Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
Help me out here – have we ever had a Medium Cool topic of Star Wars vs. Star Trek? I am considering that as a future topic for Medium Cool, so let me know, please.
Tonight let’s talk about Time Travel!
Books, movies, TV shows. Best? Worst? Most interesting?
Don’t just name the show, tell us about it.
Have at it!
bbleh
I really liked Travelers. And despite some, ah, drawbacks, I thought Looper was pretty clever.
SiubhanDuinne
¿Porqué no los, y’know, dos? Are they antagonistic?
eschneider
“This Is How You Lose The Time War”. It’s not as good as everyone says. It’s better.
Shalimar
My favorite is a novel by Poul Anderson called There Will Be Time. Protagonist discovers as a teenager that he has a very recessive gene or mutation that allows him to travel through time. Goes back to the crucifixion to find other time travelers, etc. etc.
Steeplejack
Perhaps an appropriate thread to drop this: a friend asked me today about a novel (newish, I think) set in the 2030s about a hotel where people go to die. Anybody have an idea?
SiubhanDuinne
I am probably confessing my utter superficiality and lack of sophistication here, but I will admit to enjoying time-warp romcoms like The Lake House and Sliding Doors and similar. It’s certainly not great filmmaking, but it’s soothing and just thought-provoking enough to make you scratch your chin while simultaneously going “Awwww!” at the unfolding love story.
Only a little bit s//
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: As far as I can tell, some people think one is superior to the other. It’s fine to like both. I do. But I thought some people would appreciate the opportunity to make the case for their show.
WaterGirl
@eschneider: Tell us about it?
Villago Delenda Est
“So, Back to the Future‘s a bunch of bullshit?”
NotMax
Does any iteration of A Christmas Carol count?
I vote yes.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: I liked both of those, too! Sliding doors was a big comfort as I was going through a break-up. I agree – thought provoking.
Maeve
“Life on Mars” (depicted, cop from the “present” 2000s wakes up in the 70s as a cop – policing rules and attitudes were different) was a great British series. The American remake not so good despite having Harvey Keitel in it, nor was the subsequent British follow up with different characters and time travel to the 80s. I watched on Amazon Prime some years ago before the segregated the British show to Britbox.
Has good music too.
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
Por qué, por favor.
Porque = “because.”
WaterGirl
@NotMax: This is Balloon Juice. Of course the answer is yes.
Villago Delenda Est
@SiubhanDuinne: There are Trekkers (who are the idiotically serious ones, as opposed to Trekkies), and there are Star Wars only fans, and they fight over next to nothing. For one thing, Trek is actual science fiction. Star Wars is high fantasy with an SF skin. Then along comes Babylon 5 to mess everything up. You CAN be a fan of all three of them and appreciate them for what they bring to the space opera table.
Marc
I’m not exactly a fan of time travel books, movies, or series. Life on Mars, however, was something special, one of the few cases where a series finale brought tears to my eyes. Edge of Tomorrow was pretty damn good for a Tom Cruise movie.
lee
Another vote for Travelers. What as amazing show. I’m glad they finished the story. I would like to see them carry on the story with different travelers.
Right now I’m reading the Outlander series (time travel). It is surprisingly good.
BellaPea
As I have commented here previously, I’m a HUGE Outlander fan, both the books and the series. The time travel theory of going through the stones has some historical relevance, and all of the themes are very believable. The series has some pretty hot actors in it too (Jamie, Roger, and William).
WaterGirl
@Maeve: Ashes to Ashes? I liked all 3 shows. I wonder if the one you prefer – British or American – is the one you saw first?
lee
@Marc: just rewatched that. Enjoyed it just as much the second time.
bbleh
I enjoyed Star Wars as much as anybody for the spectacle and many of the details , but the story is just the Arthurian legend in fantasy SF form. Luke = Arthur, Obi Wan = Merlin, etc.
geg6
The series of books colloquially known as the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. I also like the series based on the books, but my true loves are the books. Claire and Jamie are great protagonists.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Edge of Tomorrow
tender love story. Tom Cruise plays a flake who is saved by elite soldier Emily Blunt
Usually Cruise is the hero who saves someone in distress. Here, the plot dynamic is reversed.
WaterGirl
@lee: Which one? He mentioned two.
Scout211
I really enjoyed the original Quantum Leap series starring Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell. It was a typical Bellisaro series with adventure, action and humor.
I’ll let Wikipedia explain it.
Ken
Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing if the Dog and Firewatch are very good, and she has other novels in the milieu. She has the kind of time travel where it’s very difficult, but not impossible, to change history.
I also like Kage Baker’s “Dr. Zeus Company” novels and stories. In those, you absolutely cannot change history — with the loophole, aggressively exploited by the Company, that so much of history is unrecorded.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: Have you watched the new one?
kalakal
@WaterGirl: Yes, that was the follow up/sequel set in the 80s. I enjoyed it and I thought the last episode that wraps both series up was brilliant. I loved both series, and having lived in England in the period(s) both were set was amazed how accurate the reconstruction of the times were. Both had killer soundtracks as well
lee
@WaterGirl: edge of tomorrow.
Suzanne
My hot take: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
I watched it about a year ago, and it is still charming AF.
WaterGirl
@kalakal: Did you like the American version?
Frankensteinbeck
Primer. It’s a movie. It will melt your brain.
JDM
I’m a Star Trek Deep Space Nine fan (in particular) and they’ve got some great time travel episodes.
There’s the two-parter that deals with next year, 2024, as Sisko, Bashir, and Dax end up in SF during what will be a big big riot and authoritarian overkill. There’s plenty of social commentary and action, and interesting the different experiences of Bashir (Sudanese) and Sisko (black) vs Dax (ironically altho she’s non-human she looks like an extremely attractive white woman). Guess who get stuffed into the sanctuary districts and who has a passing rich guy reach out to help?
Trials and Tribbleations is the DS9 episode where they go back in time and interact with the TOS crew. Features lots of in-jokes and is framed as flashbacks during an interview conducted by the dreaded Department of Temporal Investigations.
And the 4th season’s Little Green Men had the shortest pitch ever: “Quark, Rom, Nog, and Odo are the Roswell aliens…” “Stop right there! We’ll buy it!”.
lee
@geg6: looks like we have several Outlander fans in the thread.
I’m not even finished with the books yet! I’m on book 6
Baud
El Ministerio del Tiempo was neat just because of the Spanish perspective.
Old Dan and Little Ann
I have loved Star Wars since I was 4 in 1979. I’ve seen every movie and all the adaptations that have come out in the last bunch of years. The new shows on Disney+ are awesome as far as I’m concerned. : )
kalakal
Dr Who anybody?
the adventures of a Time Lord called the Doctor an extraterrestial who appears to be human. The Doctor explores the universe in a time-travelling space ship called the Tardis
Scout211
Some time travel novels that I have enjoyed:
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Time and Again By Jack Finney
Maeve
@WaterGirl: I saw the British one first. “Ashes to Ashes” wasn’t bad but didn’t measure up to “Life on Mars”
Scout211
@WaterGirl: No, is the new one any good?
lee
@JDM: I just did a re-watch of the entire DS9 series. “Trials and Tribbleations” was a hilarious episode. I loved all the easter eggs and in jokes they put in it
West of the Rockies
Old school: Somewhere in Time (1980 Jane Seymour, Christopher Reeves).
The source novel by Richard Matheson, Bid Time Return, is also excellent!
Most people probably know the plot. Great music, great settings and costumes.
Percysowner
@Villago Delenda Est: I’m a fan of all 3. They each have their good points and their less good points. You don’t have to choose. It’s not like there was a TON of SciFi around in the late 90s. I loved SciFi and took whatever was out there. All 3 franchises were good. I admit, B5 is my fave, but I’ve watched ST and SW and enjoyed them as well.
the pollyanna from hell
Book series ‘1632’ flint et al has such a simple world building seed that 80 or a hundred volumes of fanfic are approved canonical. Uneven styles, but matter-of-fact-ly inquisitive about hi-tek and culture shock to upend the Thirty Years War.
WaterGirl
@lee: I think I will try that one. thanks
kalakal
@WaterGirl: I’ve not seen it yet, it’s on my list. I honestly can’t imagine how anyone could match Philip Glenister’s performance as Gene Hunt, he owned that part. What did you think of the US version?
WaterGirl
@Scout211: I have been recording it on Tivo, but I can’t bring myself to watch it. I just don’t see how it can compare to Sam and Al.
lowtechcyclist
I think my favorite time travel story is The Time Traveler’s Wife.
This isn’t a spoiler, because it’s in the opening pages: when he first meets her, she’s known him since childhood. And when she first meets him, he’s been married to her for over a decade.
One of the things I appreciate about it is that the time traveler can’t change the past or the future. At some point, he reads his own obit, and there isn’t a thing he can do about it.
The main problem I have with time travel stories – well, illustration is easier than explaining. Consider Groundhog Day. Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, relives this one day thousands of times. But so does everyone else, in the town of Punxsutawney if not the world. (Always possible that TPTB that put Phil on a seemingly endless loop through a single February 2nd put the town in a time bubble where it looped through a thousand repeats of that day while the rest of the world’s clocks advanced just a single second.) What happens to their thousands of days of experiences? Why is Phil the only one who gets to remember, and possibly learn and grow from, all those lived days? Seems pretty unfair to everyone else.
NotMax
Kind of, sort of on topic. In the mood for schlock?
Unsold? With good reason. Absolutely abysmal, even for irwin “Never Met a Corner He Couldn’t Cut” Allen, SF pilot The Man From the 25th Century. Buttheads, flashpots, and guess what comes out of the (recycled) spaceship?
:)
Ken
Roger Zelazny’s short “Divine Madness” has a kind of time travel, and makes me weep every time I read it.
I see from Google the text is online.
Tom Levenson
Can’t recommend James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History too highly.
My review of it in The Boston Globe.
Hilbertsubspace
I would tentatively recommend Primer as an interesting* movie. Two engineers discover a limited form of time travel. One of them becomes worried about the consequences and tries to go back to stop the discovery, which is when things get weird and messy.
An older movie (2004) with a 7000 dollar budget.
*If you like being confused even though most of the movie is two people talking to each other
Edit: Ah I see Frankensteinbeck mentioned it first in comment #32, but no fair mentioning the [redacted]. That’s suppose to be a surprise.
WaterGirl
@kalakal: I liked them both. I think I saw the American version first, which I don’t think had the sequel. There were great characters in both version. Someone mentioned Britbox, i am going to see if maybe they are available there. I would like to watch them again!
edit: as of May 2023 Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes were both on Britbox. Hopefully still there!
kalakal
@WaterGirl: I’m pretty sure they’re both on Britbox
eclare
@SiubhanDuinne:
I thought Sliding Doors was a charming rom-com.
Sloegin
Life on Mars was personally mind blowing, but I suspect it’s real impact was dialed in for late boomers and early X-geners. Watching the time-travelling protagonist struggle with 70s tech, culture, police procedure and the radical changes highlighted between then and now was a trip for those of us who have lived thru both periods. Probably bit of a ‘just-ok’ miniseries for everyone else.
Similar to the impact of the book Ready Player One for readers who grew up in the video arcade / early DnD / nerd culture highlighted in the book. Not a time-travelling book per se, and also a dud for readers outside of the target window.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steeplejack:
Gracias. I’ll try to remember. Never studied Spanish, so I was going on (obviously faulty) memory.
kalakal
The Terminator series of films had fun with time travel, particularly in T2 Judgement Day
West of the Rockies
@Tom Levenson:
I loved Gleick’s book!
eclare
The Passage by Justin Cronin, set in a post-apocalyptic world, is not the kind of book I would normally pick up. I could barely put it down, the characters and storyline were so engrossing.
Scout211
@West of the Rockies: Somewhere in Time was an old favorite of mine.
Rachel Bakes
@West of the Rockies: Somewhere in Time was beautiful and also messes with my head
bbleh
Ok I’m sold. Outlander is on Netflix, and 10 minutes in, so far so good.
Brachiator
I still have fondness for the 1960 version of The Time Machine, starring Rod Taylor. The de-evolution of humanity into the weak, Eloi and the vicious worker-cannibal Morlocks was a wild twist when I saw the movie as a kid. The capitalist v worker subtext flew over my head at the time, but resonated later.
The 1968 Planet of the Apes is also a time travel movie. It’s cool that it is an important, but secondary plot element.
SPOILER WARNING
I also like the Twilight Zone episode “Back There,” written by Rod Serling. A man who is a wealthy member of a private gentlemen’s club debates with other guests about time travel. Later he somehow goes back in time and tries to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He learns that you cannot change significant events, but you can nudge small things.
When he returns to the future, he is surprised to learn that a man who originally was a lowly waiter at the club is now also a wealthy member.
The time traveler had spoken with the policeman about the conspiracy to kill Lincoln.
kalakal
@Sloegin: For UK viewers of certain age another attraction of Life on Mars was that the bits set in the 70s were an extremely accurate recreation of British TV cop shows of the time, in particular The Sweeney
SiubhanDuinne
@West of the Rockies:
Yes indeed. Always a favourite. And both Seymour and Reeve were at the pinnacle of their physical beauty, so it’s just yummy to look at.
Rachel Bakes
Generally time travel makes my brain go squick. Messes with me so I don’t want to deal. Oddly, my favorite Pratchett book is Night Watch. Somehow I can accept that one and adore it.
no others need apply in book or on screen
MisterDancer
@Baud: it’s hilarious you mentioned that show, because the show I was going to mention, TIMELESS, has been accused of ripping it off!
So. TIMELESS is a too-brief show about…hell, it’s about a lot of things. There’s a whole time travel conspiracy, shifting alliances, and characters you actually come to care about.
And — because it matters to me — the Black lead not only is treated with respect around going into the past, he has his own romance that’s allowed to evolve.
Oh, and they go back to meet Bass Reeves and be duly impressed by him.
A really good show, so good that the backlash from the cancelation led to a TV Movie to wrap things up.
geg6
I always pre-order, get them as soon as they are published and devour them the minute I get the newest. Am anxiously awaiting the so far unnamed Book 10. I watch this like a hawk: https://dianagabaldon.com/wordpress/
ETA: This was meant as a reply to lee @34.
sab
@lee: We’ll try not to spoil anything then.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
Time Bandits was great, I thought. Also have a soft spot for Back to the Future although not so much for the sequels. Also Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Scout211
@bbleh: You really can’t go wrong with the Starz (now also Netflix) series. I loved the first several books in the series but the the Gabaldon started writing apparently just for the word count. They got meandering and tedious.
The series eliminates all that boring stuff that she added into the later books and is really good. Plus the acting, direction and cinematography is excellent.
DesertFriar
For a book, ‘A Wrinkle In TIme’ by Madeleine L’Engle. Meg Murry, Charles Wallace Murry, and Calvin O’Keefe set off to find the Murrys’ father. They journey through time and space to rescue their father and have to fight ‘The Black Thing’. I first didn’t read it but listened to it on a WGBH’s radio show ‘The Spider’s Web’.
For TV, I liked the 60’s show ‘Time Tunnel’ with James Darren and Lee Merriweather. Two scientists go into the time tunnel and back and forward in time (mostly back) to fix history. And in the 60’s in the ‘Rocky and Bullwinkle Show’ there was Mr. Peabody and Sherman who would travel in the wayback machine to fix history (at least this one intentionally funny).
The best; however to me, is a Korean TV series ‘Nine Times Travel’. TV reporter Min-Young is in the country of Nepal, covering an expedition team as they attempt to climb Annapurna Mountain. Min-Young hears that senior reporter Sun-Woo who is going to a police station to confirm that a body they found is his brother) is set to arrive in Nepal and goes to the airport to welcome him. Sun-Woo kisses Min-Young and asks Min-Young to live together for only 6 months. Sun-Woo goes to the police station and confirms that the frozen body is his older brother Jung-Woo. Sun-Woo blames himself, because he saw Jung-Woo shortly before his death and he looked like something was wrong. Park Sun-Woo then obtains 9 incense items, which allows him to go back 20 years in time. Park Sun-Woo travels to the past. What I liked about the series (which was just 1 season), is that every time Sun-Woo he screws up history which has a ripple effect in the present. I saw it years ago on Netflix but I think it is now on Prime.
Cheryl from Maryland
The film “Time AfterTime,” where Jack the Ripper turns out to be H.G. Wells’ best bud, escapes to the future in Wells’ Time Machine, and Wells chases him to modern day (circa 1980) San Francisco. Great cast – David Warner as Jack the Ripper, Malcolm McDowell as H. G., and Mary Steenbergen as the contemporary woman who helps and falls in love with Wells (and vice versa). I most enjoyed the “fish out of water” elements, where the Victorian clothing of the men was considered just hippie culture, and when H.G. fit in by keen observation, like ordering food at McDonalds.
NotMax
Link to a short list from when last Medium Cool broached this topic in 2021.
Without cogitating too deeply on it, would now add Dark and also Tunnel (personally much prefer the Thai remake over the Korean original)..
MisterDancer
I’m a Trekkie from a young age; it’s literally my first memory. I have a Weird Tie into Star Wars, even though my interest is…mixed.
I don’t see a lot of interesting debate in Trek verses Wars, at this point, to be honest. It’s really well-worn discussion, down to the many times people have debated if the TOS Enterprise could beat a Star Destroyer (insert specific model here).
WaterGirl
@MisterDancer: Only if you’ve had the debate before, apparently! Which I have not. :-) But perhaps those who have strong opinions on the subject already have!
Tony Jay
I’m blanking on the title of a time-travel novel I read years ago. Basic plot is that it’s 1975 and the United States is being crushed between the victorious mega-states of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and reckons it has a few years, tops, before the Axis, which was somehow capable of dropping atomic bombs on its enemies in 1942, launches a full invasion of the world’s last democracy. The answer to their problem is time-travel – send a team back to before WW2 and somehow convince Britain not to surrender and the US not to stay on the sidelines. The twist (spoilers)
…………………………………………………………………… highlight below to see the spoiler if you want to.
The world they came from was itself the result of time-travellers from the 21st century of anotheroriginal future sending agents back to their 1920s to ensure that the nightmare of world peace and human achievement under a semi-socialist League of Nations they’d been living under never came to pass. The rise of the Nazis (and Stalinist Russia) and the dominance of the Japanese military were their work, they were the source of the atomic bombs that would arrive in Germany from the future in 1942, and they were still tinkering away behind the scenes to create a world where the unforgivably oppressed rich families their 21st century could relocate to and enjoy the power and influence they’d had stolen from them. The time-travellers from 1975 succeed in their mission (sort of) and in the process create the history we’re familiar with.
(spoilers off)
Good book. No idea what it’s called.
Alison Rose
I’m not a huge time travel fan in books, but sometimes it’s excellent. Kindred by Octavia E Butler is harrowing but brilliant. It was published in 1979 but still feels very modern in terms of the writing and the exploration:
Hilbertsubspace
The Playstation video game Infamous has a time travel twist ending. SPOILERS
The villain you fight throughout the story turn out to be the main character from the future. He’s putting himself through hell to make himself ready for something terrible that’s coming.
Alison Rose
@Tony Jay: Was there meant to be hidden text along the dotted line? I highlighted but didn’t see anything.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Dammit! I did not remember that. Way to break it to me that we had already done this one! :-) I thought to ask about the Star Wars / Star Trek thing, but not this.
kalakal
There are so many books dealing with time travel
2 of my favourites are
Dan Simmons Hyperion
Hyperion follows a group of pilgrims who have arrived on the planet of Hyperion.
Tim Powers The Anubis Gates
SamInWa
@Scout211: True story here on how I finally saw the Quantum Leap series finale….
I missed in on live TV in the era before streaming and it never really came into syndicated reruns on a channel I could get where I lived. Then I forgot about it for many years.
Fast forward to 25 years later, I’m home and sick and the SciFi channel is running a Quantum Leap marathon. Anyway I caught a bunch of great episodes (they were playing a selection of major story line episodes) and I’m feeling the nostalgia. Then the final two episodes come along and I’m thinking… “hey I haven’t see these”.
Anyway, it was a great payoff and I’m glad I finally got to see them. So happy for Sam and Al.
Dr. Fungus
Umbrella Academy, which points out that jumping small distances—say several seconds back—-can be useful and much safer than longer jumps.
geg6
@Scout211:
I like most what some call tedious about the books. The level of detail, to me, is delicious.
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
It’s a moral fable. Once he overcomes his own selfishness, Phil becomes the god fixed in place and devotes himself to making everyone’s life a little better. At the end of the movie, practically everyone in the town knows him and loves him.
MisterDancer
@Alison Rose: The harrowing bit is part of why I’ve not read Kindred…yet.
It did receive an adaptation.
eclare
@Cheryl from Maryland:
That sounds interesting! And what a cast.
And it’s on Max, which I get!
NotMax
Bookwise, anyone else remember The Very Slow Time Machine by Ian Watson?
schrodingers_cat
Brian May’s 39 from the Night at the Opera, is an accurate description of Einstein twin paradox and time travel. I have blogged at it too in 2013.
Time is relative
Star Trek has abused Time Travel as a storytelling trope. Most of the time travel episodes are eyeroll worthy.
SamInWa
@Villago Delenda Est: The way they did War Without End Part 1 and Part 2 were epic (time travel). My favorite SciFi series of all time.
JMS’s autobiography “Becoming Superman” is fascinating. The Audiobook of it was read by Peter Jurasik.
zhena gogolia
Wow, this is really not a topic for me. Other than the above-mentioned Mr. Peabody, I have always found time travel stories to be tedious.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with repetition. That’s a part of time travel in and of itself.
Alison Rose
@MisterDancer: I can understand that, and some of it is brutal, but never gratuitously so.
sab
@Sloegin: Oh goody. We just got britbox, and spent the last week watching Shetland, and now we can’t agree on what to watch next. That is our demographic.
It took forever to get my husband to watch anything British because he claimed he doesn’t understand the language.
There go two miscreants
Strongly seconding that! An excellent book.
Tony Jay
@eclare:
I kind of liked The Passage and its sequels, but man did I hate the illogic of the premise. Not to say too much, but for that apocalypse to happen as quickly and completely as it did begs the obvious question, why had it never happened before?
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator: Reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”, a time travel tale with a twist.
Citizen Alan
@Hilbertsubspace: I aggressively disliked how the “twist” in Infamous was handled, but the worst thing about it was how it unintentionally spoiled Bioshock: Infinite for me.
SPOILERS FOR A TEN YEAR OLD GAME!!!
The first time Comstock shows up in game, he’s yelling at you from a distance through a megaphone and it’s too far away to see his face. And my immediate response was “Godammit! Is the villain just Future-Me again?!?!”
WaterGirl
@Brachiator: Spoiler?
sab
@MisterDancer: I heard an interview with the folks who adapted it, and they had their own time issues with adapting the 1979 novel for a twenty-first century audience.
Tony Jay
@Alison Rose:
No, just a gap to allow that necessary word (spoilers) to sink in.
Villago Delenda Est
@Alison Rose: Formatting problem. After the “spoilers off” note come the spoilers.
bbleh
@Dr. Fungus: that’s also a clever show imo — good about different timestreams.
Another Scott
Snap Judgment – 13 Ways to Destroy a Painting (11:42)
I heard this rebroadcast a week or so ago. It’s amazing storytelling.
Cheers,
Scott.
Alison Rose
@Tony Jay: Okay, I think you meant to put “spoilers off” below the second paragraph.
UncleEbeneezer
Nothing takes the problems and possibilities of time travel (and alternate Universes) and cranks the knob of ridiculousness so far to the right that the knob breaks off, as much as the cartoon series Rick & Morty.
Honestly, it’s the sort of thing that will almost make your head explode if your too stoned…or so I’ve heard…
Brachiator
@MisterDancer:
Even though I had a replica model of the Enterprise as a kid, I could never get into the minutiae of conversations about the attributes of various Starships or Star Wars vs Star Trek debates.
I liked both franchises, along with Babylon 5. I just liked science fiction. Nobody ever told me that I had to make a choice.
ETA. Recently, there was some turmoil among Star Trek fundamentalists over scenes in the animated series Lower Decks, which showed a female Star Fleet crew member wearing a hajib. Since Gene Rodenberry had decreed that Earth people had moved on from religion in the future, it was heresy to depict a member of the crew wearing religious head gear. Religious belief is reserved for non-human aliens. Fortunately most fans don’t have time for nonsense over this non-issue and didn’t have a problem with the scenes.
sab
@zhena gogolia: Outlander is more historical fiction than time travel. Gabaldon was trying to write a historical novel but her main character refused to be an 18th century woman, so she used the time travel to explain away her behavior. Otherwise it’s just Scottish Highlands before the last Rising.
TheOtherHank
A book I really liked is The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. A secret government agency figures out time travel and tries to fix things.
I liked the German show Dark (I think it might still be available on Netflix). Missing children in a small town, time travel attempting to fix problems causes more problems, etc, etc,
Tony Jay
The twist in Shatner’s Star Trek novels (did he actually write them or just put his name to them?) about the Mirror Universe was clever, though not canon to Star Trek continuity.
The whole Terran Empire with all of its rapacious evil and brutality span out of the events of Star Trek: First Contact, with the Zephram Cochrane of their universe telling the Vulcans about the threat that the Borg would pose in the future, so the Human/Vulcan alliance that developed was much more paranoid and militaristic from the start, and out of that ‘we must be strong to survive’ mentality grew the Terran Empire and Emperor Tiberius.
The novels aren’t bad either.
SFBayAreaGal
@Scout211: Oh boy
Almost Retired
@Tony Jay: The Proteous Operation?
eclare
@Tony Jay:
Good point. I never read any of the sequels, that one book exhausted me.
lowtechcyclist
@Tom Levenson:
Got a gift link to your review of Gleick’s book?
@DesertFriar:
I love that book more than I can say, but I wouldn’t call it a time travel book. Time travel doesn’t play a role in the plot, the only role it plays is to get the youthful protagonists back home before their parents miss them.
Now the third book in that series, A Swiftly Tilting
Pinball MachinePlanet, is a time travel book, which is another example of what I was discussing above: Charles Wallace remembers the timeline he changed, and Meg kinda sorta does, but nobody else who lived through the timeline-as-it-was has any recollection of it.Ken
@Tony Jay: The basic idea sounds a little like Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch, and of Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South. Spoilers follow.
Pastwatch: Time travelers try to change the outcome of Columbus’s expeditions; along the way they find that another group of travelers already did the same.
Guns of the South: Time travelers from South Africa change the outcome of the US Civil War, hoping for a future where a Confederate state would support apartheid South Africa.
Steeplejack
A movie I thought was very funny 30 years ago—but I’m not sure how well it holds up—is Les Visiteurs (The Visitors, duh), with Jean Reno as a 12th-century knight who is transported with his squire to the 20th century by a mixed-up wizard. He finds that his castle has been turned into a luxury hotel and that various people are dead-ringer descendants of ones he knew before. Hilarity ensues as he copes with “future” life and tries to get back to his own time.
Les Visiteurs was the highest-grossing film in France in 1993. The American release was screwed up and delayed—I seem to remember because Harvey Weinstein and Miramax didn’t “get it,” or thought the American public wouldn’t get it, or would hate subtitles, or both. Supposedly Mel Brooks was paid $500,000 to write (dubbed) English dialogue and did such a ham-fisted job that the French writer/director disowned it. So the American release (with standard subtitles) was held up until 1996, and it sank like a stone.
It’s available for streaming on Kanopy and available to rent at the usual places. Avoid like the plague the 2001 American “remake” Just Visiting, with Jean Reno and Christina Applegate.
One of the IMDB reviews sums it up pretty well: “Brilliant, funny movie, if you speak/understand French well, a medium slapstick comedy if you read subtitles.”
WaterGirl
@Tony Jay: Shall I fix your comment? I think your 2nd paragraph that is long is the spoiler yes?
Tony Jay
@Alison Rose:
D’oh! You’re right.
In my defence, I’m really thick sometimes.
Almost Retired
@Steeplejack: I loved that movie….especially the running joke about how bad the 12th century visitors smelled.
JoyceH
I don’t know if this is technically time travel, but it has the same effect. Book is Replay by Ken Grimwood. From the late 1980s, I found it as a new paperback.
Premise is: Jeff Winston is in his mid-40s and disappointed. He’s a mid to lower level executive, getting by but discontented, never quite got that big break. He’s in his office when he has a heart attack and dies. And wakes up back in his dorm room in 1963. He didn’t physically travel, it’s his younger body, but he has all the memories from life before the heart attack, and has a Whole New Start. Going to do things right this time… And he lives his life, makes different choices, some things are better, some are not… and reaches that same age, has a heart attack and dies, and is back in college. So basically he’s on this decades long experiment to determine for himself what makes life worth living.
There’s just… something about it. I’d bought it (at the Waldenbooks at the windward mall, as I recall) and it was in my new books stack. I was still in the Navy and also working on my masters. I had my econ final the next day and was studying for that. Took a study break, and picked up Replay to get started, read a little bit and get back to studying. Well, studying was over for the night, and I read that book cover to cover in one sitting. Next day, went to work, went to class, aced the final, came home, and read Replay all over again.
Marc
@Scout211: Time and Again By Jack Finney
Completely forgot about that (illustrated) novel, I loved the story and concept when I first stumbled across it back in the 70s. The sequel From Time to Time was pretty good, too.
Villago Delenda Est
@WaterGirl: There is HTML to address this, <spoiler>content</spoiler>. Perhaps that can be tacked on to Word Press?
WaterGirl
@Tony Jay: I just edited your comment. see if that’s okay? I can un-edit if you want to go back to the original.
WaterGirl
@Villago Delenda Est: How does that work?
Tony Jay
@WaterGirl:
Yes please. It is confusing.
@Ken:
I’m pretty sure it predates Guns of the South, not sure about Pastwatch.
Got it! The Proteus Operation or Operation Proteus. By James P. Hogan.
Ken
@Dr. Fungus: That reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s The Dead Past and Damon Knight’s I See You. They don’t have time travel, but a time viewer that can look anywhere in the past. Spoiler follows.
Such a viewer could of course be set to one millisecond in the past, and your next-door neighbor’s bedroom. Knight’s story explores what kind of culture might develop when there is absolutely no privacy.
mali muso
Put me down as another big Outlander fan. Been reading the books since I found them as a teenager in the 90s and have really enjoyed the TV series adaptation.
Shalimar
@Baud: El Ministerio del Tiempo is a fun series, but still no longer available on any service I have access to. Probably 4 years since i have seen it.
Tony Jay
@WaterGirl:
That’s great. Mucho Thanko.
eclare
@JoyceH:
It has been decades since I read Replay, but I remember devouring it. I read it the summer after high school, so it was timely.
Villago Delenda Est
@JDM: I remember at the time the 2024 episodes were viciously attacked by the usual idiots who don’t get that Star Trek has been “woke” (in contemporary wingnut whining) since it was born. I mean, really, a woman as second in command of a starship?
lowtechcyclist
@kalakal:
Pretty much all of SF involves either a functional equivalent of FTL travel (wormholes, hyperspace, collapsars, etc.) or time travel, so there are a lot of time travel stories out there.
A good idea for a Medium Cool would be SF stories that don’t involve either one.
Jackie
My family are huge baseball fanatics and I discovered a book at the Goodwill called If I Never Get Back and bought it for my high school aged ball player; but I read it first lol We BOTH loved it, and then I found the sequel…
Lots of great baseball history interwoven with that period’s politics…
Reading this book and the sequel made me and my son want to be there. I know it was the kindling for my son’s obsession with the early age of baseball. That, plus the movie Field of Dreams 🥰
Chetan Murthy
@JoyceH: Oh la! That’s kind of like _The Strange Life of Ivan Osokhin_ by P.D. Ouspensky (written in 1915). Same sort of story: Ivan is about to commit suicide, having screwed up his career, lost the love of his life, etc. But he gets convinced to meet a magician, who says he can send him back to when he was a child, only with all his memories. Ivan says yes, b/c he thinks “I can do everything differently”. But (not a spoiler yet) he doesn’t. At every juncture, he does the same thing, only for (internally) different reasons.
Anyway, I won’t give the rest of the book away, but I found it profoundly moving, and feel it had a real effect on me and the way I viewed life.
A great, great book.
Brachiator
@WaterGirl:
Fair point.
I think, however, that this movie has pleasures even if you think you know how it ends.
CliosFanBoy
@Villago Delenda Est:
I thought the Trekies were the ones whose life revolved around Trek, and the Treckers were those of us who enjoyed it, but have a life.
Chetan Murthy
@WaterGirl: Like this?
Oof, guess not. I put the tag in, and WP took it right back out. Ah, well.
Villago Delenda Est
@WaterGirl: I’ve used it on Disqus, it’s just another HTML tag that greys out everything between <spoiler> and </spoiler> and the end user has to click on it to see it.
CaseyL
I’m a sucker for good time travel stories, the more mind-twisty the better.
Loved “Arrival” (with Amy Adams) which was not about “time travel” so much as “time perception.”
“Edge of Tomorrow”, also excellent.
Oldie but goodie: “Time After Time,” where Malcolm McDowell plays H G Wells chasing David Warner’s Jack the Ripper to then-present-day (1979) San Francisco. (ETA: Cheryl from Maryland beat me to this one.
In books, I echo the recommendations for Connie Willis’ novels. Besides the ones cited, I recommend what (IIRC) was her first published novel, “Lincoln’s Dreams,” which (lIke “Arrival”) isn’t time travel per se. A young woman is having disturbing dreams about the Civil War – “disturbing” meaning, it’s like she’s there. She’s been to therapy, which hasn’t helped, and seeks out a Civil War historian to see if she’s crazy like the shrink says or if she’s really re-living the Civil War through someone who was alive at the time. (Not Lincoln, BTW, despite the title.)
I also want to give a shout out to “The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.,” by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. It’s a very complicated and farcical novel of a top secret American project to send people back in time to influence major events in ways that benefit the US. Chaos and hilarity ensue.<
NotMax
Proving one can put out a fun product on a shoestring, Leon Must Die, made for a budget of €100.
;)
Shalimar
@WaterGirl: 281 comments last time. It turns out to be a popular subject, no harm in doing it again
Villago Delenda Est
@CliosFanBoy: The Trekkers are the ones who are so offended by being called Trekkies. So I consider them to be the ones Shatner was addressing on the classic SNL skit.
CliosFanBoy
@Jackie:
Wait, he wrote a sequel?!?!???!?!?!?! As a lifelong Cincinnati Reds fan, I am so there!! I loved “If I Never Get Back” when it came out.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Frankensteinbeck:
Seconded. Recommend that anyone watching it for the first time should read the Wikipedia entry on it first – or at least this diagram, so you can follow how the time loop works.
You’ll have enough Wait, wait what the fuck just happened? moments without having to figure out how the time travel loop works on top of it.
CliosFanBoy
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’m pretty sure those were Trekies. ;)
Oh well, I’m a big Farscape fan anyway. :p
dm
@WaterGirl: eschneider never came back to expand on their review (which is inaccurate only in the faintness of the praise), so….
@zhena gogolia: Try This is how you lose the time war.
It is not your normal “time travel” story. Instead, it is an epistolary novel consisting of teasing, flirting, love letters between two agents of different sides in a “time war” — you know, going back to change history so the other side doesn’t have an advantage.
It’s delightful, if only for the ways the agents hide letters for the other to find (written in the sand just before it is covered by lava from an erupting volcano, hidden in the DNA of a species that has been ages extinct).
Matt McIrvin
One difference between Star Wars and Star Trek is, in fact, that Star Wars rarely uses time travel as a plot device (I think it has shown up very occasionally in the animated TV shows and tie-in material), whereas Star Trek uses it all the time.
(Star Wars does, however, use precognition and prophecy quite a lot, which presents the same sorts of paradoxes.)
WaterGirl
@Shalimar: Nice of you to say!
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodingers_cat: Enterprise had a built in reset button. It was just ridiculous.
CliosFanBoy
@West of the Rockies:
And “Somewhere” illustrates the dangers of carrying a penny in your pocket!
JDM
@lee: I loved how after one Temporal Investigations guy works out, super quickly, just how many years, months, and days ago the stardate Sisko provides was, the other guy adds that it was a Friday.
Of course it was a Friday. That’s when the original series was on.
kalakal
@Steeplejack: Oh I loved Les Visiteurs , I’ve still got it on DVD along with Les couloirs du temps: Les visiteurs II which is still fun but pretty much a retread. There’s a 3rd one but I’ve never seen it
I think its become a series of increasingly worse films rather like the French film Taxi which was hilarious but getting pretty bad by Taxi III
NotMax
Medium Cool idea to let percolate until the well starts running dry?
Character actors. Favorites (or not so much) through to “Hey, I recognize what’s-his-name.”
Villago Delenda Est
@WaterGirl: What you did to Tony Jay’s post is pretty much what the <spoiler> HTML tag does.
jackmac
@JDM: I wasn’t as big a fan of DS9, but damn if those three weren’t among Star Trek’s all time great episodes.
JDM
@bbleh: We liked Outlander, although there’s a bit too much torture porn for me.
Villago Delenda Est
@NotMax: My mom was REALLY into this sort of thing, calling me into the family room to identify various character actors that she recognized but could not place.
NotMax
@JDM
First year of TOS aired on Thursdays.
Matt McIrvin
@SamInWa: Babylon 5’s approach to time travel was interesting: we’re basically going to do it ONCE (which, given the nature of time travel, doesn’t mean “just one episode”). And it’s going to be a huge hinge point for the entire arc of the series. I respect that.
WaterGirl
@Villago Delenda Est: Anyone can highlight the text and change the text color to white. Well, actually, I think that would be really hard to do on a phone or tablet.
But that’s probably because I use my laptop 99% of the time for BJ, so I have never learned how to highlight a set of text that’s not just a word.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: That’s a good idea.
Ken
Another not-quite-time-travel is Thrice Upon a Time by James P. Hogan, where the McGuffin technology is a computer system that can send a message back in time to itself — and the sent message alters the timestream, so wipes out the sender (though they likely still exist in the new timestream).
As I recall, a couple of the early messages were “Don’t run the experiment with the new collider, it creates micro black holes that fall into the Earth” and “Here’s how to make a vaccine for the disease that will show up in six months, make lots of it.”
lowtechcyclist
@Brachiator:
He’s not a god. A saint, maybe, by the end of the story. But some greater power is obviously pulling the strings.
And in the end, our experiences are what we have. I’d be pretty damned pissed at a god who had me live through one day thousands of times, but erased every memory from all but the last go-around – and it was the last go-around not because of any growth I’d achieved, but because some bozo I barely knew had finally achieved sainthood.
Lots of stories have characters who, in the story, are basically spear-carriers; what we see of them is their interaction with the protagonist, and that’s all. But in general, there’s no reason why they can’t be complete people with complete lives of their own offstage. In Groundhog Day, that’s not true: everybody in town has given up thousands of days in service of Phil’s spiritual journey. Their own lives have gone nowhere in all these relived days. Sure, at the end, he’s done some good thing for or with many of them that day, but that’s hardly a fair trade.
Chetan Murthy
@kalakal: Jacqouille le Fripouille!
CaseyL
And @CliosFanBoy: reminds me of another mind-twisty book that sorta-kinda has time travel, and also involves baseball: “The Iowa Baseball Confederacy,” by W. P. Kinsella, the same person who wrote the book “Field of Dreams” (which of course became a wildly successful movie.)
There’s a LOT MORE of the fantasy timey-wimey elements in this one than in “Field of Dreams.’ Also wonderful meditations of the nature of baseball, its intersection with ancient myth and folklore, particularly Native American. The climax is a battle between many gods over the fate of the Earth – the battle being a baseball game. Good stuff.
Brachiator
@kalakal:
It amused me that some long time fans did not like the Moffat “timey wimey” stories. They preferred a more rigid approach to time travel.
They wanted a Doctor who drove the TARDIS like a car to some defined point in time, had an adventure and then drove the TARDIS to the next place to have a new adventure.
Matt McIrvin
@JDM: Always thought Deep Space Nine “Little Green Men” would make a great double feature with the Futurama episode with the same premise, “Roswell That Ends Well”. Both comic takes on the same scenario, both really funny.
CliosFanBoy
Here’s a recommendation: Hawk Among the Sparrows by Dean McLaughlin. It first appeared in Analog magazine in July 1968 but has been reprinted since. I was nine and my Dad gave it to me to read, and I fell in love with SciFi and time travel stories.
An American fighter pilot in the early 21st century gets tossed back to 1917, where he finds himself at a French aerodrome. What chance does a 1917 German fighter have against a supersonic 21st-century aircraft?
AliceBlue
11/22/63 by Stephen King. An English teacher travels back to prevent the Kennedy assassination. It’s long (842 pages) but I could hardly put it down.
CliosFanBoy
@CaseyL:
I read that too. Great book!
zhena gogolia
@sab: Is it really violent? I’ve been tempted by it, but I can’t stomach Game of Thrones type stuff, even though it had such good actors in it.
kalakal
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds is very good. It has 2 timelines, an alternate history murder mystery set in the ’50s in a Paris where Hitler’s invasion of France failed, and technology is stuck in the 30s and the other set 300 years in an alternate future where an archaeologist is sent back to the 1950s and finds herself in the ‘Earth 2″ timeline
Villago Delenda Est
@Tony Jay: There’s a novel out there by Richard Dreyfuss (you know, Hooper from Jaws) and Harry Turtledove called The Two Georges, which is an alternate history of North America where the Colonies did not become independent because representation was brought to the table, I guess over Lord North’s objections.
Ken
Adrian Tchiakovsky has a fun time-travel novelette, One Day All This Will Be Yours. It’s difficult to say more without spoilers; perhaps it’s safe to say it takes Poul Anderson’s “Time Patrol” stories to their logical fixpoint.
NotMax
@Brachiator
(gently kicks phone box door) “How many years to the gallon ya get on this thing?”
Doc Sardonic
@sab: Reminds of a conversation years ago I had with a friend from England who was trying get a dispute with retailer resolved over the phone. She was very frustrated and the last sentence of her rant was “ but I speak English”, her face when I told her the problem was that she spoke English, not American, we are not two cultures separated by a common language was priceless.
zhena gogolia
@NotMax: That’s a good one.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: Before Moffat, Doctor Who really wasn’t primarily a time-travel show. The time travel was just how the characters got into various adventures.
But they should have known what Moffat was going to do from the parody episode he wrote for a charity telethon, “The Curse of Fatal Death.” The whole thing was basically a prefiguring of what Moffat would do if he ever got control of the series, framed as a joke.
zhena gogolia
@JDM: Okay, that settles it. Not for me. I’ve bailed out on Richard Armitage vehicles once the torture starts.
Steeplejack
@sab:
I hope you turn on the captions for your husband.
If you also have Acorn, Hinterland is right in the Shetland zone, except Wales.
kalakal
@lowtechcyclist: rule out post apocalyptic stories and you’d really thin out the field.
Actually post apocalyptic films/books etc would make a pretty good Medium Cool
CliosFanBoy
Ohh, I missed that. Nice catch!
Villago Delenda Est
@NotMax: Second year, too. Third season was Fridays at 10PM, a dead zone as far as NBC execs (idiots) were concerned. This was at the dawn of demographic breakdowns of ratings, and it turns out that Trek killed in groups that are now considered ratings gold.
Eric S.
Late to be here and hope the thread isn’t completely dead. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North is one of my favorites. It’s not time travel as we normally think about it. The premise is Harry August is reborn as himself every time he dies. He starts over as baby. There are others like him. The only way for them not to live over and over again is to prevent their birth. These people remember the previous lives as they age. The book traces how he learns to deal with this phenomenon, meets other people like him, and how he and others come to cope. Full recommend.
Jackie
@CliosFanBoy: “Two in the Field” Still selling on Amazon!😊
Chip Daniels
Lotta good copmments here;
I loved The Time Traveleer’s Wife, and Travelers.
I thought Outlander was good. Not without flaws, but any flaws were within the usual Hollywood range of stuff that you just accept.
Like how Claire, the time traveler becomes sort of like Mark Twain in Connecticut Yankee, the improbably clever inventor of all sorts of newfangled things like penicillin.
But those are minor quibbles- they handle the problematic issues of slavery and injustice by showing how in the moment, it isn’t always easy to see and stand up to injustice in the way we think we would.
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
I take Phil at his word.
SPOILER
In the Odyssey, all of Odysseus’ crew, and even the suitors, die so that our hero, Athena’s favorite, can become a better man. Fiction is not fair.
Except for comedies. Sometimes.
Villago Delenda Est
@Doc Sardonic: A friend of mine who was brought up in Germany, later moved to America for at least HS, with an American soldier dad and a German mom, insists to this day that here across the pond we speak “American”, not “English.”
CliosFanBoy
@Doc Sardonic:
My wife often had to translate for me when we visited England. She has English and Scottish family. She does the same when we watch British mysteries on BritBox.
OTOH, I can translate Japanese-accented English for her, as I had a Japanese roommate in grad school.
CliosFanBoy
@Matt McIrvin:
“The Curse of Fatal Death.”
“Alas, they discovered fire.”
@Jackie: Already on my Amazon wishlist for Christmas!! :)
Steeplejack
@UncleEbeneezer:
Oh, jeez, you’re right! I had forgotten about Rick and Morty. The ultimate breakdown of time travel—in every sense—is “Rattlestar Ricklactica.” Snake jazz! (Episode 4.5, available on Max and Hulu.)
glc
@eschneider: That’s fair. The best thing I’ve seen from either of the authors separately, a remarkable collaboration. Emotionally rich. (But my daughter didn’t like it, so go figure.)
In a more straightforward vein: “The Light Brigade” is an intricately plotted (naturally) novel about a militia which occasionally loses certain people in time slips, following one soldier as she hops back and forth through a series of battles, dislocated from everyone else in terms of which ones lie in her past and which in her future, and haunted by a sense of how it all ends, but not understanding how it fits together – and how it began – till the end.
dm
Let’s see.
The anime Steins;Gate (random punctuation is a stylistic tic of the studio that made the source material) is about a group of college-age friends who stumble upon a time-machine that starts simply by allowing one to send texts to the past, but then quickly spirals out of control. I think it’s mostly interesting for the character interactions before tragedy strikes.
Another anime, The girl who leapt through time, about a high-school girl who stumbles on a lost time-machine, and she uses it to go back in time and eat the pudding she was saving but which her sister swiped, prepare for pop-quizzes, and non-sensical things like that before she realizes that the machine has a limited number of uses, and something happens that she really wants to be able to prevent.
The reason the time-machine was there for her to find is itself rather charming and melancholy.
I already mentioned This is how you lose the time war, but published almost simultaneously was Anna Lee Newitz’s The future of another timeline, which centers on a group of women time-travelers who are trying to avert the Ron-Desantised society that they live in (and the Handmaid’s Tale society that another group is trying to give rise to). They’re part of a historical research team, but are off-the-rez in that they’re trying to change history.
Great scenes involving Comstock, the Comstock laws, and the Chicago World’s Fair in the late Nineteenth Century.
The time-travel mechanism itself is worth the price of admission.
CliosFanBoy
@JDM:
The single best Star Trek episode ever, of any series, is DS-9’s “In the Pale Moonlight.” Period. End of discussion. I will brook no dissent.
Wapiti
Er… William Gibson’s The Peripheral (book is much better than the series imo) and Agency.
Several years back, some Chinese lab announced that they had used quantum physics to transmit data, and the message arrived before it was sent. Some microseconds, maybe. I’m not sure it was ever duplicated.
Gibson takes that and spins a couple of tales about one timeline that has gone through absolute hell from about 2030 to maybe 2080, and somebody uses this trick to communicate with other timelines back in about 2030, as their worlds are falling apart with climate change, antibacterial resistances, etc, etc.
Kayla Rudbek
@the pollyanna from hell: yes, this is a fun series “we’re going to start the American revolution 132 years ahead of schedule”
kalakal
Babylon 5 did a rather good if initially confusing trick with an episode of season 1 Babylon Squared and 2 episodes in season 3 War Without End pts 1 & 2 being a continuation of the first. The mystery disappearance and reappearance of Babylon 4 in the first episode is explained in the later ones via Sinclair going back in time. It’s brilliantly done as you see both sides of the story as the characters see it at that point in their own timelines. From either viewpoint things are rather weird, put together it makes complete sense
Matt McIrvin
@Villago Delenda Est: I’ve been watching these people complain about how Star Trek has turned “politically correct”/”SJW”/”woke” ever since The Next Generation came on the air, and I think it reveals something about the conservative mindset.
A lot of today’s conservatives are actually OK with the kind of Racism Is Bad preaching and such that appeared on the original series. But their view of this is static. The boundary-breaking that happened when they were small children is something they’re comfortable with, but they wish it stopped there. They think that at some point we reached a finish line where we could congratulate ourselves that everything was fixed. And going beyond that is going too far. Telling us that Klan-style racism is bad? That’s a fine message; they absorbed it as children. Putting trans and nonbinary characters on the screen? Going too far.
NotMax
@Eric S.
Tangentially brings to mind Replay by Ken Grimwood.
Or, going in another direction, the short story Let’s Be Frank by Brian Aldiss.
Jackie
@CaseyL: Oooh! I just ordered it for my son! Christmas shopping has begun! Also “Shoeless Jackson!” Thanks!
Kayla Rudbek
@Tony Jay: is it by Philip K. Dick? I thought he wrote one where the USA had been invaded by the Nazis…
dm
Chris Marker has a short, La Jetee about a time-traveler sent back to prevent a disaster. It consists entirely of narration and still images (save for one precious moment).
The concept was later expanded by Terry Gilliam and turned into 12 Monkeys. I can tolerate watching 12 Monkeys only by putting the knowledge of Marker’s wonderful, beautiful, magical film into a locked closet in my mind.
Steeplejack
@Almost Retired, @kalakal:
Glad to see someone else remembers it and liked it! I saw it on the recommendation of a francophone friend, who explained a lot of the wordplay in the original to me. I can follow French a little bit, usually just well enough to understand that I’m missing something. But even with subtitles it was very good.
Villago Delenda Est
@CliosFanBoy: It’s very much one of my favorites. Still, there are others that compete. “City on the Edge of Forever” and “Mirror Mirror” from TOS, “The Best of Both Worlds” and “Yesterday’s Enterprise” from TNG, for example.
sab
@Steeplejack: Thanks for the tip. We’ll be getting Acorn next month. My stepson gave me my own tv for Christmas, and we only just got it hooked up last week.
RSA
One of the greatest SF writers, Stanislaw Lem, takes on time travel in the Seventh Voyage (Chapter 1) of The Star Diaries. Ijon Tichy is in a damaged spaceship, and two people are needed to repair the damage. Unfortunately, he’s alone. The ship is passing through some sort of vortex in which time folds in on itself, and Tichy encounters different versions of himself. If only he can persuade an earlier or later version to cooperate:
Later, on Wednesday, he has the identical conversation from the other side. As days go by, more and more Tichys appear but they all argue about what can and can’t be done without actually getting anything done.
It’s very funny. This short was my introduction to Lem and it made me a lifelong fan.
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt McIrvin: Which means they learned nothing at all about Trek.
Kayla Rudbek
@Brachiator: The whole point of the TARDIS was that the Doctor was constantly lost and never got to where he wanted to go. When I introduced Mr. Rudbek to the show, he was (and still is) utterly convinced that the TARDIS is based on the British automobile. Mr. Rudbek drove some clunkers in his younger days.
kalakal
.
Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time I remember as being rather good. It’s set in a temporal war spanning billions of years with the two opposing factions trying to change the past to ensure the present is the one they want
Larry Niven did a fun series about a time traveller called Svetz who travels in time to ‘real’ places but always ends up in fantasy versions of those places. The running joke is that time travel is a fantasy. eg sent back to get an extinct eagle he returns with a Roc, sent to view the battle of Trafalgar he appears in a Hornblower story
sab
@Doc Sardonic: Midsommer Murders has been very helpful in training husband. He was fine watching Shetland except sometimes for Sandy Wilson. Sandy’s actor is a Shetland native and admits he liked to slip into Shetland Scots in his role.
JoyceH
Okay, guys, bear with me, because what I’m going to describe is just a thought experiment of my own. I was watching or reading something about one of these organizations that go back in time to fix bad history. And it occurred to me that a society advanced enough to have time travel would be too advanced to be willing to fix a timeline using violence.
For instance – go back in time and kill Hitler? How barbaric! No, what the advanced, civilized time fixers would do it – go back in time and get Hitler accepted into art school! Yeah, it takes more of an long-range effort than simple violence. You need to leave an outpost in the past to continue the time fix. You need the wealthy collector to buy Hitler’s paintings and the influential critic to praise the paintings, and so on. But how much more civilized, dontcha know?
What I love about this premise is that it explains so so much! Sometimes when I encounter a creative type, writer, singer, movie maker, etc, who is inexplicably successful despite mediocre talent, I think, “Man, they must have been a real monster in the original timeline!”
Geoduck
Edge of Tomorrow is a Tom Cruise movie which even Tom Cruise haters can enjoy, because you get to watch him die horribly over and over and over again.
Trials and Tribbleations was chosen as the Anniversary Special because the DS9 crew was batting around ideas in a restaurant and the actor who played the villain in the original episode walked past their table. (And yes, his character sets off the plot of TaT.)
The various versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has some amusing time-travel stuff, including The Restaurant At The End of the Universe, which is exactly what the name indicates.
NotMax
@sab
Usually good money-saving deals on a variety of streaming services during Black Friday/Cyber Monday time.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay: I think that’s The Proteus Operation by James P. Hogan, a decent writer of exciting if not profound science fiction who, sadly, slid into increasing crackpottery toward the end of his life until he got to the point of flirting with Holocaust denial. It’s as if once you start to feel the crank magnetism, antisemitism is the Great Attractor at the center of it all.
WaterGirl
@Eric S.: Not to worry, the Medium Cool threads often still get comments the next morning.
Bill Arnold
@Scout211:
Re “The Midnight Library by Matt Haig”
Ctrlcreep, a writer of short, often extremely intense (sort of magical realism but not) fiction/microfiction
(Microfiction, and Current longer (short) pieces, some public), wrote a maybe similar short story in 2016:
Throughout All Generations (CTRLCREEP, JUL 11, 2023, originally published 2016)
JDM
I stand corrected.
sab
@zhena gogolia: It’s nothing like Game of Thrones. There is some violence and some sex, but it’s not gratuitous.
Wyatt Salamanca
I second both The Time Machine and Primer.
Two of my favorite Star Trek episodes involve time travel:
Assignment: Earth – This episode was originally intended as a pilot for a series based on the Gary Seven character played by Robert Lansing.
City on the Edge of Forever
Has anyone here ever read Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behold_the_Man_(novel)?
I haven’t read it myself, but the plot intrigues me. The main character uses a time machine to travel back in time to meet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and ends up taking the place of Jesus on the cross.
Central Planning
How about Galaxy Quest for the shortest time travel (Omega 13)? Is it also the movie with the latest introduction of the time travel plot?
NotMax
@Kayla Rudbek
JDM
@zhena gogolia: Don’t want to discourage you too much. We really did like it otherwise though.
The showrunner, BTW, did a lot of writing/producing on DS9.
lee
@Scout211: yeah I thought book 5 was never going to end.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
Some conservatives watched Star Trek through a different lens. They saw a future in which white guys were mainly in charge. The future was kinda like how things might be if the United States was in charge, and also controlled the future equivalent of the United Nations. Star Fleet is a strong military, which is why there is peace.
And women know their place. No women captains.
Nu Trek supposedly displaces men, especially white men.
There was a complaint in a review thread about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Some insecure nutjobs were unhappy that in the opening scene of an episode, all the officers on the bridge, except for the captain, were women. Obviously, the current producers hate men. Just beyond stupid.
And yeah, they have problems with gay characters, non binary, etc, because these issues were not commonly part of the TV landscape of the mid 60s.
NotMax
Fix.
@Kayla Rudbek
Pish-tush. The electrical system in the TARDIS works. (AFAIK, decidedly not being a Whovian.)
;)
NewLarry
A Sound of Thunder – Bradbury
Possibly the best time travel short story I’ve ever read.
Sure Lurkalot
Unfortunately written by the reprehensible Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris is a story about a screenwriter who on a trip to Paris with his fiancée, time travels to the 20’s, his favorite era, and hobnobs with artists of the time. He falls for a woman of that time only to time travel with her to the 1890’s, the period she loves more than her own time. Nostalgia for the past is illusory.
Very simplistic description, whereas the movie is rich and beautiful with a fine cast.
I know many of us are conflicted about reading, watching, listening to artists who we’ve come to learn are not good people.
WaterGirl
@NewLarry: Welcome!
kalakal
@Wyatt Salamanca: Gary Kilworth’s Lets go to Golgotha has the idea of time travel as tourism. Popular is the “Crucifixion Tour”, the tourists are all told they mustn’t disrupt history so when the crowd is asked whether to spare Jesus or Barabbas, the tourists must all join the call “Give us Barabbas!” . Turns out there was an awful lot of tourists…
lee
@zhena gogolia: it has its moments but much fewer than GoT.
Geoduck
@NotMax: Actually, the TARDIS electrical system is NOT a model of efficiency and robustness.
Matt McIrvin
@Villago Delenda Est: Science-fiction fandom in the middle 20th century spent a lot of time congratulating itself about how science fiction was the one genre that accepted change as a matter of course, and that this dynamism would uniquely outfit its fans to stride confidently into the future.
When the future came, and it didn’t turn out like their favorite books, a lot of these guys lapsed into decades of whining about how some malign political influence stole away their rocket liners and jetpacks and Mars colonies. Perhaps it was the welfare state! Maybe it was feminism! They only thought they were primed to accept change because they thought they knew how it was going to turn out.
NotMax
Anyone else here at the time (no pun intended) part of the minuscule audience for UPN’s Seven Days?
kalakal
@NotMax: Well it doesn’t have an oil leak so it can’t be based on a British motorbike
NewLarry
@WaterGirl: ‘thanks, glad to be here.
JDM
@CliosFanBoy:
Here’s the description I sent my granddaughter:
The Dominion is winning the war and there seems little hope unless the Romulans can be brought in on our side. They’d rather sit it out unless there’s immediate danger to them. So Sisko decides to do whatever it takes to bring the Romulans into the war. He has to partner with Garak. Maybe Sisko shouldn’t have said “whatever it takes”. Has a great speech by Garak at the climax and by Sisko (dictating a personal log entry) at the end.
Sometimes used as an example of DS9’s “dark” side, I’d say it’s more the moral grey area that DS9 often visited. Garak’s speech speaks to that.
And none of that even mentions the great performances that form the characters Sen. Vreenak and that oily creep Grathon Tolar.
Pete Downunder
The late, and often controversial (and totally not woke) Robert A. Heinlein had a clever time travel story called, if memory serves, By His Bootstraps. I won’t spoil it but the twist is very clever. He also had a horribly racist novel called Farnam’s Freehold in which a white family is blasted into the future by a nearby nuclear explosion. He really lets his racist flag fly in that one – not recommended.
CaseyL
Barbara Hambly has written two Star Trek novels, and both involve time travel. They’re very different from one another, too.
The first is “Ishmael,” where Spock escapes from a Klingon interrogation session and goes back in time to 19th Century Seattle, where he encounters the Bolt Brothers (from the 1960s TV series “Here Come the Brides”). There’s a reason he went there, an urgent reason, but he can’t remember what it is. In fact, he can’t remember anything at all, including who he is. Lots of characters from 1960s westerns made cameo appearances. The “take” on Klingons is very much pre-TNG (they’re villains through and through) but otherwise the book is a fun read.
The second is “Crossroads” and it’s a lot more complicated. Someone arrives on the Enterprise from a future where the Federation is fighting insurrectionists, and it’s not immediately clear who is telling the truth about why there’s an insurrection, or what the Federation and Starfleet stand for in the future. Characters include a new and interesting alien species that has some kind of commensal/symbiotic connection to certain people. The book is not light reading at all: there’s a whole lot of melancholy going on. But an interesting story, and very interesting character moments.
(Hambly has written many, many books in scifi, fantasy, and historical mystery. All of her books are terrific.)
Geoduck
@NotMax: I enjoyed Seven Days, but just once, they really should have let the back-up guy to the jump back.
Steeplejack
@Kayla Rudbek:
That’s The Man in the High Castle. Alternate history, not time travel.
sab
@Scout211: But North Carolina filmed in Scotland just doesn’t work. Everyone looks cold all the time when they should be melting in the heat.
Steeplejack
@dm:
La Jetée is marvelous. Streaming on Criterion; shows up occasionally on TCM.
Central Planning
@Steeplejack:
Alternate history could be an interesting Medium Cool topic.
Ken
@Pete Downunder: Heinlein also wrote “All You Zombies”, with an even more clever twist.
Matt McIrvin
@Pete Downunder: Heinlein came back to the basic plot device of “By His Bootstraps” later on with “– All You Zombies –“, which was way tighter, an absolute virtuoso effort of plotting and also ahead of its time in some ways, though by now it’s probably had enough time to date badly.
There was a movie adaptation of it a few years back called “Predestination” that I have not seen, though it seemed to be well-regarded.
lee
@JDM: what he did after making the log really completes the episode.
I know they were about to end the series but I wish the story in ‘It’s only paper moon’ had been stretched over more episodes.
Timill
When Hollywood gets a time machine…
The Technicolor Time Machine
Warren Senders
Mo Daviau’s book “Every Anxious Wave” is one of my favorite time-travel books — the protagonist discovers a time portal in his apartment closet, and markets it privately as a way for his clients to go to the concerts they missed the first time. Very clever and funny. Also Annalee Newitz’ “The Future Of Another Timeline” is terrific.
Warren Senders
@CaseyL: Galland did a sequel, called “Master of the Revels.” It’s very good.
Ken
@kalakal: I recently read a novel where the premise was a wormhole generator; eventually they could put the far end of the wormhole anywhere, and anywhen, giving them a time viewer (similar to the Asimov and Knight stories I mentioned upstream).
After the inevitable social upheavals passed, a number of scientific and historical projects were organized. One of those was called “The 12,000 Days” or something like that, with the goal of recording every second of Jesus’ life. Most of it went well, but they found they just couldn’t make out the last words on the cross — so many viewers, from so many future eras, had tried to view those minutes that the sheer density of wormholes caused interference.
Unfortunately I can’t remember author or title — one reason I gave so much detail was in hopes someone else would recognize it.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Thanks for the reminder. I recently bit the bullet and (finally) subscribed to Netflix and the Disney+/Hulu bundle. Had to lie down for a bit after that, and I have been pondering what to add. Maybe MHz (stand-alone), Acorn and/or Britbox.
Do I need Apple TV? I recently bought an iPad, and they’re dangling a few free months in front of me. Hmm, just answered my own question: I should subscribe, check it out and cancel before the meter starts running if I don’t like it.
lee
@Pete Downunder: Holy shit. I remember that one (Freehold). When I read it it was a real WTF moment.
Pete Downunder
@Ken: I missed that one I think. I’ll chase it up.
eclare
@Steeplejack:
It’s easy to cancel and switch providers, you can do it all on-line. At least you can for Hulu and Netflix, I go back and forth between those two.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Wise choice. MHz via Prime is not the same as MHz on its own. And can only be accessed through Prime.
Eric S.
Oh a movie from 1980, The Final Countdown. A US Air Craft carrier goes through a storm and ends up in 1941 just before the Pearly Harbor attacks. Star Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen.
kalakal
@Ken: I’m pretty sure it’s The Light of Other Days by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter
Not to be confused with The Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw which also rather good
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
It took me forever to run down the differences between the two. It made me leery of subscribing to any Prime version of a “channel” available elsewhere.
Ken
@kalakal: Sounds familiar, thanks.
BlueGuitarist
@Alison Rose:
would like to read Kindred (can’t say looking forward to, since, as you noted, harrowing; which i expect from her other work.
Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents in the 1990s – foreseeing climate crisis destroying the gulf coast and, frfr, a demagogue with the campaign slogan Make America Great Again. Brilliant and disturbing.
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt McIrvin: It was Nixon killing NASA and Reagan doing nothing to revive it.
geg6
@sab:
I would argue that it is both. The time travel is a major storyline throughout the series. Various major plot lines are tied to it.
sab
@geg6: Yes, but she’s not jumping back and forth. It’s horrible and almost irrevocable.
Eric
An interesting time travel movie is Timecrimes a Spanish movie from 2007, basically the whole plot is about time travel into the past changing the present with unintended consequences. A guy finds a time machine and goes back like 45 minutes and does something that changes the present so he goes back a little further to try and fix it and then creates other problems, repeat a few times.
Eric
@Steeplejack: Apple TV has a good quality per series ratio, they don’t have a break out top tier classic but have a lot of very good shows
Steeplejack
@Eric:
Thanks. That has been my general impression—not anything absolutely must-see, but a lot of things where I note “Oh, that’s on Apple TV.”
Bill Arnold
Palimpsest is worth a mention. Good (a bit disturbing) story.
Palimpsest is a 2009 science fiction novella by Charles Stross, exploring the conjunction of time travel and deep time.
Tehanu
@Ken:
Connie Willis, yes! I would add, Blackout/All Clear, about London during WWII, and Doomsday Book, which is not only a great time travel story, it’s one of the best historical novels I’ve ever read, and an absolute refutation of the idiot idea some historians have that people in the past didn’t have the same kinds of feelings we do now. And Kage Baker’s books are terrific too.
@JDM:
Those DS9 episodes are delightful.
@CaseyL:
I’m a huge Barbara Hambly fan — Ishmael is one of my favorite books ever — so thanks for bringing her up.
I’m only halfway through the comments and most of my faves have already been mentioned so I won’t add more. Glad to know so many here also like what I like!
Mathguy
@NewLarry: It only took 228 comments for someone to finally mention on of the best stories in this genre.
I need to second the early recommendation of “This is How You Lose The Time War.” One of the best stories I’ve read in the past 5 years.
Steeplejack
@eclare:
Yeah, good point.
dm
@Matt McIrvin: Nahh. I think they looked at science fiction and all they saw was hard men doing hard science. Early Heinlein (not sure what they made of things like Stranger in a strange land). (At that time engineers and scientists tended to be conservative, since there was a lot of woo-woo on the left, plus a fair amount of anti-technology (“do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate, I am a human being”).
So, when science fiction starts doing different kinds of people doing different kinds of science, they get verbuffled, and verbufflement leads to anger, especially when the hard men prove to be too rigid to find their way out of a quantum labyrinth.
I mean, you still have the Sad Puppies, upset that Helen and Niven, and Pournelle have been replaced with Octavia Butler, Charles Stross, China Mieville, R.F.Kuang, and Martha Wells.
dm
@NewLarry: That’s the one where the guy steps on a butterfly, right?
The Lodger
William Gibson’s The Peripheral and Agency, where the act of communicating with another timeline creates that timeline. You can’t change your own past, but you can try to teach them from your mistakes.
piratedan
apologies for being so late to the thread….
Stephen King’s Fairy Tale fits here as a boy finds a time portal allows him to visit a fairy land and when he returns…..
There’s also H.Beam Piper’s Paratime Police stories that mesh time travel with parallel universes and how messing in a timeline can cause new and unexpected repercussions
plus time travel is a pretty significant portion of Harry Potter III – The Prisoner of Azkaban
the 1632 author – Eric Flint (RIP) also expanded his assiti shards time disruption series with a few alternate titles beyond the 1632 series, one of which is Time Spike but there are other titles as well. What he plays with is that time is a dimension unto itself and when higher alien forms start messing about with intellectual constructs, well… things happen and a cross section of the planet gets displaced and dumped into a single time continuum destination allowing anything that may have existed in the zone effectively being deposited in a destination that is foreign to them.
Sandia Blanca
We’d like to put in a word for Jodi Taylor, one of our favorite authors, and her “Chronicles of St. Mary’s” series. St. Mary’s is an English institute for historians who “investigate major historical events in contemporary time”* with often-hilarious results. Each volume brings a rich mix of history, humor, tragedy, adventure, and romance. There are 14 novels in the series, along with numerous short stories and novellas. The first book is “Just One Damned Thing After Another”; see the complete list here: joditaylorbooks.com/blogs/news/chronicles-of-st-marys-reading-order.
* But don’t call it “time travel”!
P.S. We love Jodi Taylor so much that we took our first trip to England this Spring to attend the “JodiWorld” fan convention, held in Coventry. It was a blast!
glc
@Pete Downunder: Great reference. Heinlein has a couple of twisty ones where he basically set himself a problem to solve – there’s an even twistier one whose name escapes me, and any description would involve a spoiler … Also, there’s his novel “The Door into Summer” which refers to his cat’s insistence that even if it’s winter at the front door they should go check the back for summer. At one point in that story, Heinlein tries to imagine consumer electronics developing on the back of the technology he knows. That bit is probably more interesting now than it was then.
My impression of Farnham’s Freehold is that’s it was meant (and understood) as an unsubtle critique of racism. But I have never read it. That was in his late weird period, after Stranger in a Strange Land. What you might reasonably call his woke period (not that he had changed in any significant way, but the world definitely had, and he became very experimental).
Brian
+1 for “Time and Again”. The most ingenious explanation of time travel I’ve ever heard or read. Someone mentioned it was an illustrated novel; the illustrations are all photographs from the 1880s when the action takes place.
Re Star Trek time travel episodes: from my long ago reading of a book called “The Making of Star Trek” I seem to remember that those episodes were at least in part because they had blown their budget on a previous episode with all the exotic costumes, SFX, etc; with a time travel episode all they had to do is send the Enterprise into a time when, then get a bunch of period costumes from wardrobe instead of having to create them from scratch.
Groucho48
@Pete Downunder: Heinlein expands on some of the ideas of By His Bootstraps… in a story called All You Zombies. In some ways it’s a very extended shaggy dog story.
Groucho48
@Groucho48: I hit post, by mistake.
I haven’t read the whole thread so I’m not sure if anyone mentioned the Time Trader series, by Andre Norton. Aimed at young teens, with the dirty commies as bad guys, it as the usual action scenes but does have a lot of interesting prehistory as background. I loved them as a kid.
billcinsd
Jodi Taylor has 2 pretty good Time Travel Series’
The Chronicles of St. Mary’s and The Time Police very fun and reasonably well done
In addition, Connie Willis’ “To Save Nothing of the Dog” was part of a sort of series with “Doomsday Book”, and the double novel “Blackout/All Clear”
Dang, in the time it took me to read 264 comments, I was beaten to both of these in the last 15 comments. I fully back up Tehanu and Sandia
Tony Jay
@Villago Delenda Est:
Got it. I went through a huge Turtledove phase until he just started tracing over a copy of The World At War and changing some names.
Governor-General Martin Luther-King was a nice touch. See? You’re living in the non-optimum timeline.
Cliosfanboy
It’s kind of a time travel story, “A Statue for Father” by Isaac Asimov.
Tony Jay
@Kayla Rudbek:
That’s The Plot Against America, I think. America going fascist all on its lonesome thanks to Lindbergh.
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh dear. That’s sad to hear.
Shana
@Ken: This thread is probably long dead but I’m traveling in Europe so my timing is off. I hoped someone would mention Connie Willis. Doomsday book is terrific. They’ve figured out time travel but you can’t take anything to the past that wasn’t made the way things were then or bring anything to the present so it has become a tool for historians. Our heroine goes to mid1300s England but the coordinates are a bit off and she doesn’t go to the exact time she planned and has to deal. Absolutely riveting and a Nebula winner. Highly recommended
Pittsburgh Mike
@Maeve: There’s also a sequel to Life on Mars called “Ashes to Ashes,” which is really good as well. And its ending sort of answers the “what’s really going on here?” question.
Clearly a Bowie fan was involved :-)
Christopher Mathews
“Predestination,” Ethan Hawke’s adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s short story “All You Zombies,” is quite good. There’s very little that can be said about it that isn’t a spoiler, so I’ll just say it was the first time I’d seen Sarah Snook on screen and I was utterly charmed.
“Deja Vu,” with Denzel Washington, Paula Patton, and Val Kilmer. What if the government could look around a bend in the fabric of space-time to view the past in detail? What if they could do a little bit more?
“The Map of Tiny Perfect Things.” With pre-MCU Kathryn Newton. You’ll think “Groundhog Day.” You’re not wrong, except you are. A sweet-natured musing about shared loops and the time-bending properties of grief.
Paul in KY
@SiubhanDuinne: They take place in different galaxies…
Paul in KY
@Scout211: Is that the one where Christopher Reeve holds on to a old penny hard enough to be sent back to 1900? If so, a little too sappy for me.
Paul in KY
@DesertFriar: I liked Time Tunnel a bunch when I was a kid. Didn’t stay on long enough, IMO.
Paul in KY
@UncleEbeneezer: They really crank it up to 11 on the alternate universes. My current favourite cartoon show.
Kosh III
@SamInWa: B5 is the BEST!
I am old enough that I was a teen when Star Trek was first broadcast on NBC.
Started watching Doctor Who when it was DW #4.
An amusing time-travel novel is the 1939 Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. An archaeologist ends up in 535 AD Italy and manages to avert the “dark ages.”
Paul in KY
@piratedan: Piper wrote a great short story set around 1810, where the authorities in some European nation find this madman, (named Bathurst, I think) who claims to be a British diplomat on a secret mission. He keeps raving about this ‘Napoleon’ fellow and his empire. Well, Louis XVI is still safely on his throne and he does have a General Napoleon who runs his artillery…
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: I think there was a Turtledove novel where the CSA was a political entity in the 20th century.
The only thing I liked about it was that in this timeline, powered flight did not exist, and thus battleships had grown to titanic sizes (1500 feet long, with 30 inch main guns, etc.).
Paul in KY
@Kosh III: I really like alot of DeCamp’s stuff. His ‘The Fallible Fiend’ is great!
Uncle Cosmo
@Tony Jay: Correct. (Late to the thread, as always, I took the very unJackalike step of perusing the nearly 300 posts before adding what was bound to be multiply redundant.)
It’s an interesting idea. Most of James P. Hogan‘s novels are thrown together around interesting ideas. But no reviewer of SF[1] who gave a damn about her/his readers[2] could ever in good conscience recommend any of them to them. Hogan, you see, made his living as a technical writer – and his novels are written like technical writing[3].
I can’t say he couldn’t write directions for someone to exit a room with an unlocked door in one wall[4]; a competent tech writer can obviously manage that. But his prose style was the equivalent of a hippopotamus in a tutu attempting to dance ballet: Briefly diverting as a joke[5], otherwise a waste of time and energy. Though I suppose an Evelyn Wood graduate on uppers, speeding through a couple hundred pages an hour, might manage to strain the ideas out of the dreadful mishmash of his prose…
[1] Which I did for pocket change and copies of the books a couple of generations back.
[2] All ten of them. Thirty, maybe, for a big-name author. (I reviewed a few of those, and got a few blurbs for the newspaper on the paperbacks. One of those even included my name – misspelled. Sic transit gloria mundi…)
[3] For many years I made a good living as a technical writer masquerading as an engineer, so I recognize the genre. Which has its own standards of competence, which have fook-all to do with good fiction writing of any genre.
[4] One of my go-to insults for the literarily incompetent who somehow managed to get published. FTR I never wrote SF myself: too easy to write utter crap (like 90+% of the genre, cf. Sturgeon’s Law), too frackin’ hard to write well.
[5] Cf., of course, Fantasia.
Brachiator
@Groucho48:
Coming back to the thread to note that I also really enjoyed these novels when I was discovering science fiction.
Uncle Cosmo
FFS, of course he so insists – because (at least in that era) all German kids were taught English by English natives, or teachers who had learned English from English natives, or teachers who had learned English from English teachers who had learned English from English natives, usw.!
Two stories:
Uncle Cosmo
@CliosFanBoy: Kind: of how I recall it: Back in the day (1970s-80s) , what we serious SF fans called “Trekkies” called themselves “Trekkers” and demanded to be taken seriously by us. In a pig’s eye, as the saying goes.
Whoever hasn’t watched Galaxy Quest should do so if for no better reason than to savor the absolutely brutal treatment (in the early few minutes) of the whole “TrekkieCon” phenomenon. I honestly thought – still think – Tim Allen deserved an Oscar nomination for his masterful and complete evisceration of Shatner as Kirk.
adepsis
Palm Springs – Two wedding guests stuck in a time loop together. Funny and charming.
12 Monkeys – This is the TV series. It eventually dovetails with the movie but it’s mostly just a nonstop wild ride.
The Lazarus Project – Ordinary Joe gets recruited into an organization policing the time stream.
Continuum – CBC series from 2012 starring Rachel Nichols. Cop from the future chasing a terrorist group also from the future into the past – to prevent shenanigans of course. Not all prevented – of course.
Signal – Korean detective discovers old walkie talkie belonging to a now long dead predecessor. They help each other solve and prevent crimes in their decades (30 or so years apart).
Do Over – 2002 series. A 34 year old man that has generally failed in life dies and wakes up 13 again but with all memories intact. Stars a young Penn Badgeley from the Netflix series, You.
Daybreak – A cop is framed for murder and relives the same day over and over trying to prevent it or at least clear himself. Pretty fast paced and lots going on.
History of Time Travel – A fun faux documentary.
John Dies at the End – Time travel, zombies,…. Just give it a try. ;)
glc
@Sandia Blanca:
@billcinsd:
I’ll put in a word for Jodi Taylor too, though the St. Mary’s series is mainly on my list of things to get back to some day. Very lively and entertaining. The main series has 14 novels and I can imagine binge reading them. Starts with “One Damn Thing After Another” which lives up to its title. I got distracted some time ago but it was memorable. Felt a bit like Jasper Fforde to me (whom I also can’t keep up with, but always enjoy).
In a somewhat more serious – but also very entertaining – vein, Kate Heartfield’s Alice Payne series (which has stalled out at two books, for now) attracted a lot of attention, and I found it rewarding. Hope to see more of that.
Sandia Blanca
@billcinsd: Yes, thanks for mentioning the Time Police series, which is also terrific! And Connie Willis “To Say Nothing of the Dog” set the blueprint for this genre, I think.
Sandia Blanca
@glc: Funny you should mention Jasper Fforde, as he was a featured guest at the JodiWorld convention! Got to hear both him and Jodi speak at length about their writing processes. Love them both!
NotMax
Okay, since no else seems to have mentioned it —
“I’ve just returned from ancient Greece. Look at this grape!”
:)
glc
@Sandia Blanca: Well now you’ve got me wanting to go to JodiWorld. Not that I see that as a realistic possibility. Though if they do something virtual I’d be interested.
Pittsburgh Mike
Lots of good ones:
11 Minutes Ago — fun time travel rom-com. Not giving much of a spoiler, since it happens in the first minute, but our hero travels from the future and arrives at a wedding. He travels multiple times, but his first visit is the last one in the time frame of the wedding, so some of the wedding guests screw with him, since he has no idea they know who he is.
Time Traveller’s Wife — the movie’s OK, but NetFlix has a TV series that’s better than the movie, but only covers about half the book before it was canceled.
Goodnight Sweetheart — British series where a guy travels from the 1990s to the 1940s, and ends up with a woman in each “port.” Better than it sounds.
The Man in the High Castle. The book by PKD is great, but the Amazon TV series is quite good, even though it goes way beyond the book.
Pittsburgh Mike
Also Happy Accidents — Vincent D’Onfrio is a time traveler from 400 years in the future, who has a crush on Marisa Tomei. Actually a lot of fun.
Pittsburgh Mike
Also Bring The Jubilee — book about a guy traveling back to the Battle of Gettysburg to watch the South win the Civil War, from a time line when the South succeeded. Except the traveler messes things up, leading to our world.
Journeyman is a TV series, canceled early by an earlier writer’s strike in 2007, where a guy travels back in time randomly, apparently by some ‘higher power’ to set some things right. Very good show, perhaps available for purchase from Amazon or Apple+.
glc
@Villago Delenda Est:
@NewLarry:
I notice the Bradbury in the table of contents for “The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th century.”
The Bradbury story is probably fairly well known even by people who’ve never actually read it. I’d entirely forgotten it was one of his – I remember the plot more than the tone, which is unusual for a Bradbury story.
By coincidence, assuming there is such a thing, I was looking over our local library’s catalog for things by Connie Willis just now, and this anthology popped up.