Twisted Times (Part 1)
An expedition into (and through) time-travel begins at Urban Future.
Comments welcomed here.
17
Feb
An expedition into (and through) time-travel begins at Urban Future.
Comments welcomed here.
I’m interested in seeing where you go with the time travel series, and I appreciate the link at the end with the overview of all possible time-traveling plots (I’ve book-marked it to read later). So it wasn’t clear from the article (nor was it meant to be, I imagine, since it wasn’t a review) would you recommend watching Looper? I missed it while it was in theaters. I read Sailer’s review and he didn’t come out very definitively either, his biggest argument being, pegging it as a comic book story rather than a science fiction one.
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Posted on February 17th, 2013 at 2:47 pm | Quoteyour apparent disdain for narrative coherence is matched only by the cinematic avant-gardes of the 60s and 70s and it warms my cockles I must say
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Posted on February 17th, 2013 at 3:50 pm | Quote@richeyrw
Recommend that you see Looper? — Sure. Its schlocky and ridiculous, but there’s plenty of interesting stuff there. The future Shanghai scenes (Pudong) are fantastic. Best Shanghai SF movie to date.
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Posted on February 17th, 2013 at 4:35 pm | Quote@hallisfrumpton
OK, but this isn’t just talking cinematic narrative incoherence, it’s historical narrative incoherence. Solid stuff comes first though (thermodynamics and cybernetics) — I’ll bend into a pretzel to try and keep it lively.
Delighted to hear that your cockles are cooking
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Posted on February 17th, 2013 at 4:38 pm | QuoteAs Sailer notes, Looper isn’t sci-fi, it’s comic book — identity-driven. Risible tech like The Matrix, but when viewed in relationship to the culture that produced it, revealing.
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Posted on February 18th, 2013 at 5:41 pm | QuoteExcellent! The comments section already feels like a massive improvement over Urban Future.
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Posted on February 18th, 2013 at 8:49 pm | Quote@Thales
I kinda sorta agree with that, except that time-travel scenarios impose their own logic on narrative structures, even when ‘risibly’ executed. For instance, the duplication of people through time-travel, which is the real core of the Looper plot, reveals something important about the implications of a certain twisted-time model. Hardly new of course (again, Primer does it better, if — or rather, because — less dramatically), but once time-travel is involved, novelty can be hard to find.
@Vimothy
Oh yes, oh yes …
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Posted on February 18th, 2013 at 10:24 pm | Quotecommentocalypse?
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Posted on February 19th, 2013 at 2:18 am | Quote@northanger
I’ll treat that as a nudge to get VL back into operation … (this afternoon?)
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Posted on February 19th, 2013 at 4:31 am | QuoteDon’t worry. I shan’t mention any connection between a wrinkle in time, pacta dæmoniorum and skillful means here. No, not me.
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Posted on February 19th, 2013 at 4:41 am | Quote@northanger
Just as long as massive, multi-comment, qabbalistic explorations unfold in all their magnificent immensity over at the other place, we’re cool …
[PS VL really stinks as a platform, now that I’ve been spoiled by this … linkage all but impossible, no italics … it’s horrible … might have to move]
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Posted on February 19th, 2013 at 5:15 am | QuoteWithout the Power of the Italic it’s impossible to discern the deeper connection between Horselover Fat, the amphidemons and 273d-e. So I’ll leave you to it.
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Posted on February 19th, 2013 at 5:40 am | Quote