Ah, yes, The Man Who Folded Himself. David Gerrold’s the one who wrote “The Trouble with Tribbles”; his book in The Star Trek Chronology as recommended reading for those wanting to know more about temporal paradoxes. There’s a little bit too much fridge-logic in the end, though.
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I knew about him writing Trouble with Tribbles, but not the ST Chronology. I’ll may check that out.
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Ah, the book that answered the question: “If you cloned yourself, and you hit it off with you, and had sex with yourself, would that make you gay, or just at the very pinnacle of masturbation technology?”
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Lunopolis is another fun time travel movie. Saw it too long ago to talk about too many details, but I remember thinking it was pretty good.
I liked the way the GURPS Time Travel (3e) described stuff- The basic possibilities are:
Fixed time: If you go back in time and try to change something, you discover either that you can’t, or that you already did, and were responsible for how things happened. (Like Harry Potter).
Alternate timelines: If you go back and change something, you create a new universe where that happened. Depending on the story, you may or may not be able to return to the original timeline at a later point than you left.
Elastic time: If you go back and change history, it will still happen, just slightly differently. Kill Hitler as a baby, and a failed poet will rise to power in 1930s Germany and exterminate 7 million Jews. Go back and kill him, a failed musician rises to power and kills 5.5 million.
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Oops, I think I missed a word. I meant to say that his book is cited in the Chronology as recommended reading.
Not sure the Chronology has much going for it these days – it’s pretty out of date (how ironic), and really served as a prototype for the Star Trek Encyclopedia (which happens to have a fresh new edition in print these days).
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Interestingly, the author himself is gay. But I somewhat disagree that the book is about gayness or bisexuality per se. Rather the character study is about narcissism.
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It struck me as delightfully quaint that the author eagerly included all sorts of implied chronocest, yet when the protagonist finally encounters his female self, she is of course still a virgin.
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It definitely has a lack of polish. I feel the same plot could have been presented in a less confusing manner without sacrificing integrity. To me it’s like someone presenting an interesting idea at a conference but not communicating it as clearly as they could. That said, I’d be more critical of its flaws were it not made on a shoestring budget. Given the limited resources Shane Carruth had, and the fact that it was his debut film, I’m impressed it came at as well as it did.
Can we all just take a moment to appreciate this?
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Richard Hell and the Voidoids made a song about it!
It’s more dire than that. You need to have watched Primer.
That’s right: you need a time machine.
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The birth of a new word! And we were there.
(Just not sure if it shouldn’t be “chroncest” instead of “chronocest.”)
Primer is actually the most immersive time travel movie you could ever watch : while its length is officially only 77 minutes, you’d swear you’ve spent four hours watching it…
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I went to see Primer in theaters without knowing anything about it. I went by myself on a saturday afternoon, just something to do.
The movie is filmed partly in the apartment complex I was living in (Post Addison Circle in Addison, TX) and partly at the engineering school I was working/studying in (UT Dallas School of Engineering) and had a few bit parts that included coworkers of mine. A former boss of mine is the one who cracked the “what happens to engineers when they die” joke.
The movie is intensely paranoid and you can’t imagine how paranoid I felt watching it. Like… is this a joke, are they going to bring out cameras for the reality show I must be in right now?
I wonder if the filming was very low key and that’s why I never saw it, or if I was just very very self-absorbed
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I just finished listening to The Film Reroll* 2-parter of Bill and Ted and they early on did Back to the Future. They used very different time travel models for each game and they handled both really well. I didn’t realize GURPS had explicit time travel models, that’s pretty great. I gotta actually get the GURPS manuals.
*an actual play GURPS podcast where they role play movies…
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