Grandfather paradox The “grandfather paradox” is an argument used to prove the impossibility of time travel. The idea is that an individual (usually called "Tim" because the name looks a lot like "time") who could travel backwards in time, could kill his grandfather, prior to the conception of his father. But this would imply that Tim’s father would never have been born, and that in turn would imply that Tim would never be born. And if Tim was not born, Tim could not go back in time. This situation leads to a contradiction. Tim both could and could not kill his grandfather. He could (because he would by hypothesis be in the right time and place with a weapon) yet he could not (because he would have to have been born!) And since our “Tim” could be anyone this means that nobody could - that time travel is impossible. Syllogistically, the macro argument is this: Premise 1. If time travel is possible, then contradictions are possible. Premise 2...
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Discussing the late sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison a couple of weeks ago got me to thinking about one of the best known facts about his life, one which may not be true at all. The fact, or factoid, is: The Schwarzenegger movie, Terminator, was plagiarized from a scenario that Ellison wrote for the television program Outer Limits. If anyone ever tells you this, they'll probably tell it in the tone of someone retailing a deep dark secret. Something that was hushed up, but that the cognoscenti are aware of nonetheless. If this ever happens to you, please answer: "Oh, really? Which episode was that?" The truth is that Ellison wrote two such scenarios, both variations of the same general idea but very different from each other. Terminator is generally described as a rip-off of one. Or the other. Or it doesn't really matter. But it does matter. Because one is not entitled to a property interest in one's broad thematic ideas. Neither Ellison nor anyone else eve...
I watched a boring movie recently. Through DVD sent through the snail mail by Netflix (by now a very old-school system) I watched a fantasy about time travel. There is nothing wrong with fantasies about time travel. H.G. Wells', THE TIME MACHINE is a classic novel and gave rise to an equally classic movie of the same name. More recently, the Harry Potter novels/movies had time travel elements, as did the Terminator films, etc. The movie I saw last night, ABOUT TIME (2013) was an effort to do something different from all of that, to make time travel a plot device within a romantic comedy. The closest analog would be THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT (2004). There too, the story was about the multiple paths possible in the life of an apparently ordinary person who can travel back in time to correct what he sees in retrospect as his mistakes. But in BUTTERFLY, the emphasis is on how efforts to fix the mistakes of the past keep backfiring, so each time line seems worse than the ...
This is from a review of new books, contributed to the October HARPER'S Magazine by Joshua Cohen. "Fiction is one of two ways we currently have of traveling through time. The other is to travel from South to North Korea: from Samsung-sponsored clamor to a dictatorship of barbed-wire penal camps with nary a bar of WiFi. It's nearly as difficult for an American to obtain a visa to the SPRK as it is to obtain copies of the hundred books its government has approved for reading." That's a nice passage, and allows Cohen a segue between the sci-fi novels he had just been talking about, into a Korean-American publishing project, Dalkey's Library of Korean Literature.