The Machines

I was thinking about the various plot devices that allow time travel. In addition to opening the way for a time travel plot, the nature of the device can itself be a symbol, or it can add to a novel or film in other ways - it can give a film a unique style, say something about the traveller, or it can be a source of humour.

Before H.G. Wells, time travel was something spiritual - the ghosts of Christmas Past or Future in A Christmas Carol - or accidental, as in the blow to the head of the Connecticut Yankee. Wells introduced the mechanical Time Machine, bringing time travel into the realm of human control. These trends continue in more recent sci-fi - mechanical Time Machines include the garage physics experiment in Primer, while accidental time travel includes the genetic disorder described in The Time Traveller's Wife. The blow to the head method is also alive and well in Life On Mars, a series heavily inspired by the Mark Twain novel. There are less spiritual time travellers these days. However it makes perfect sense, for example, that Nick Hornby's Sam might be sent back to revisit key moments in his life by his Tony Hawk poster as it represents a kind of father figure/guardian angel.

I've mentioned Kate and Leopold before: it's not my favourite film. However it is a good example of time travel symbolising the risks that are taken in life; and this is portrayed as literally jumping off a bridge.

The bizarre series of committee meetings that led to the creation of the Tardis has been well described. However I think it's also reasonable to think of the Police Box as an authority image, which along with the Doctor's title, is consistent with Doctor Who's interventionalist themes. Another telephone box time machine features in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, perhaps as a reference to Doctor Who, but this time the process of time travel becomes a comic search through a telephone directory and network.

My final example is a classic time machine: the deLorean in Back To The Future - and as Dr. Emmett Brown says: "The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"

It's about time...

Time travel is everywhere. I recently read Slam by Nick Hornby. This is not a sci-fi genre novel at all, but a novel about a Tony Hawk-obsessed teenager who has to grow up fast when he and his girlfriend become teenage pregnancy statistics - Hornby's very readable and funny adolescent writing style is for once used to bring to life an actual, likeable teenager rather than a regressed adult. However the book uses a flash-forward plot device - a magic Tony Hawk poster that flashes the protagonist forward along his own time to experience events in his future. Hornby and the protagonist are clearly aware that these trips might be real or imagined, and as Hornby allows the linear plot to catch up with the flash-forwards this question is answered. And what's the protagonist's name? Oh yes, Sam.

The Machine

While time travel appeared in stories before H.G. Wells, it is Wells who introduced the idea of the Time Machine. By making time travel a mechanical process relying on the ideas of a scientist he brought the idea into the sci-fi genre he was busily making his own. Wells' story uses the time travel plot device in order to explore evolutionary theory - the upper and lower class trends of the day are extrapolated into the distant future in which humanity has diverged into two distinct species, the childlike Eloi and the more animal, although possibly more intelligent Morlocks. Wells didn't introduce any ideas about changing the future or time travel paradoxes - change was of course offered to Scrooge by Dickens while the paradoxes are a more recent time travel theme.

The classic 1960 film starred Rod Taylor and was directed by George Pal. More recently, Simon Wells, great grandson of H.G., directed a re-make with Guy Pearce and Samantha Mumba. This was disappointing in some ways but introduced a version of the time travel paradox - the traveller is only driven to complete his invention following the death of his girlfriend, and tries repeatedly to save her life - each time, she is killed in some other, quite different but equally unexpected way. Eventually he stops trying and instead sets off for the future, where he is finally given a sad explanation for the paradox.

There's also an official, Wells-estate-sanctioned sequel written by Stephen Baxter, The Time Ships. In this book time travel has consequences: the traveller has returned from the future and shared his experiences and this has changed the future. Baxter's story uses the time travel device to explore a range of imaginative scenarios including a First World War that has persisted for decades, and a future where the Morlocks developed very differently from Wells' description - all the while developing Wells' ideas about class and evolution.

Kew Gardens - the novel

Billions of years in the future, when the Sun is big and red and close to death, who will be there to see it? H.G. Wells in The Time Machine explores this scenario briefly, imagining a bleak future inhabited by crablike creatures. Jack Vance is more optimistic - humans live on although past their prime.

I'm currently reading Hothouse by Brian Aldiss. Like Jack Vance Aldiss sets his novel in the distant future where the sun is close to dying. This is sci-fi and fantasy of a different kind though - the earth now belongs to the carnivorous and fast-moving descendents of the plants, with tree-running humanity one of just a handful of surviving animal species. It's a harsh reality - the members of the human tribe constantly face danger and death, while the vicious battles between different plants make the animal kingdom, or the human heyday, seem tame by comparison. Aldiss creates a world with detailed and internally consistent descriptions of the flora and fauna, and uses it to tell a story about the necessity, the inevitability and the fear of change. There is a great deal to uncover as the reader explores the setting, although much of this is lost on the protagonists who are only interested in their own survival.

Aldiss' setting has been criticised as implausible, but this is missing the point of the powerful and eerie central symbol of this novel - the tidally locked Earth and Moon and the webs of the Traversers connecting the two.