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Now and Then We Time Travel

Author : Fraser A. Sherman

Publisher : McFarland

Page : 280 pages

File Size : 16,41 MB

Release : 2017-02-06

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 147662643X

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Book Description

More than 400 films and 150 television series have featured time travel--stories of rewriting history, lovers separated by centuries, journeys to the past or the (often dystopian) future. This book examines some of the roles time travel plays on screen in science fiction and fantasy. Plot synopses and credits are listed for films and TV series from England, Canada, the UK and Japan, as well as for TV and films from elsewhere in the world. Tropes and plot elements are highlighted. The author discusses philosophical questions about time travel, such as the logic of timelines, causality (what's to keep time-travelers from jumping back and correcting every mistake?) and morality (if you correct a mistake, are you still guilty of it?).



Time Travel in Popular Media

Author : Matthew Jones

Publisher : McFarland

Page : 337 pages

File Size : 38,81 MB

Release : 2015-03-27

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0786478071

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Book Description

In recent years numerous films, television series, comic books, graphic novels and video games have featured time travel narratives, with characters jumping backward, forward and laterally through time. No rules govern time travel in these stories. Some characters move by machine, some by magic, others by unexplained means. Sometime travelers can alter the timeline, while others are prevented from causing temporal aberrations. The fluid forms of imagined time travel have fascinated audiences and prompted debate since at least the 19th century. What is behind our fascination with time travel? What does it mean to be out of one's own era? How do different media tell these stories and what does this reveal about the media's relationship to time? This collection of new essays--the first to address time travel across a range of media--answers these questions by locating time travel narratives within their cultural, historical and philosophical contexts. Texts discussed include Doctor Who, The Terminator, The Georgian House, Save the Date, Back to the Future, Inception, Source Code and others.



Paradoxes of Time Travel

Author : Ryan Wasserman

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 261 pages

File Size : 41,89 MB

Release : 2017-12-01

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 0192511823

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Book Description

Ryan Wasserman presents a wide-ranging exploration of puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, including the grandfather paradox, the bootstrapping paradox, and the twin paradox of special relativity. He draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology. The Paradoxes of Time Travel is written in an accessible style, and filled with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture.



The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History

Author : Jack Dann

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing

Page : 185 pages

File Size : 25,65 MB

Release : 2023-07-13

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 1350351377

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Book Description

A comprehensive guide to the speculative sub-genre of alternate history fiction, this book maps the unique terrain of this vibrant mode of storytelling and then explains how to write it. First giving a concise conceptual overview and the critical tools to differentiate the different forms of counterfactual fiction, Jack Dann lays out the 'tricks of the trade' such 'Heinleining', how to create recognizable 'divergent points' and how to employ paratextual elements and 'layering' to overcome readers' unfamiliarity with invented counterfactual events and cultures. Alongside this, Dann takes you step-by-step through a complete short story to demonstrate, line-by-line, how alternative history fiction works. As well as Dann's exacting methodology for writing professional quality alternate history stories, this book also features a live-on-the-page Q&A with some of the most esteemed alternate history writers working today, including Kim Stanley Robinson, John Birmingham and Lisa Goldstein among many others, who will detail their own particular hacks, theories, processes, methods and strategies. Combining extensive and deep knowledge of the field with accessible writing advice, this is the ultimate guidebook to the broad and complex sub-genre of counterfactual and alterative history fiction.



Connie Willis’s Science Fiction

Author : Carissa Turner Smith

Publisher : Taylor & Francis

Page : 264 pages

File Size : 13,65 MB

Release : 2022-10-31

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1000728455

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Book Description

In spite of Connie Willis’s numerous science fiction awards and her groundbreaking history as a woman in the field, there is a surprising dearth of critical publication surrounding her work. Taking Doomsday Book as its cue, this collection argues that Connie Willis’s most famous novel, along with the rest of her oeuvre, performs science fiction’s task of cognitive estrangement by highlighting our human inability to read the times correctly—and yet also affirming the ethical imperative to attempt to truly observe and record our temporal location. Willis’s fiction emphasizes that doomsdays happen every day, and they risk being forgotten by some, even as their trauma repeats for others. However, disasters also have the potential to upend accepted knowledge and transform the social order for the better, and this collection considers the ways that Willis pairs comic and tragic modes to reflect these uncertainties.



The Science of Time Travel

Author : Elizabeth Howell

Publisher : Simon and Schuster

Page : 240 pages

File Size : 47,83 MB

Release : 2020-06-02

Category : Science

ISBN : 1510749659

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Book Description

Travel back in time with Doctor Who, the Terminator, the X-Men, and all your favorite time travelers! Science fiction is the perfect window into the possibilities and perils of time travel. What would happen if you went back in time and killed your own grandparent? If you knew how to stop a presidential assassination, would time travel allow you to make your wish come true? Can we use time travel as a tool to escape the destiny of our future or mistakes of the past? The Science of Time Travel explores time travel through your favorite science-fiction franchises, from the classic time travel paradoxes of Star Trek to the universe-crossing shenanigans of Doctor Who. Discover the real science behind questions such as: Can time travel really erase our past regrets like in A Christmas Carol? Is it worth killing people in the past to prevent a horrible future like in Terminator? What can we learn from living the same day over and over again like in Groundhog Day? Could time travel destroy our right to privacy like in Deja Vu? And so much more! It's time to fire up the DeLorean to 88 mph, jump into the TARDIS hiding in plain sight, or warp space with the USS Enterprise to explore what time travel means for us.



The Time Machine

Author : H.G. Wells

Publisher : Broadview Press

Page : 295 pages

File Size : 31,15 MB

Release : 2001-02-12

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1460404211

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Book Description

Wells was interested in the implications of evolutionary theory on the future of human beings at the biological, sociological, and cultural levels, and The Time Machine, short and readable, draws on many of the social and scientific debates of the time. The Broadview edition of this science fiction classic includes extensive materials on Wells’s scientific and political influences.



Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction in Literature

Author : M. Keith Booker

Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield

Page : 435 pages

File Size : 40,93 MB

Release : 2014-10-01

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0810878844

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Book Description

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction in Literature is a useful reference to the broad and burgeoning field of science fiction literature. Science fiction literature has gained immensely in critical respect and attention, while maintaining a broad readership. However, despite the fact that it is a rapidly changing field, contemporary science fiction literature also maintains a strong sense of its connections to science fiction of the past, which makes a historical reference of this sort particularly valuable as a tool for understanding science fiction literature as it now exists and as it has evolved over the years. The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction in Literature covers the history of science fiction in literature through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries including significant people; themes; critical issues; and the most significant genres that have formed science fiction literature. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this subject.



Postmodernist Fiction

Author : Brian McHale

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 357 pages

File Size : 37,65 MB

Release : 2003-09-02

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1134949162

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Book Description

In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fiction's ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Exploiting various theoretical approaches to literary ontology - those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, Hrushovski and others - and ranging widely over contemporary world literature, McHale assembles a comprehensive repertoire of postmodernist fiction's strategies of world-making and -unmaking.



Theology and Science Fiction

Author : James F. McGrath

Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers

Page : 125 pages

File Size : 19,18 MB

Release : 2016-09-22

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1498204511

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Book Description

What is the difference between a god and a powerful alien? Can an android have a soul, or be considered a person with rights? Can we imagine biblical stories being retold in the distant future on planets far from Earth? Whether your interest is in Christianity in the future, or the Jedi in the present--and whether your interest in the Jedi is focused on real-world adherents or the fictional religion depicted on the silver screen--this book will help you explore the intersection between theology and science fiction across a range of authors and stories, topics and questions. Throughout this volume, James McGrath probes how science fiction explores theological themes, and vice versa, making the case (in conversation with some of your favorite stories, TV shows, and movies) that the answers to humanity's biggest questions are best sought by science fiction and theology together as a collaborative effort.