BOC: "No-Zilla"

Kevin Perry kevin.perry at VIRGIN.NET
Wed Jun 10 09:51:49 EDT 1998


> i said properly, but meant effectively i guess.  i have never
> seen it to
> make sense.

Sorry - I wasn't meaning to be rude about it.  They were more rhetorical
questions than anything else: sugesting (maybe) that the reason it's
(almost) impossible to get a good fictional account of time travel is
because of the paradoxical nature of TT and the linear nature of our own
lives.  But that's a bit heavy for a Wednesday.

> > i) Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time (Morphail Effect)
>
> great series, but silly as hell.

Indeed :-)  The Morphail Effect is quite handy though.

> > ii) Julian May's Pliocene saga works very excellently and logically

I'll stick with this one as a good way of hanlding TT.  The
pseudo-scientific nature of her whole universe is very well thought out and
plausible.  It's the internal consistency that makes it work.

> > iv) Zelazny's Amber handles time travel differently
>
> at which point does this address time-travel?

I'm not as well versed in Amber as you, but I was thinking of the episode
Corwin's raven: agreed, it's not exactly TT, but it is similar.  And
hellwalking is near identical to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum
machanics (apart from the fact that we can't hellwalk of course).

If you did want to take a logical and pseudo-scientific view of TT in
fiction (which would prove the most consistent way of doing things), I feel
that you'd end up with a very dull story (Julian May aside).

Kevin Perry
Technical Manager
Wide Multimedia
http://www.wide.co.uk/



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