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A by-invitation group blog for busy authors of SFR, Futuristic, or Paranormal romances in which at least one protagonist is an alien, or of alien ancestry.
As an almost lifelong science fiction reader (mostly "soft" SF, since I'm mainly a fantasy and horror fan), I can't help nitpicking at the new TV series TIMELESS, even though I'm enjoying it. Premise: The antagonist has stolen the prototype time machine (the Mothership) in order to leap around through U.S. history trying to change the past, for reasons that seem justified and vitally important to him. The good guys—a historian (Lucy), a soldier tasked with eliminating the villain by any means available, and the scientist mainly responsible for inventing the time travel device—pursue the thief in the smaller "Lifeboat" and struggle to keep history on track. The writers of the program attempt to take seriously the present-day reverberations of changes in the past, e.g., Lucy returns from the first excursion to discover that her terminally ill mother is fine and was never sick, she had a different father in the new timeline, she's engaged to a man who's a stranger to her, and her sister's existence has been erased. Alterations occur only when it suits the plot, however; the "butterfly effect" of small deviations potentially cascading into huge changes doesn't show up.
Just as series such as GILLIGAN'S ISLAND have the Omnidisciplinary Scientist, an expert in whatever category of science that week's plot requires, TIMELESS has an Omnidisciplinary Historian. Like experts in any other field of study, professors of history specialize. No one historian can know every period in minute detail, not even every period in American history (which seems to be Lucy's specialty). Her familiarity with the events of every date the time machine lands on and the backstory of every historical person they meet strains credibility. It wouldn't take more than an extra minute or two for each episode to show her reading up on whatever span of dates they're about to visit, which would go a long way toward plausible suspension of disbelief. And what's with that huge walk-in closet stocked with any type of clothing the travelers happen to need? When the time machine was built, did the designers PLAN to hop all over the past two or three centuries risking permanent damage to the timeline?
Hardest for me to accept is the scene in last week's episode, when Lucy tries to spook a serial killer in 1893 by revealing knowledge of details of his past that would appear only in an in-depth biography—and the team had no advance reason to suspect they would even meet this guy.
At the beginning of the same episode, Lucy has been kidnapped by the villain and taken to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. One character laments, as they're preparing to pursue the Mothership, "We're short a historian." Have they forgotten the Internet exists? If Lucy were there, she would probably have to look up the World's Fair to gather information or at least refresh her memory; the other characters could brief themselves the same way.
What really bugs me, though, is how the characters behave with such a sense of urgency in every episode. They have some means of tracking the Mothership. They always know where and when the villain has landed. Yet they act as if catching up with him is a life-or-death rush. Uh—they have a TIME MACHINE. They could research the target date and location for months or years, then transport themselves to the precise place and moment to intercept the villain.
Clearly the writers either haven't thought through the implications of time travel or ignore them in the interests of drama. A glaring example of consequences of the fact that a network science fiction series has to appeal to a general audience, not just the SF-fan subset thereof.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt![]() |
Diagram where each point of light is a Galaxy |
Cultures in the non-tropical regions of our planet typically celebrate seasonal holidays such as lights, fire, evergreens, and feasting at the winter solstice; harvest festivals and tributes to the dead in the fall; rituals welcoming spring, e.g., Easter and May Day (as well as advance preparations for the return of spring, such as Carnival and Lent); etc. Heather Rose Jones's Alpennia series takes place in an imaginary country in a version of our Europe. In addition to familiar holidays, the capital city marks the changing of seasons by measuring when the river rises to a certain level. What kinds of holidays might be celebrated on worlds that don't have seasons like ours at all? Come to think of it, why do the Fraggles in the animated series FRAGGLE ROCK have a midwinter festival of bells? They live in a giant cavern complex, where the climate should stay uniform all year round, and they don't have a view of sun, moon, or stars to mark the cycle of the year. (Yeah, I know, because the writers wanted a sort-of Christmas episode, and I loved it, but in-universe the episode lacks logic.)
On a planet where the main division of the year's climate falls between wet and dry, the onset of the rainy season—the time of fertility—might be an occasion for a major holiday. On Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover, which has four moons, some festivals coincide with the appearance of all four moons in the sky. Earth cultures mark months and weeks by phases of the moon, and some cultures follow a lunar rather than a solar year. How would the calendar of a world with no moon look? Without weeks in our sense, what method would societies use to set aside days of rest? Or consider a world like the planet in Isaac Asimov's classic story "Nightfall," with several suns. On that world, total darkness occurs only at intervals of over a millennium. With no memory of night and stars except in mythology, people go mad from the unprecedented sight, and civilization collapses at every "nightfall." But suppose darkness happened rarely but not all that rarely, say roughly once a year. The peoples of that world might have holidays to get them through that frightening occurrence, just as ancient cultures on Earth held rituals and celebrations to ensure that the sun would return on the winter solstice. Other kinds of worlds might have holidays centered on the periodic eruption of a geyser, the migration of important species of animals, or the blooming of a special tree. In our own culture we have celebrations such as the Cherry Blossom Festival and (in my home city in Virginia) the spring Azalea Festival. Capistrano honors the return of the swallows.
The STEVEN UNIVERSE animated series (Cartoon Network) takes place in an alternate world similar to ours but with divergences in history and geography caused by the Gem War (an alien invasion) thousands of years in the past. The characters live in Beach City in the state of Delmarva, for instance. According to the show's creator, this world has no Christmas. We've seen that there's no Halloween. (From these clues, we must assume no Christianity and therefore no Easter either.) Apparently they also don't have Thanksgiving. Other than local town celebrations, we don't yet know what holidays they do celebrate. Because they live in a temperate zone with changing seasons, though, we have to expect them to observe some holidays analogous to the ones we know.
Terry Pratchett's HOGFATHER takes place at the season of Hogswatch, Discworld's analog of Christmas. At the winter solstice the Hogfather brings toys to good children in a sleigh pulled by giant boars. People leave sausages instead of cookies for him, in keeping with the origin of Yuletide as a all-out orgy of feasting before the privations of winter. At the climax of the novel, Susan, Death's part-human granddaughter (it's complicated), has to save the original Hogfather, the primal being on whom the myth is based, from permanent annihilation. Death tells Susan that if she had failed, the sun would not have risen. When she asks what would have happened instead, he says, "A mere ball of flaming gas would have illuminated the world." It's also Death who tells us, in the same scene, "Humans need fantasy to be human."
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt![]() |
Clayton Moore - The Lone Ranger |
Numerous works of fiction use the premise of a character stuck inside a game (including a few holodeck episodes in the various STAR TREK series). If you enjoy that kind of thing, try the Japanese "light novels" (a generic label based mainly on books' length, not the "light" or "dark" tone of their stories) in the "Sword Art Online" series by Reki Kawahara. In the first sub-series, the protagonist, Kirito, one of the beta testers for a cutting-edge virtual reality game, gets trapped inside the game world along with hundreds of other players who log in on release day. The game designer has fixed it so that nobody can log out, and anyone who dies in the game dies for real because of the way the creator covertly rigged the brain-machine interface. Thanks to Kirito's experience as a beta tester, he becomes one of the survivors. The main appeal of this story lies in his Intimate Adventure journey from his original stance as a self-reliant loner to friendship with a fellow player, Asuna, and ultimately to deep mutual love with her. The game, Sword Art Online, feels like a three-dimensional, physical experience in most ways but with many game-based factors. For instance, getting injured drains points but doesn't cause true pain. So, despite the total immersion effect, because of details such as this the players have no trouble remaining aware that they're playing a game.
The latest sub-series, which I'm reading now, introduces Kirito to a new VR system that's far advanced over Sword Art Online. The new game, still in the testing phase, simulates the physical world in such extreme detail that the environment can't be distinguished from reality. When Kirito inexplicably wakes up in this environment with no memory of how he got there (no awareness of returning to the test facility, logging in, etc.), he feels hunger, thirst, fatigue, and pain as if in his real body. The only way he can confirm his guess that he's inside a hitherto unexplored version of the game is by opening status windows for objects in the environment. To the people he meets, these windows are simply a form of magic, "sacred arts."
If such a virtual world existed, simulating the primary world in the finest details, how could you know (unless you could access game features such as status windows) whether you were in a real environment or a fictive one? Would there be any way to prove either hypothesis? Furthermore, if you experienced all the effects of living in normal reality, would it make any difference whether you were or weren't?
This scenario brings to mind the problem of solipsism, the one view of the universe that's impossible to refute. If I believe all people and objects I observe are figments of my imagination, how could you refute that belief? The fact that things I can't control and/or don't enjoy happen around me doesn't provide a valid counter-argument, because uncontrollable and unpleasant events often happen in dreams, too. The solipsist hypothesis is completely untestable. Robert Heinlein seems fascinated with this world-view. One of his classic works has a protagonist who (thanks to time travel) is all the characters in the story, including his/her own father and mother. It ends with the chilling sentence, "I know where I came from, but where did all you zombies come from?" I've read a short story (can't recall author or title) set on an interstellar spaceship, in which one character begins to doubt that his memories of Earth are real. Maybe he and his crew mates have always been on the ship? He deteriorates from doubting the reality of Earth to believing that the other people on the ship cease to exist when not in his immediate presence. In THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, Alice ponders whether the sleeping Red King is a character in her dream or she's a character in his.
If "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream" (Poe), how would we know that? If we live within a perfect three-dimensional, multi-sensory simulation, we can't confirm or refute that possibility unless we can somehow get outside the simulation. As I read in some philosophy course long ago, "A difference that makes no difference is no difference." So it makes sense to operate on the working hypothesis that the universe and all its inhabitants actually exist.
By the way, I've written one "trapped inside a game" story, which appears in the collection DAME ONYX TREASURES, here:
Dame Onyx TreasuresMargaret L. Carter
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