathe through filters. This gives the story urgency: Cee (and Ezra) must get off the moon. They can't carve out a little Robinson Crusoe homestead in the forest. The main MacGuffin, the gems, is not something one can simply dig up with a shovel — which is why the mercenaries need Cee and Ezra to extract them. The movie couldn't work as a tale of gold miners in the Old West. There's also an impressive amount of casual background worldbuilding, which I loved. Lots of showing without explaining; the level of detail that made the original Star Wars and Blade Runner feel so rich. Fans of Firefly (or the Traveller roleplaying game) will like the gritty, blue-collar feel of the characters' lives.

Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Pig

Went to see the new Nicholas Cage movie Pig. It's . . . unlike anything else. 

This isn't gonzo Nick Cage, it isn't action-movie Cage, it isn't "I'll do anything for money" Cage. This is Nicholas Cage the by-God actor, in a movie with a real story about people having real emotions. We thought the other Cages had locked this one in a buried schoolbus in the desert, but he's back.

Oh, and it's about a reclusive ex-chef delving into the seedy underbelly of the Portland restaurant scene in search of his kidnapped truffle-hunting pig. So, yes, there is some weirdness.

I could include a lot of "spoilers" without spoiling it, because it's a movie you watch unfold, driven by sheer interest in what's going on rather than mystery or edge-of-the-seat suspense. Stuff happens, but not the stuff you might expect. There is no paint-the-kitchen-red rampage of revenge. Mr. Cage seldom raises his voice, and spends much of the movie being barely audible. It does go on the list of Great Food Movies, along with Babette's Feast, Tampopo, and Big Night.

Highly recommended.

 

Movie Review: Luca

Capsule review: it's The Shadow Over Innsmouth re-imagined as a kids' buddy comedy about bicycle racing in 1950s Italy. How can that not be wonderful?

My Canon

In modern geek culture we've begun to use the term "Universe" to refer to a background setting, particularly one which is shared by multiple creative works. The most famous, right now, is probably the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," which encompasses all the Marvel/Disney superhero films and TV series since Iron Man in 2008. There are some odd borderline cases, mostly the result of rights ownership issues, but right now pretty much all live-action films about Marvel characters can be assumed to take place in the same world.

A related concept is "canonicity" — which stories "really happened" in the fictional universe versus which ones are either "imaginary stories" (a term pioneered by DC Comics in the Silver Age) or alternate timelines. The Star Trek universe illustrates this: for a long time the rule was that the live-action TV shows and movies were "real" and thus canon while animated shows, comic books, tie-in novels, and games were not.

There was some permeability, as when the depiction of Klingon society and culture invented by John M. Ford for his novel The Final Reflection and the FASA Star Trek roleplaying game were adopted wholesale by the makers of Star Trek: The Next Generation and thereby became canonical. The 2009 film snarled everything up by introducing a canonical timeline split induced by time travel, so that it's no longer clear which universe is which.

All that throat-clearing accomplished, now I have to grapple with the fact that I seem to be creating a couple of Universes of my own.

Most of my novels and short fiction have been stand-alone works. The world of my first short story "A Diagram of Rapture" has nothing to do with my second story "The Alien Abduction," or my first novel A Darkling Sea. And none of them are connected with The Initiate or "Object Three" or Arkad's World.

However, because I was writing "Abduction" and Darkling Sea around the same time, some concepts and jargon did seep into both. Those two stories can be considered to share the same Universe. Its defining features are:

• Very near-future interstellar travel (basically some smart people discover a convenient way to go faster than light next week, and this sparks a boom in space exploration),
• Star travel primarily a scientific endeavor, under the auspices of the UN Interstellar Cooperation Agency (UNICA),
• Multiple intelligent species, but
• Few technological civilizations.

I may return to this Universe again, especially if I want to do another first-contact story. There are some complications about publishing, but nothing insuperable. Possible names for this setting are "the Darklingverse" or "the UNICA/UNIDA universe." At present it includes only the novel and the short story already mentioned.

My second, and more extensive Universe is of course the Billion Worlds. So far it encompasses one published novel, one published short story, a novel in progress and two forthcoming short stories. In addition, some concepts and ideas from some of my earlier works show up again in the Billion Worlds, so I'm inclined to retroactively put those stories into the same history.

So, the official list of Canonical Billion Worlds Universe fiction, straight from the creator, is:

"Balancing Accounts" (2008) — the dawn of autonomous sarcastic artificial intelligence;

"Periapsis" (2014) — first mention of Deimos as an important power center;

Corsair (2015) — the dawn of private space development and colonization;

"Contractual Obligation" (2014) — collective AI runs a military squad, Deimos shows its ruthless side;

"Calando" (2020) — specifically mentions the Billion Worlds, side reference shows up in Godel Operation;

The Godel Operation (2021) — primary introduction of the Billion Worlds;

"Out of the Dark" (forthcoming) — Billion Worlds short story, references Juren habitat;

"The Paoshi Puzzle" (forthcoming) — involves Adya and Pelagia from Godel Operation;

The Scarab Mission (in progress) — takes place a few years before Godel Operation and involves one character from that book.

By including Corsair I can even create a thrilling canon/non-canon debate about its short story progenitor "The Barbary Shore" of 2007. Let the flamewars begin!

Retro-Review: Treasure Planet

I recently watched the 2002 Disney animated movie Treasure Planet. I am told by my children that we rented it multiple times when they were younger, but I am sure I never actually watched the whole thing. Perhaps I was in the room while they watched it, but my attention was elsewhere.

My judgement is that Treasure Planet is an ambitious failure. It has nifty graphics, an interesting blend of cel and computer animation, nonstop action, some decent character moments, some hammy supporting voice actors, and a story which doesn't stray too far from Robert Louis Stevenson's classic original.

So why do I call it a failure? Three main reasons.

First, it felt rushed. It weighs in at 95 minutes, which is acceptable for an animated feature. But throughout the movie the interval between setup and payoff was too short. At the beginning, the aged pirate Billy Bones arrives at the Admiral Benbow inn, just as he does in the book. Stevenson's novel gives him a couple of chapters there before he dies, but in Treasure Planet poor Billy (voiced by no less than Patrick McGoohan!) doesn't even make it inside the inn before uttering a cryptic warning, handing young Jim Hawkins the treasure map, and dying.

A couple of scenes later, when Jim boards the ship RLS Venture (cute, Disney) he no sooner meets Long John Silver than he immediately suspects him of being the sinister cyborg of Billy Bones's cryptic warning. Again, in the book Stevenson took time to let his (and our) suspicions develop. 

Given its full feature length, where does the time saved by all this rushing go? To my second reason.

Second, it had too many pointless action sequences. Look, I'm no prude about pointless action. My complaint about the movie Battleship was that it wasn't stupid enough. But Treasure Planet had too many obvious "put that in so we can use it in the video game adaptation" chases with Jim riding his space sailboard through random obstacles. There's a scene with an exploding star collapsing into a black hole which comes out of nowhere, gets resolved by technobabble and handwaving, and serves no purpose in the plot whatsoever. But I'm sure there was a level for it in the game.

Finally, the scriptwriters wasted time and plot space on some stupid character motivation bullshit. Young Jim has (wait for it) an ABSENT FATHER and so has (yep) ABANDONMENT ISSUES and all the boilerplate "character arc" tomfoolery of every other film for young people cranked out by Hollywood. Stevenson managed to convey all the same information without resorting to maudlin flashbacks or having Mrs. Hawkins outright infodumping to another character. In the novel he just assumes the readers are clever enough to notice that Jim's father does not appear in the book, and clever enough to figure out that's why he has conflicting bonds with several different paternal characters in the story (Captain Smollett, Dr. Livesey, and of course Silver himself). Not every character motivation has to be displayed in giant illuminated letters.

Oh, and some idiot had the brilliant idea of including a couple of pseudo-alt-rock pop songs in the film, thereby locking it solidly into the decade in which it was made — a sure way to avoid timeless icon status.

My letter grade for Treasure Planet is a B minus. Adequate but nothing more, which is a shame because it could have been considerably better.  

 

 

 

 

Godel Operation Minus Two

Counting down now to launch. One early promotional effort: my guest article at the 'blog My Book, The Movie — in which I discuss who would be best to play the characters in The Godel Operation if it ever makes it to the screen. You can read it here.

Writing that piece was surprisingly difficult. I wrote The Godel Operation with fairly vivid mental pictures of the characters, and consequently I had to do a fair amount of research to find actors who looked like my own imaginings. 

I actually think The Godel Operation would make a splendid film. It's full of exciting action and entertaining plot reversals. The future setting of the Billion Worlds might take a fair amount of computer animation to put on screen, but in a time when even historical dramas have green screens behind the actors to dub in renderings of past landscapes without power lines and jet contrails, that should hardly be an obstacle.

If you're interested, let's do lunch.