could it be done, could, should, I, you, do it, I see that somehow I have neglected to link to Heinlein's "All You Zombies —" — the time travel story to end all time travel stories. It didn't, actually, end them; but if people would have read it, it would have. See what I mean about time travel? Gets you all mixed up and leads to confusing the tenses. [Which will remind me, in the next paragraph, to link to Tenser, said the Tensor, a sporadic (as I should be the one to say!) but always interesting site whose title is inspired by Alfred Bester. What the Tensor does with the "unanswered questions" from Slate has me LOL.] I plan to stop doing it, sometime soon. Or late, I can't tell any more.
That discussion must have been in someone else's comments. I went on to say something about Alfred Bester and "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," which leads to Copenhagen interpretation, many worlds, and that darn cat. (And the Tensor song, from Bester's The Demolished Man.)
Recent reading: Avram Davidson, Adventures in Unhistory. Prose so tasty you want to spread it on a muffin. Got to keep the "Selectra Six-Ten" away from the computer, though.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Thinking about time travel,
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7 comments:
Look, as long as I'm not my own grandfather, I think I'm doing okay.
Thinking of this, were you?
Actually, I'd not heard that before!
I was thinking of this.
My word, but that's a nice curly plot. It does something interesting with the old "what if you killed your own grandfather" trope.
I see that Bender's UFO body has gained the ability to hover, as the result of being reassembled into the shape of a UFO. I did not think that Bender had the ability to hover when his body was its regular shape. This leads me to wonder about the ease of hovering for vehicles and characters in SF movies. Even The Green Slime had that cool hovering aircar that delivered the astronauts to the lauch pad, though most of the tech in that one was pure early '60's. Everybody in some of these flicks can hover away like anything, with no or little sign of thrust from anywhere, like EVE in WALL-E, who just zips around because, you know, "she" can. We have been thoroughly prepared by these movies for the advent of a reactionless drive. I eagerly await its arrival. Of course we will probably need a whole new paradigm of physics …
The Futurama guys deliberately mess with Bender's capabilities to disturb the anal-retentive continuity lovers.
As for hovering...I'm sure I've seen something about a quantum effect that results in hovering without any messy mechanics. Can't remember where, though.
If you should happen to rememeber the thing, do try to find a margin big enough to scribble the whole URL!
Few people know this but Fermat's last theorem is actually about bagels. But the math/science/geek-industrial complex covered that up because "Fermat's Penultimate Theorem" just doesn't pop.
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