Supafunkadunka

Full agreement there.


This is true of pretty much ALL fiction. To single out time travel as a particularly egregious offender is an affront to the awfulness of most romance, fantasy, heist, spy and teen vampire stories ever written. Just because a lot of fiction sucks, doesn't mean we should just hold a moratorium on entire genres and stop trying.

Again, just because many writers use time travel in that way doesn't mean that using in a more intelligent and/or entertaining way is impossible. I've seen numerous examples from literature and film. It's only "cheap and meaningless" if writers use it that way.

Time travel stories do not have to disrupt the status quo. In fact, a good time travel story can add many layers of depth to the established canon by going to the past and filling in a few gaps. Going forward in time can be a good way to examine alternate or divergent futures - and because the future isn't set in stone it by definition doesn't disrupt the status quo.


That was precisely my point. Venture had seemed to imply that because Harlan Ellison was the only writer he thought did a time travel story that was half decent, then anyone who wasn't as good shouldn't bother. We're all trying to be better writers through this exercise. I just think that saying "time travel stories are all crap written by lazy authors and no one can write a good one so do something else" is completely against that ideal.

I would argue that 99% of all science fiction and fantasy that's out there is - to some extant - hackneyed or riddled with logical flaws. That doesn't mean it is without merit or cannot be entertaining. Sci-Fi and fantasy depend on a certain amount of suspension of disbelief in order to work in the first place. There's no such thing as magic or fire-breathing dragons or fiery space explosions or transforming alien robots but we just accept these things because it's part of the fun of the story.

If we are going to judge sci-fi based on adherance to logic and lack of hack writing, let's just toss Star Wars into the dumpster right now.

There are bad time travel stories - no doubt - but there isn't anything inherant about the notion of time travel that precludes a good story being written. There are tons of time travel books and movies I can think of off the top of my head which I enjoyed immensely. Did they have a few leaps of logic? Of course they did. Did they take historic liberties? Sure, sometimes. Did this make them bad stories? Not in the least.

Also, if you are going to set Harlan Ellison as the standard by which our writing needs to live up to, then you, me and everyone else here should stop writing immediately. The very best of our work here pales in comparison to absent-minded napkin scribbling of any number of professional writers. That's why they are full-time authors and we are playing superhero games on the Interwebs.

Time travel doesn't HAVE to be a cop out. Used cautiously and creatively it can be an excellent story-telling device. The problem is that it's so easy to use as a shortcut, that most can't resist. That's why crappy stories about someone going back to kill Hitler as a baby usually outnumber the good stories 20:1.

Obama Zombie! Bet you can't say it 10 times fast!