"Time keeps on slipping...into the future."

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

- Groucho Marx

Posting from Ontario today - I'm currently sitting on the patio of the Delta Chelsea hotel, located near Yonge and College in downtown Toronto.  It's a beautiful sunny day, and although the hotel wants to charge the ridiculous daily fee of $13.95 for hardwired internet access in the rooms, they have free wireless downstairs.  Unlike the various dullards who are crammed onto every available flat surface in the lobby, I noticed that there was this outdoor section near the food court area....hmmm....so here I sit typing away outdoors in a shady spot with a nice little breeze, pleasantly isolated from the hustle and bustle of Yonge Street, sipping a frigid iced tea between sentences.

It's interesting to visit a familiar city on a semi-regular basis of about twice a year.  It's a bit like slow time travel - changes can be large and noticeable, or small and subtle.  In fact, this is probably the only feasible method of time travel, although it's not exactly what most people have in mind when they discuss the concept.

When you think about it, all you really need for successful time travel is a reliable method of suspended animation* and a great deal of faith in either automatic timing systems or your fellow man.  Want to move to the year 3010?  Climb in, close the lid, slowly drift off to sleep....when you wake up, presto, 1,000 years in the future.

As with most of the basic science fiction concepts, this one is first introduced by H. G. Wells. In his 1910 novel The Sleeper Awakes**, his character falls into a mysterious trance rather than being put on ice, but the results are the same.  Most of the novel is the sort of thinly veiled socio-political criticism that too often dominates Wells' writing, but it does offer the interesting idea that after sufficient time, a person in suspended animation whose financial life continues to be active would eventually possess all the money in the world. (In the "A Fishful of Dollars" episode of Futurama, Philip J. Fry proves the benefits of compound interest by unintentionally leaving 93 cents in his bank account for 1,000 years at 2.25% and ending up with over four billion dollars.)

The idea was continued by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1956 work The Door Into Summer, which amplifies on the problems faced by Wells' protagonist in terms of adapting to a completely different society in the future.  Obviously all of the scientific knowledge possessed by Heinlein's inventor/hero is obsolete, but the deeper problem is that all of his knowledge is obsolete, in every aspect of life.

They brought me modern clothes right after breakfast the next morning...and I had to have help in dressing. They were not so odd in themselves (although I had never worn cerise trousers with bell bottoms before) but I could not manage the fastenings without coaching. I suppose my grandfather might have had the same trouble with zippers if he had not been led into them gradually. It was the Sticktite closure seams, of course-I thought I was going to have to hire a little boy to help me go to the bathroom before I got it through my head that the pressure-sensitive adhesion was axially polarized. Then I almost lost my pants when I tried to ease the waistband. No one laughed at me.

By the way, the hidden joke is that this particular Sleeper has ended up in the distant future of the year 2000.

When I mentioned that faith in one's fellow man was required for Sleeper time travel, it's not only in the area of having someone wake you up.  Larry Niven's story The Defenseless Dead combines a growing need for transplant donors with a large pool of "corpsicles" - people in cryogenic suspension.  The result?  The Freezer Laws, which decree that anyone without sufficient funds to support them upon awakening is officially dead and as such can be used as a source of spare organs.  In other words, you still wake up, but "one piece at a time", as one of the characters comments.

In my opinion, the best use of the idea of stasis time travel has to be Vernor Vinge's clever Marooned in Realtime, a murder mystery disguised as a science fiction novel, or vice versa.  Vinge's novel is based on the idea of bubbles of suspended time - "bobbles", in the parlance of the novel.  Bobbles are indestructible and with sufficient power can be created to be of almost any size or duration.

The novel takes place after the Singularity, a point in human development where humanity has made a quantum leap to another state of evolution, leaving behind a silent, empty planet.  However, people who are in bobbles suffer the fate of the lame boy in the Pied Piper legend, left behind when the doors to paradise close.  The more technologically advanced survivors decide to use their bobbling technology to travel through however many millenia are necessary to collect all of the remaining humans as they emerge from their bobbles, in hopes of rebooting humanity as a species.

Problems arise when one of the originators of this plan is murdered.  The weapon?  Old age - they're trapped outside the bobbles and left to die while everyone else travels a thousand years.  Needless to say, the clues are not in the best of condition after the crime is discovered.

Of course, interesting though all of these ideas are, there's one problem with this particular approach to time travel.  After all, once I've finished my little faux time travel visits to Toronto, I can go home again...

- Sid

*  Just for the record: regarding my own personal time travel visits to Toronto, I do not consider living in Vancouver to be the equivalent of suspended animation.

** Originally published in 1899 under the title When the Sleeper Wakes, but Wells did some rewriting and re-published it - which may mean that Wells also originated the concept of the director's cut.

"Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?"

Tychus Findlay:  I just wish the damn thing came with an instruction manual.  For all we know we could be upsettin' the entire time-space continuum!!

Jim Raynor:  Easy, Tychus, this ain't science fiction...

- Starcraft 2

After what can only be described as an unnecessarily extended gap of 12 years, the good people at Blizzard Entertainment have finally released the sequel to Starcraft, their 1998 science fiction themed real-time strategy game.  Starcraft 2 continues the story of the Terran colonists in the Koprulu Sector after the conclusion of their civil war, their rebellion against Earth, and their struggles with the enigmatic alien Protoss and the hive-mind insectoid Zerg.

In the sequel, ex-marshal Jim Raynor continues his battle against the tyrannical Arcturus Mengsk, self-proclaimed Emperor of the Sector.  However, the situation is complicated by the return of the Zerg, still under the leadership of the vengeful Queen of Blades, who was a human telepath named Sarah Kerrigan until she was betrayed by Mengsk and subsequently captured and infested by the Zerg.  And what of the grim omens of the future as perceived by Zeratul, Protoss warrior and mystic?  Will Kerrigan save or doom the universe...?

Although it may not have a high profile in the eyes of the general public, the Starcraft franchise is one of the most popular games ever developed.  More than 11 million copies of the original version and its expansion modules have been purchased to date, and Starcraft 2 sold over one million copies on its first day.

It's interesting to note how many of the really big game franchises are based on fantasy or science fiction themes.  Admittedly, not all - you Grand Theft Auto fans can sit down now  - but the majority of games that have really made a mark, like the Doom and Half-Life franchises, Halo, Quake, Diablo, Dark Age of Camelot, and of course World of Warcraft, are set in futuristic or mythical worlds.

Obviously there are good reasons for this.  Games are not just exercises in eye-hand coordination and strategy, they present the same escapist opportunities as their relatives in the literary and visual genres.  Science fiction and fantasy gaming offers a rich creative palette in terms of world-building - it's one thing to accurately duplicate the western United States during the time of the cowboy, but an entirely different challenge to believably create the various environments and technologies of the far-flung planets of the Terran Confederacy circa 2504 or the verdant glades and exotic wildlife of Elwynn Forest.

The other appeal of SF and fantasy gaming is in the range of virtual abilities that they allow the player to experience.  If you're seeking an opportunity to wield mystical god-like powers in the struggle between Order and Chaos, guide massive war machines through smoking urban rubble, or just leap tall buildings in a single bound, there are lots of games that can easily indulge your particular daydreams.

The flip side of that coin is that I sometimes play historical games like Battlefield 1942 or Call of Duty simply because they lack the exaggerated powers bestowed upon the player by games like World of Warcraft.  In BF1942, there are no magical spells, no mystical armour, no energy shields, no BFGs - there's just a rifle, three clips, and a couple of grenades, which presents an entirely different gaming challenge.

However, Battlefield 1942 offers an unexpected explanation for the prevalence of science fiction and fantasy gaming.  I sometimes play BF1942 online with my friend Alan in Toronto.  Alan, whose father flew in Mitchells during WWII, steadfastly refuses to play as the Axis forces.  For me, the difference between the Allied and Axis sides is solely one of uniforms and equipment, rather than a moral position, but Alan is unable to ignore the implications of seeking victory for Hitler's forces.  Changing the setting to 2142 in the newest version of the Battlefield franchise certainly removed any stigma associated with a particular historical setting, although that change probably had nothing to do with the reaction of players like Alan.

Even so, that change to a futuristic venue may not have been a bad decision on the part of the game designers.  Imagine what it would be like to discover a hidden level in a game like Battlefield 1942, one in which the player is offered a horrifying opportunity to command the German forces that are operating Dachau... 

- Sid

Okay, I could do without all the doors making that "WHOOSH" sound.

Based on what I've already said about the size of my library, you wouldn't think that I would be going out of my way to add to it.  Nonetheless, when my friend Colin announced that he was going to get rid of some large hardcovers, I eagerly paid for the shipping in order to get a box full of new material.

One of the books was Films of Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Baird Searles.  As you might guess from its uninspired title*, it's an analysis of science fictions and fantasy films, and Searles offers some clever insights in the development of the motion picture aspect of the genre.

I was flipping through the pages this morning, and it occurred to me that there are damn few movie versions of the future in which I'd actually want to live.  Blade Runner is a good film, but would you want to live in that perpetual drizzle?  Mad Max speaks for itself, none of the zombie futures have any interest to me, and Soylent Green?  Thank you, but no.

But if I were offered the option of hopping into a fictional future, I think that I would probably say, "Star Trek - The Next Generation, please". 

Why ST-TNG?  Out of all the fictional futures that you might see on a movie or TV screen, The Next Generation is one of the few that suggests that people might lead real lives in the 25th century.  Far too often the future is just a backdrop, usually drawn in bold but undefined terms, but I think that the Star Trek team did its best to create a world that was both plausible and consistent, and then added everyday life to it.

The crew of the Enterprise has poker nights, plays around on the holodeck, works out, goes on vacation, hangs out in Ten Forward, plays musical instruments, presents amateur plays (sorry, Data, but "amateur" is appropriate), cooks real food when they get tired of that replicator stuff, and has to find someone to feed the cat when they head out on extended away missions.  (Ironically, they never watch TV.)

Think about it for a minute:  tell me one thing about a character from Star Wars in terms of their social lives.  Other than Luke's youthful interest in shooting womp rats in Beggar's Canyon, what do any of these people do when they're not whirling a lightsaber?

- Sid

*I first discovered Baird Searles when he was the movie/TV columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was equally "nose on your face" in terms of its name.