Sunday 2 September 2018

No Beginning

A well constructed time travel narrative with circular causality has to be read at least twice because earlier events make sense in the light of later events but how does the author construct a circular narrative in the first place since he cannot begin at the beginning?

Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time and There Will Be Time succeed Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" just as Anderson's Psychotechnic History and Technic History succeed Heinlein's Future History and Anderson's Operation Chaos and Operation Luna succeed Heinlein's Magic, Inc.

We would like to see Anderson's Time Patrol adapted as an endless TV serial. As I argued here, the Time Patrol symbol should be visible from the beginning of any visual adaptation. Also, maybe an older Everard could be visible somewhere in the background, but without interfering, during a mission of the younger Everard?

Although the Time Patrol has yet to be adapted, circular causality has been dramatized on screen a few times:

The Philadelphia Experiment;

The Final Countdown;

Twelve Monkeys;

one very intricate episode of Doctor Who;

Andrea tells me that the twenty (so far) Marvel Movieverse films contain clues that Doctor Strange has time traveled and arranged, or rearranged, events to ensure the eventual defeat of the main villain.

Since all this has already been done with characters created for graphic fiction or the screen, the logical next step is the screen dramatization of time travel masterpieces by Heinlein and Anderson.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

You asked how do writers construct time travel stories using circular causality? I thought the answer to that would be to use methods like "in media res" at the beginning of such a story and non-linear narratives and flashbacks filling in earlier events and details for that story.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
But how do they even think of the causal circle before writing about it?
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I don't know. Your question here touches on what makes a creative writer a writer at all? How do writers come up with all those crazy ideas? And how do the best of them turn them into stories we care about, discuss, debate and argue over? And so on!

Sean