Steampunk, Time Travel and Suspension of Disbelief
By
AncientSpirit_NA,
Posted on: 2009-05-31 16:42 in Mission Architect
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Qr - time travel stories are easy to compose without any messups as long as nobody says 'but what if bob had killed his grandad?'.
I walked to work today. I didn't get hit by a truck.
But what if-
Nope. It didn't happen.
Likewise, if a time travel story ends with the mcguffin that enables time travel destroyed at a point in time after any time travellers are extant and using it, then you're pretty much ok.
Also, today, I didn't open my front door to find myself standing there with a longer beard and the keys to a delorean. This means that whatever happens in my future, I will never give myself the keys to a time travel machine, even if I find one and want to. Various accidents may have already happened to my future self that prevented him from meeting me today. It's more likely though that he remembers not meeting himself today and so just hasn't bothered.
Eco
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Unless meeting yourself in another time creates a time paradox and thus cannot happen.
See, it's all based on the rules you set for the time travel. As long as those rules make some sense without too much of a stretch, and stick to those rules, time travel can be done well.
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4) Everything that can be done can be done again, later, cheaper. This is a general rule for development. Compare the computer you're using to read this message to the first computers being developed.
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For me, a story has a beginning, middle, and end. If by the end we haven't dealt with what someone might do 200 years in the future, then it usually wasn't necessary.
Assuming, as always, that we're not talking about something that's just crap to begin with.
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So it takes the resources of a program.
Then again, ten years later.
Twenty years after that, a different program.
The next five years are prosperous so three different programs get started.
Repeat ad infinitum, until humanity explodes. It's commonplace because every single one of those programs could send people to the same point in time
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I know your trying to say something. I have no idea from this what that is, if it was anything at all.
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3) Time travel is not an inherently bad trope to use if you can control it, which 99% of writers don't do. I am painting with a very broad brush here when I say 'time travel stories suck,' but it's only in the same way I say 'I don't want to have a nail hammered into my foot.' Chances are, one nail might actually feel AWESOME, but I don't have the will to find that one.
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I am curious by what exactly do you mean " if you can control it".
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4) Everything that can be done can be done again, later, cheaper. This is a general rule for development. Compare the computer you're using to read this message to the first computers being developed.
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That is assuming that something can be scaled down, made simple enough that a single person can reasonably own, maintain and operated it, priced at a point where the a consumer could acquire it, and not have restrictions or inherent dangers that would cause the Governments and all the Ring Wraith Lords to descend upon the first guess of someone owning it. There are lots of things that could never be scaled down, made simple enough, cheap enough, or safe enough to be made available to the general or even private public to own or operate.
Just out of curiosity, what kind of science fiction do you like?
Good science fiction.
Edit: Okay, too easy a quip. I like science fiction that actually uses science well. I like science fiction where science is actually employed, and understood, by the person crafting it. I like science fiction where the science is an element that either expands my knowledge of how something works, or, if I already knew it, doesn't fly in the face of it and say something really stupid.
Jurassic Park, for example? Terrible. Because I know how big a velociraptor is and how DNA works. I know how fossilization works. On the other hand, I can see ways for them to reach the same end point, just using different science that also happens to actually be real. The funny thing is, I have a hard time seeing any problems in badly-done racing movies and stories because I don't know how to drive. 
Edit 2: Again, look at your computer. Such a piece of hardware was simply unfeasible to be distributed to consumers twenty years ago. How much better do you think they will get?
The Time Traveler's Wife was wonderful, in my opinion. I highly recommend it.
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#1
I think your confusing science fiction with a science book. Science fiction is about taking premise, theory, and/or some kind of fictional mechanism and extrapolating them out and/or their use through use of a story. Jurassic Park is a really good book, better than the movie, and some of the work in fossilized DNA that has been in the news makes it almost creepy at how close it might actually be possible.
I take it you wouldn't like Issac Asimov's Robots or Foundation series, William Gibson's The Difference Engine, Burning Chrome, or the Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), Anne McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern, or anything by the likes of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells (often both refered to as the Fathers of Science Fiction.)
#2
Computers are more of the exception than the rule. There is a staggering amount of collective work that goes into actually making the hardware, literally hundreds of millions of dollars of capitol equipment, millions of manhours, tens of thousands of people, all to make some tiny little piece of crystallized germanium arsenic doped and layered with a mind boggling array of trace elements and filled with chemical compounds, to sell at just a few hundred dollars. The only thing that really makes it possible is that it represents a VERY small material object sold to millions, perhaps billions of consumers at a significant cost. Even then, it is useless unless you get the hardware to use it in and the software to employ it.
I think something more on the comparison level of say, railroad infrastructure, orbital satellites, nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, space stations, superconducting supercolliders, and atomic weapons and such would be fairer. Stuff no one is just gonna be able to put in there backyard, let alone use just by themselves.
I like how they handle this in the movie Primer.
I can say without spoilering too much (be careful reading the Wiki article if you want to avoid spoilers) that one of the basic rules of time travel adhered to in the movie is that you cannot travel back to a time period prior to when the specific time machine you use was first turned on. So no matter how advanced Time Travel gets in the future, if that rule remains extant, you can never travel back to 'today' with a time machine that isn't already here and running somewhere.
The movie is all about how a couple of average modern engineers would handle time travel, and I think you might enjoy it.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
#1. No, I'm not. Jurassic park's understanding of DNA was idiotic even for the time it was made. Verne, Asimov and Wells were writing with good scientific understanding of their days, and extrapolated into interesting fields based on that. They didn't invent stuff and dress it up as 'sciencey.' No matter what time you're talking about, since we've found velociraptors, we have known that they are about the size of a basset hound.
#2. The engine that powers your car is much more efficient and much better than the engines that were being created in the 1900s. The pen you use is better designed than the pen your grandfather used. The toilet paper you use is better than the toilet paper that was used. The firearms being used today in common purchase are better than the best the military had to offer two hundred years ago.
As far as Primer goes, it's a story that keeps good control on its time travel mechanism, and actually complies with one common theory of time travel. It also uses the idea of duplicating degradation - which is to say, each new timeline involves copying someone and that involves further damage. It's not the wild, free-wheeling time travel presented in most cases, and is therefore, that 1% that fails to be bad.
Glad you liked it.
Seen or read any other time travel stories that you like? My standards aren't as strict as yours, but I do enjoy a good tale of time travel.
I remember, in fact, a short story that had fun with the whole 'time travel' is cheap and easy in the future' premise: a time traveller travels back to witness an important event, but he can't get a hotel room because all the hotels are full of other time travellers who have gone back to witness the same event. 
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
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#2. The engine that powers your car is much more efficient and much better than the engines that were being created in the 1900s. The pen you use is better designed than the pen your grandfather used. The toilet paper you use is better than the toilet paper that was used. The firearms being used today in common purchase are better than the best the military had to offer two hundred years ago.
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Yes, but cars have actually gotten less affordable and we were supposed to have flying ones by now. Most of those engines work on the same principle, but while they're more efficient, are less reliable than a lot of the older models out there. Saying that new cars are "better" than a lot of older cars is putting you on pretty shakey ground.
The pen isn't actually any better. It's made of cheaper materials and it comes in larger quantities, but it does not do it's job better than a pen from the 1950's. Is it better than a quill? Possibly.
What kind of pen are you talking about, even? The ones I use for pen and ink artwork are basically unchanged over the last few hundred years. The major innovation would be using plastic instead of wood holders.
The toilet paper is still paper. It is not remarkably smaller with more uses. One could argue that it is still less efficient than leaves or a hand and soap, but I'm not gonna go there because that's icky.
Firearms follow the same principles they have since their infancy. What has improved are rate of fire, ease of ammunition changes, things like that. A cannon still has to be x big to fire y size munitions.
The other guy was right that the rules that govern computers don't apply to everything. Things using processors and such will shrink over time, but some things will always have to be at least a certain size to work. Some things go up in price over time or stay static with inflation.
Since we haven't yet worked out how to create the wormholes necessary for time travel, we can't say for certain that the device that creates them will be all circuits and processors that will shrink and become cheaper over time.
Wow... I actually agree with everything Talen has said in his post.
Also, I think a lot of what people call SciFi these days is basically SciFantasy, which is to say, it's a framework where the story simply says it uses "Science" instead of saying it uses "Magic". The difference of course is that Science is REQUIRED to be an explainable and consistent framework, where Magic isn't really.
Stories that manage to take Magic and elevate it to the degree of being an explainable and consistent framework, are rare in my experience and it's just so much easier to just say: "It's a lightsaber and it works because it has a crystal in it, now shut-up and fight", or say "the power of the Deity flows through me... FIREBALL!", so I guess most stories do just that because it's easier to get the framework out of the way and get to the plot points.
Like Talen remarked about Jurassic, knowing how things work in the real world can sometime ruin some stories for you.
I find it very difficult watching any movie that displays contemporary computer systems... especially Independence Day where I was required to suspend my thinking entirely just so that I could believe Jeff Goldblum can decipher an Alien computer system and design a Virus to infiltrate it in just a few hours.
I believe that a Kheldian Gold Standard should be based on SO's, and for anything above that... there's Platinum!
Save Ms. Liberty (#5349) � Augmenting Peacebringers � The Umbra Illuminati
Save Ms. Liberty (#5349) � Augmenting Peacebringers � The Umbra Illuminati
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I find it very difficult watching any movie that displays contemporary computer systems... especially Independence Day where I was required to suspend my thinking entirely just so that I could believe Jeff Goldblum can decipher an Alien computer system and design a Virus to infiltrate it in just a few hours.
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I let him get away with it only because he's Jeff Goldblum.
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#2. The engine that powers your car is much more efficient and much better than the engines that were being created in the 1900s. The pen you use is better designed than the pen your grandfather used. The toilet paper you use is better than the toilet paper that was used. The firearms being used today in common purchase are better than the best the military had to offer two hundred years ago.
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Yes, but cars have actually gotten less affordable and we were supposed to have flying ones by now. Most of those engines work on the same principle, but while they're more efficient, are less reliable than a lot of the older models out there. Saying that new cars are "better" than a lot of older cars is putting you on pretty shakey ground.
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I have been a mechanic for 27 years. The new cars or pretty much anything built after 1985 is pure junk. My 67 chevelle will out last anything built now and is safer if it is ever hit. I had a woman slam into the side of my 67 custom 500(4 door galaxy like on the andy griffith show) and bent my front fender in, but totaled her car! I replaced my fender and head lights, her car when to the junk yard.
Engines still work the same as they did in the early 1900s. Fuel, air and spark. Same, and they are all still mostly only burning 25% of their fuel, unless you mod the engine like I have done in my cars. But, they are still inneficiant. Gas engines are and there isnt a lot people can do about it all but making hoter spark and more compresion and having the darn thing tuned right. The way cars come out of the factory is terrible. If you have your comp tweeked a bit you get more power and better gas milage.I hate the way they ship new junk out like that.
\But anyway, I could go on forever about this, so back on subject
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I know your trying to say something. I have no idea from this what that is, if it was anything at all.
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Allow me to rephrase. Let's say it takes five years' worth of gathering resources to send an agent into the past. So what? We've got hundreds of years. Lots of time to send agent after agent after agent to now.
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had a woman slam into the side of my 67 custom 500(4 door galaxy like on the andy griffith show) and bent my front fender in, but totaled her car! I replaced my fender and head lights, her car when to the junk yard.
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Remind me again, what would happen if either car was to hit a pedestrian?
What shall claim a Sky Kings' Ransom?
PPD & Resistance Epic Archetypes
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Remind me again, what would happen if either car was to hit a pedestrian?
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The pedestrian would learn a valuable lesson about not crossing at the light?
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I find it very difficult watching any movie that displays contemporary computer systems... especially Independence Day where I was required to suspend my thinking entirely just so that I could believe Jeff Goldblum can decipher an Alien computer system and design a Virus to infiltrate it in just a few hours.
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I let him get away with it only because he's Jeff Goldblum.
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That, and watching him together with Will Smith is so funny!!
I believe that a Kheldian Gold Standard should be based on SO's, and for anything above that... there's Platinum!
Save Ms. Liberty (#5349) � Augmenting Peacebringers � The Umbra Illuminati
Save Ms. Liberty (#5349) � Augmenting Peacebringers � The Umbra Illuminati
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I know your trying to say something. I have no idea from this what that is, if it was anything at all.
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Allow me to rephrase. Let's say it takes five years' worth of gathering resources to send an agent into the past. So what? We've got hundreds of years. Lots of time to send agent after agent after agent to now.
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had a woman slam into the side of my 67 custom 500(4 door galaxy like on the andy griffith show) and bent my front fender in, but totaled her car! I replaced my fender and head lights, her car when to the junk yard.
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Remind me again, what would happen if either car was to hit a pedestrian?
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What does a ped have to do with anything, and the dummy should watch where they are walking or stay out of the road.
And plus where I live, if there is someone in the road they are either drunk and lost or lost and drunk.
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Allow me to rephrase. Let's say it takes five years' worth of gathering resources to send an agent into the past. So what? We've got hundreds of years. Lots of time to send agent after agent after agent to now.
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So what, indeed? How many groups keep the same interest over 100 years? 200 years? If it takes 5 years to put together a single time traveling trip, then by the time you can send your second guy, there could be a new President in office. What if the economy sinks in those 5 years and it becomes too cost-prohibitive to do it again? What if a religious movement rewrites the moral code of your society over a 25 year period?
If you want to open that box, it never closes. Accept the story for what it explains within it and stop nitpicking needlessly (still assuming the story is a decent one, of course).
I cannot believe there has been an 18-page thread about "suspension of disbelief" on a message board for a game based on a fictional genre that involves grown men, women and occasionally children putting on colored underwear in order to fight/commit crime, giving themselves names like "Spiderman" and "Mr. Freeze" in the process. Not to mention developing the ability to stick to walls, fly faster than light, shoot laser beams out of their eyes and build doomsday devices, jet-powered cars and battle armor out of supplies purchased from the local Home Depot.
A high capacity for suspension of disbelief is kinda intrinsic to appreciating the format.
You might think so, but apparently it's not that simple.
And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines
Time Travel is wicked cool. Zzip-Im back in time! Zzapp! - I'm walking around in the future! ZZappoooom! - I'm back in the present betting on the horses! I'm rich!
ZaparoompADOOM! - Im back in time again! Take that, grandad! Ooh! paradox? Nope, BECAUSE IT TURNS OUT MY GRANMA WAS HAVING IT AWAY WITH THE MILKMAN!
eCO.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
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<QR>
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Lost yet. That series is using a modified version of Stephen Hawking's time travel hypothesis. Since whatever has happened in the past has already happened if you traveled into the past then you must have already caused what has happened (you know I think I need a new verb tense ;p ). Let me try that again... cause and effect stay consistent because if you travel into the past you are the cause of past events that effect the present (hmmm still doesn't sound right...ah well)
So far in the series I haven't seen any time travel related continuity errors but they do occasionally pass the idiot ball around.
My 50s:
Prime Minister MA/SR Scrap - Protector
Captain Hit-Guy DM/Reg Scrap - Freedom
Prime-Minister ILL/TA Troller - Freedom
Ultimate Minister Inv/SS Tanker - Freedom
QR:
1) I don't think Dr Who is crap. I don't like it, so I don't watch it, but I certainly don't think it's badly written because all its time travel malarkey seems to have the same purpose in the story as Star Trek's space malarkey - a way to connect an anthology of short stories.
2) Timecop was a bad example. That's not to say you can't do good time travel stories - in fact, and this is going to sound hilarious in hindsight, I found the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation quite interesting when I saw it (I was twelve).
3) Time travel is not an inherently bad trope to use if you can control it, which 99% of writers don't do. I am painting with a very broad brush here when I say 'time travel stories suck,' but it's only in the same way I say 'I don't want to have a nail hammered into my foot.' Chances are, one nail might actually feel AWESOME, but I don't have the will to find that one.
4) Everything that can be done can be done again, later, cheaper. This is a general rule for development. Compare the computer you're using to read this message to the first computers being developed.