The Big Front Yard discussion

An extended visit from my parents and a general busyness means that I am very far behind in my Simak reading. I also haven't read anything that anyone (meaning Fred and Lawrence) has written here for fear of spoilers. I will certainly respond as soon as I finish the book, which will hopefully be fairly soon. Maybe this weekend.

Fred, the novel for November is Ring Around the Sun. Even though I'm behind, I'm hoping to get back to schedule soon and I see no reason to delay the monthly Simak reading.

Sounds good. If you ever need / want to delay the reading that's probably fine with me. I almost asked for an extension this past month, but then Time and Again got so darn good that I read it every chance I got. December may pose a challenge to my reading. We'll see.

This has nothing to do with Simak or this book, but while we're on the subject of time travel, I'd like to get your all's opinions on the movie Primer. I just got around to watching it (it came out in 2004) and would like to hear what you esteemed gents have to say about it.

As Mr. Owen knows, I have a personal distaste for almost every single time-travel story, but lately it seems as though I've seen and read more of that genre of SF than others.

Oddly I've not even heard of it, although I've been growing somewhat cool on the moving image where SF is concerned. Actually quite enjoy time travel stories as a rule.

I finished Time and Again yesterday. I just posted a bunch of thoughts in the other thread.

As for Primer, I've never been able to "get it." Something about it rubs me wrong. It may be the best time travel film we've gotten so far. I don't know. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure holds up pretty well. :)

As for time travel in general, I think it was Hawking's Brief History of Time that convinced me that it is impossible (at least going backwards). I still enjoy it as a literary/imaginative device.

Specifically regarding Time and Again, I think that the time travel is well developed and works to de-center the action, allowing for the multiple reactions to Sutton's work to manifest in concrete ways that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

You must be warming up to time travel, Fred, now that you've seen to what good effect it can be used by the inestimable Mr. Simak!

1. I agree that the Bill & Ted movies are some of the best time travel movies, but they possibly might be slightly inferior to the first two Back to the Future movies.

2. The above comment should illustrate how I think of time travel stories and what elements I like about them. Both picks are fun and don't take themselves seriously. I like the CONCEPT of time travel because, in my opinion, it's one of the ways to locate the boundary of the capabilities of human logic. It's an unspoken assumption in the zeitgeist today that if something is true it will conform to logic. The rub? That's human logic. As it currently exists. We like to think we are so clever that all things are within our mental reach and if they aren't then they are false. But we can purposefully set up mental scenarios that create cognitive dissonance. "Can God create a rock so heavy that He can't lift it?" Yes is the inverse of no, yet both of these answers are equally wrong in this case given that the concept of God is understood to be infinitely powerful / there's nothing that particular god couldn't do. Yet if yes is true then no must be false according to my 7th grade math teacher (A is true : ~A is false). So while a logical conclusion to draw would be that it is not possible for a being to exist that is infinitely powerful, another could be that the answer exists outside the human capacity of understanding. Or it points out a flaw in language. Or I guess shows that yes is not, actually, the inverse of no. Anyway, time travel stories will always contain uncaused events and seemingly circular logic that shorts out human reason in a way similar to the aforementioned example and I get a kick out of that. What I don't get a kick out of is how they just make up arbitrary laws of physics like "You can go back in time as long as you don't change too much". Preventing Lincoln from getting assassinated is somehow an affront to the universe, but eating a sandwich is fine because it only changes unimportant stuff. Says WHO!? Simply by BEING in the past one would be changing things. You'd be displacing air molecules that weren't historically displaced, kicking stones that weren't kicked, exhaling CO2 that has no place back in that time.The skin that sluffed off your body would be made up of molecules that already exist in that time and would stay there after you left. In short, time travel would result in necessarily creating new mass and, therefore, energy. Are we to suspend our current understanding of physics to read a genre of fiction that specifically focuses on the principals OF our current understanding of physics? Or we're supposed to let it slide because the universe is inexplicably partial to the concerns of humans' opinion of what is or isn't an "important" event? I call bogus on that. A story can set up any rules it wants, but it's frustrating when it breaks the rules it itself has set up. Really any time travel story can't avoid that.

3. What is probably my favorite time travel movie that takes itself seriously is Time Crimes. It takes the approach of a guy going back in time one day, multiple times to prevent something from happening, but winds up changing absolutely nothing. He merely plays a different role in the events that unfold the same way each time and the viewer sees that multiple versions of they guy exist simultaneously and act unaware of each other. So nothing actually ever changes about the past. We just see the same event a few times from a different character's perspective. Ultimately there are still uncaused events (what I heard one author refer to as "chronoclasms", which I just love), but I can at least stomach them.

More later.

I like Timecrimes.

Did you see Looper? I hate the time travel in Looper.

And, back to Simak, how did you like the time travel in Time and Again? If I remember right, Simak describes the breakthrough in time travel research as a psychological switch, a sort of paradigm shift in the way the mind perceives/experiences time. Following this is the construction of a "Brain" that operates machinery that allows for time travel. In this, I think that Simak hints at the possibilities of humans being able to do this traveling/timeshifting with their own brains, no?

I don't recall that being brought up in this book, but I may be mistaken. That comes up in other Simak books; as well as does telepathic space travel.

He deals with travel into the future in Cosmic Engineers by saying its a possible future, not a definite one. But that's equally ludicrous as travel into the past is, because people are still out of the linear flow of time as we know it and what was once sequence becomes a simultaneity. Whatever. I think it's highly possibly that time doesn't work as linearly as we currently believe it does. And of course my staunch belief in free will necessitates the we are each capable of initiating uncaused events. Is this a spiritual capability or a physical capability that we as of yet cannot rationalize? Or is it an illusion? I'm betting the third choice is the weakest of the three.

Did I like the time travel in Time and Again? I guess I'll say that I tolerated it. Like you said, it was a necessary element to have. Otherwise the story would have to venture into the supernatural explanations and that's something Simak seemingly didn't want to do in this book. And I think the story is stronger staying out of the supernatural this time. I liked the time travel parts in Cosmic Engineers not because of the time travel itself, but because the writing at that point started to get really good.

I haven't seen Looper. I may or may not ever see it. Incidentally, a guy I know worked in the soundtrack composition for it.