Monthly Archives: March 2015

31 March 2015 · 11:59 am

Time Travel Media March: 10 Greatest Time Travel Movies

We’re now at the end of my blog series about time travel media (TV, film, and literature). For the past two years, I’ve been working steadily on a time travel novel, The Curiosity Killers, as my thesis project for Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. As I inch closer and closer to graduation this June, I want to celebrate some things that inspired the writing of that book.

For today, I offer my favorite time travel movies. What are yours? What have I missed?

1. The Back to the Future trilogy: Back to the Future (1985), Back to the Future Part II (1989), and Back to the Future Part III (1990)

The first Back to the Future film is basically flawless, especially for mid-‘80s cinema. You have comedy, you have Michael J. Fox, and you have 1950s nostalgia. Teenager Marty McFly is accidentally sent back in time to 1955 by his mad scientist mentor, Doc Brown (I kind of want to know the deeper backstory of how Marty and Doc met. Somebody get on that prequel!). In the ‘50s, he meets his parents when they were his age and inadvertently prevents their courtship. In order to ensure his own existence, Marty has to make them fall in love. This is a near-classic example of the grandfather paradox.

The second two films were less perfect but still fun. In Part II, Marty and his girlfriend travel forward to the year 2015 to see how their children’s lives have turned out. In the process, Doc’s time machine is stolen and an alternate—and terrifying—future is created.

In Part III, Marty goes back to rescue Doc in 1885. This final chapter is underrated. Viewed today in the post-steampunk explosion (at least in literature), so many tropes we now see in this genre were established, cemented by the fabulous closing image of a time travel locomotive.

2. Somewhere in Time (1980)

Schmaltzy, soft-focus weepie. Christopher Reeve is a playwright who gets approached by an elderly woman at one of his shows. She gives him a pocket watch and tells him to “Come back” to her. Reeve’s character later discovers she was an actress whose heyday was sixty years earlier. He finds a professor who teaches him how to time travel via self-hypnosis and sends himself back to meet the actress in her youth.

3. Looper (2012)

Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis play the same character at different ages, with the younger version contracted to kill the older one. There are tons of illogical paradox issues here, but so many sequences are just plain cool or downright gruesome—a famous scene involves a man being destroyed, bit by bit, when he’s being tortured in the past. For this one, just go along for the ride and try not to reason it out too much.

4. Groundhog Day (1993)

A weatherman, played by Bill Murray, begins reliving the same day over and over again. Cute and fun, but there’s also a slightly better, more logical film with the same concept from the same year (12:01, starring Jonathan Silverman and Helen Slater) that gets overlooked during the deluge of repeating-day time travel media that began coming out around the same time. Both are worth a look for different takes on the phenomenon. I like 12:01’s attempt at a scientific explanation, but Groundhog Day’s mystical gotta-live-the-day-over-until-you-get-it-right concept works better as an allegory for living a better, more present life.

5. Happy Accidents (2000)

Marisa Tomei is unlucky in love until she meets Vincent D’Onofrio. The only problem is he tells her he’s from the future. The fun thing about this film is that it plays with genre: is it a quirky indie romantic comedy, a science fiction film, or a film about unreliable narrators and mental illness? We’re left wondering about reality and fantasy and whether, in the context of love, if the dichotomy between truth and delusion is essential to trusting and believing in one’s partner.

6. Primer (2004)

This film was shot for only $7,000, and yet it’s one of the most complex studies of a highly technical and speculative subject I have ever seen. A pair of engineers working on inventions in their garage inadvertently devise a means of time travel. They begin using it to their financial gain through the stock market, but the effects of travel begin to wear on them emotionally and physically. The intersecting timelines have generated a lot of online fan work to attempt to graph or document the travels logically, though these resulting diagrams and charts are themselves highly complex.

7. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

And herein we swing wildly from one pendulum of thoughtchewy intellectualism to its exact opposite. Bill and Ted are high school students who pay little attention in history class. When they find a phone booth time machine, they bring historical figures to the present to help them with their presentation assignment. This movie does not age well, but it’s still amusing and of course features a very young Keanu Reeves as Ted. The sequel—Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, 1991—is less time travel and more nonsensical farce.

8. 13 Going on 30 (2004)

13-year-old Jenna makes a birthday wish in 1987 and is transported into her 30-year-old self in 2004. This is mostly pretty standard body swap/suddenly-an-adult comedy, but the fact that Jenna still perceives it as 1987 is where the time travel element comes in. Jennifer Garner, as the grown-up Jenna, is adorably innocent and lends the material a great deal of charm.

9. Donnie Darko (2001)

The time travel in Donnie Darko is only hinted at, explained almost solely through expanded media in its Director’s Cut DVD material. Viewers could interpret the film as a meditation on schizophrenia, with its onset typically occurring in one’s late teens and early twenties. The titular character begins experiencing odd shifts of time and perception, leading up to several neighborhood and familial catastrophes. Interpreted more literally, Donnie’s sudden abilities of perception and strength speak to the possibility of multiverses and time loops.

10. Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

I’ll let you stumble upon the trailer for this gem yourself, as most are red band. Hot Tub Time Machine is an incredibly crass (yet, honestly, pretty darn funny) tale of a group of social outcasts who go back to the year 1986 via a, um, yes. Hot tub time machine.

Look, I’m not saying this is a great film (John Cusack is notably absent from the sequel, as if finally admitting his embarrassment at this project), but it sort of comes full circle from Back to the Future insofar as the heroes’ main goal in the past is the ensure that their present day will be better…since it can’t get much worse.

You can find my celebration of time travel television and literature earlier this month. For more time travel fun, check out the Facebook fan page Time Travel Book, TV, and Movie Club!

Time Travel Media March: 10 Greatest Time Travel Novels

All this month, I’ll be blogging about time travel media (TV, film, and literature). For the past two years, I’ve been working steadily on a time travel novel, The Curiosity Killers, as my thesis project for Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. As I inch closer and closer to graduation this June, I want to celebrate some things that inspired the writing of that book.

For today, I offer my favorite time travel books. What are yours? What have I missed?

1. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger, 2003

I read this when I had the flu, and all I could do was cry and sneeze, becoming a snotty, snobby messy. Clare and Henry are like any other couple—except that Henry randomly time travels without control or warning. This results in twisted interconnected existences, with the two crossing paths from childhood to old age at different stages of each other’s lifetimes. There is also a broader metaphor at work here of genetic disorders—if you knew your child would suffer from something dangerous and heartbreaking, would you still try to become a parent? Clare and Henry have to decide all this and more in this twenty hanky tearjerker.

2. The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers, 1983

The Anubis Gates is sometimes cited as one of the first steampunk novels, though it contains no actual steam-powered technology; it is, however, steeped in Victorian atmosphere. Professor Brendan Doyle goes on a time travel trip with an eccentric millionaire and winds up stuck in 19th century London. Forced to assume a false identity and scratch together a living, he falls in with a group of pickpockets, is kidnapped by magicians, finds love, and causes a paradox. This novel is especially appealing for literature nerds, as Doyle has a very special connection with one of his favorite poets.

3. Kindred, Octavia E. Butler, 1979

I’ve been teaching Kindred in my college literature course for several years, and students tend to respond well to it. This is a study not just in paradox (although it’s a great tool for discussing this concept, as well as questions of logic in literature) but also historical fiction, African American literature, and feminist literature. Dana is a 20th century African American woman married to a white man. She begins time traveling abruptly to the pre-Civil War South, where she meets her ancestor, the son of a plantation owner, and cannot return to her own time until she saves him from some dangerous situation that threatens his life. If she’s physically connected to her husband, she can bring him back to the past with her as well, which leads to the couple having to pretend to be master and slave. Stark, upsetting questions about identity and privilege are raised, and Butler is unflinching in her portrayal of plantations as sites of unspeakable violence. This is a time travel novel about so much more than just the science fiction/fantasy elements; it’s about the human element and trauma reprocessing, both on a personal and cultural level.

4. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells, 1895

When we think of time travel fiction, we think of The Time Machine. H.G. Wells may not have invented the concept but he certainly popularized it in this story of an inventor who hits upon a way to travel through time. He goes far into the future and encounters post-human creatures engaged in class warfare and suffering grave societal ills. Much of the Time Traveler’s observations of the Eloi and Morlock factions of beings exemplify Wells’ own social and political leanings. This isn’t a mere surface novel of adventure but rather a castigation of the stratification of elite and working classes in the Victorian era.

5. 11/22/63, Stephen King, 2011

This book is 880 pages long—not the weightiest tome Stephen King has ever penned, but longer than I normally have time to devote to a single novel these days. However, I devoured this in less than a month, binging on it whenever I had a free second. I distinctly recall reading it while walking to meetings, even, reading the ebook version on my phone as if my life depended on it. High school English teacher Jake Epping discovers a portal connecting the back room of a diner in 2011 to September 9, 1958 at 11:58 a.m. Jake eventually decides to use the portal to live in the past for five years and try to save John F. Kennedy from being assassinated. As Jake learns, preventing a tragedy on this magnitude is no easy task. The main reason I love this book so much is the clear attention to detail and research King took with it. He began work on it as far back as the early 1970s, and then later worked with a researcher to make every detail period appropriate and accurate, down the price of a pint of root beer. My own research for The Curiosity Killers took a long time, particularly for my Jack the Ripper, Black Dahlia, and Mothman storylines. Readers appreciate it when time travel stories exhibit as much painstaking historical accuracy as possible.

6. Outlander, Diana Gabaldon, 1991

This series is making a big splash these days via its TV series adaptation on Starz. A World War II British Army nurse is pulled backward in time to mid-18th century Scotland. There, she falls in love with a highlander and marries him, despite being married in the 1940s. This is a tale of culture clashes as well as a love story with enough ambiguity to keep it from simply being a standard romance.

7. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, 1969

A work of tremendous experimentation, Vonnegut’s novel is less a plot-driven story and more an examination of how fiction works. Books are referenced within the text. Events are told non-linearly, both through time travel devices, flashbacks, and a jigsaw puzzle order of scenes. The gist of the work is that it describes the aftermath of the WWII bombing of Dresden, which Vonnegut himself witnessed. When taken as an allegory for war experiences, it can read as a study in PTSD (protagonist Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time” as a result of what he went through in the war), decades prior to its formalization as a psychiatric diagnosis.

8. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle, 1962

To be clear, the characters in A Wrinkle in Time do not travel to different times. Thus, this isn’t often classified as a time travel novel per se. However, the method by which the Murry children travel to other planets and dimensions is through a concept called a “tesseract,” which the novel defines as folding the fabric of space and time (very Doctor Who’s TARDIS, in fact, which is a device that can travel in both space and time). If one folds this fabric, after a fashion, they’re able to use it to shorten great distances and reach places otherwise inaccessible to one another. Though “tesseract” is a real term in mathematics and geometry, the concept as described in this and L’Engle’s other Murry novels is akin to a wormhole, which is often put to great use in other SF works dealing with space and time travel.

9. Lightning, Dean Koontz, 1988

Lightning was probably one of the first contemporary novels about time travel I ever read. A mysterious stranger named Stefan rescues author Laura Shane at several pivotal points in her life, culminating in the reveal that he’s actually part of a World War II time travel experiment. Unlike some of the other books on this list, Koontz employs a mechanism whereby paradoxes are impossible, although I would argue that Stefan’s repeated rescuing of Laura by itself represents the creation of a paradox. But hey, paradoxes are fun to dissect and untangle, and I’m a big believer in readers cultivating a willing suspension of disbelief.

10. The Door into Summer, Robert A. Heinlein, 1957

This is the brand of time travel that doesn’t only involve machines and wormholes but also sustained sleep. Dan goes into suspended animation in the year 1970 and awakens in 2000. Through using time travel, he is able to witness alternate versions of himself and work out his best possible future. Here, paradox is used to its fullest effect to manufacture personal and professional change—a fantasy very relatable to audiences of the mid-1950s, struggling with the aftermath of WWII and the beginnings of the Cold War.

Watch this space for my top ten time travel movies, coming later this month! You can see my top ten time travel TV shows here.

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17 March 2015 · 9:02 am

Time Travel Media March

For today, I offer my favorite time travel TV series. What are yours? What have I missed? A few I like that didn’t make the final cut include Fringe (which, while great, is really more about parallel universes than time travel as its central SF trope), Alcatraz (a very cool series but cut so short we never found out much about the time travel mechanism), and Sapphire and Steel (super fun and creepy, but limited appeal today based on its glacial pacing and relative obscurity).

1. Doctor Who, BBC, 1963-1989, 1996, 2005-present)

The quintessential time travel show. Long-running, cheesy, and ever-changing, Doctor Who is the love story of a man and his time machine/spaceship. There are essentially three kinds of Doctor Who storylines: time travel, space travel, and aliens rampaging modern-day London. Give me a dozen gimmicky time travel stories over the others any day. The best always include a historical figure (e.g. “Vincent and the Doctor,” “Tooth and Claw,” “The Girl in the Fireplace,” “The Shakespeare Code”) battling robots, aliens, or both.

2. Quantum Leap, NBC, 1989-1993

Instead of a visible time machine/spacecraft or a time traveler observing the events of the past or future, Quantum Leap rewrote time travel rules for the twentieth century. Our time traveler, Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula, later of Star Trek: Enterprise) can only travel within his own lifetime (roughly the early 1950s up through a near future in the late 1990s). Furthermore, when he “leaps,” he appears as someone else in the past, their “physical aura” replacing his own. A convoluted concept, but the series executed it much like a historical anthology series, full of period-appropriate music and fashion.

3. Lost, ABC, 2004-2010

Lost didn’t start out as a time travel show. In the beginning, it was almost a cross between Survivor and Gilligan’s Island: how will a group of plane crash survivors make a new life for themselves on a desert island? But then the smoke monster showed up, and there was a hatch, and suddenly in season 5 a group of the survivors are marooned in the 1970s for reasons that—much to the show’s rabid audience’s chagrin—are never adequately explained. If you view Lost as an allegory, with the survivors being “lost” as people even before and after their island adventures (in much the same way The Walking Dead refers a bit more to the survivors than the zombies), then this series still holds up as an interesting study into the dark spots of the soul. The video above is a set of fan-made opening credits, as the series famously had only a title card to start each episode.

4. Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, BBC One, 2006-2007 and 2008-2010

First of all, ignore the American remake, at least until you’ve finished with the original. The first series, Life on Mars, deals with twenty-first century police detective Sam Tyler being inexplicably sent back in time to the 1970s. Those around him think he’s a newly-transferred detective, but they don’t know he’s from the future. Throughout the series, Sam picks up clues that he may be hallucinating while in a coma from injuries sustained in a car accident. The spin-off series, Ashes to Ashes, features a new detective character, Alex Drake, being sent from the present back to the early 1980s and once again being stationed in the same precinct as Sam Tyler with many of his former colleagues. Like Sam, Alex thinks she might be languishing in a hospital after being shot. This sort of time travel device is more fantasy than science fiction, and the David Bowie-inspired titles, music, and imagery give both shows a trippy, post-psychedelic patina. LoM has a recurring Wizard of Oz motif threaded throughout as well, and AtA makes constant Alice in Wonderland references. In both cases, the series also serve as a kind of homage to the cop dramas of their respective eras.

5. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Fox, 2008-2009

It’s easy to forget if you’re not a hardcore fan that the Terminator franchise of films and TV series is technically based on a time travel premise: in order to save humanity from what is essentially a sentient internet, freedom fighters are sent back in time to ensure the birth of humanity’s savior, John Connor. Flesh-covered AI robots called Terminators are also sent back in time, to ensure John Connor (and his mother) are instead killed, preventing the human uprising. The Sarah Connor Chronicles focuses on John’s mother and her quest to keep her son safe at any cost. They’re aided by a female Terminator model who is actually on their side. The time travel in both SCC and other Terminator properties is unique in its focus on future travelers coming back to what the audience thinks of as present day. We may not see the effects of the time travelers’ efforts as much, at least not until 2009’s Terminator Salvation film, set in the year 2018.

6. Being Erica, CBC, 2009-2011

What if you could have a second chance at all the pivotal moments of your life? That’s what happens to aptly-named Toronto book editor Erica Strange, who finds herself receiving therapy from a mysterious man named Dr. Tom. During Erica’s sessions with Dr. Tom, whenever he pinpoints something from her past that is indirectly affecting her present, she goes back in time to relive the original moment—in her previous body but with all her present memories and experiences and knowledge intact. The fun of this series comes from reliving the ‘80s and ‘90s, but at times it gets pretty deep. The underlying theme is, at its heart, understanding that even our most painful of experiences shape who we are.

7. Tru Calling, Fox, 2003-2005

From the Groundhog Day school of time travel: what if you could relive a day over again to intervene in a tragedy? To stop a crime? To save someone’s life? That’s what happens to medical student Tru Davies (Eliza Dushku) when she starts working in a city morgue. This series is notable for its premise as well as the presence of pre-Hangover Zach Galifianakis as Tru’s boss.

8. Journeyman, NBC, 2007

Journeyman was a victim of the Writers Guild of America strike of 2007; not enough episodes were produced before TV series experienced schedule-crippling hiatuses, and as no new episodes were available past the original 13-episode order, it was cancelled. This is a shame, because what started as a Time Traveler’s Wife-inspired fantasy romance gradually turned into a complex SF system of multiple time travelers from multiple eras working together to solve a large-scale problem in time.

9. Voyagers!, NBC, 1982-1983

To watch this series now is to see something almost proto-steampunk at work. Time traveler Phineas Bogg and his teen sidekick are part historical tourists, part solvers of time errors. Whenever history doesn’t unfold the way it’s supposed to, it’s up to them to correct it. Episodes usually featured famous historical figures. Bogg’s time travel device and vaguely pirate-like costume lent the series a quasi-Victorian sensibility.

10. The Time Tunnel, ABC, 1966-1967

The series that really started time travel on American TV. We see the starts of various themes that later spring up in Voyagers! (encounters with historical figures) and Quantum Leap (mysterious government program in danger of losing its funding). Though reboots were attempted in the 2000s, they have thus far been unsuccessful, perhaps because we now live in an era where time travel on TV isn’t quite so rare. A full-length pilot for a 2002 reboot attempt is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mETHT5npqOI and while it was aiming for gritty and dark, it comes off weirdly more dated than the original series at this point.

Watch this space for my top ten time travel movies and books, coming later this month!

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Filed under blog, graduate school, news, school, television, the curiosity killers, time travel

5 March 2015 · 1:53 pm

What I’m selling, pitching, writing, and doing

Happy Thursday! I’m starting a new blog series today called “What I’m…” Every few days, I’ll update this site with what I’m selling, pitching, writing, or doing. Today I’ve got updates in all four categories!

What I’m selling

I’ll be at the Dayton Book Expo on April 25th at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, where I’ll have copies of The Red Eye available for sale (and signing, which I’m also happy to do if you’ve already purchased it earlier). If you can’t make it to the DBE but also haven’t gotten a copy of The Red Eye yet, you can purchase it via the DBE’s Amazon store to enter me into the running for DBE’s online bestsellers! And remember, too, that owning an Alliteration Ink title in print means you also own the ebook!

What I’m pitching

I’m nearing the end of my studies in Seton Hill University’s MFA program, and so I’m starting to see if my thesis novel can get any agent nibbles. The new web site Writer Pitch connects authors and agents. If you feel so inclined, you can share my pitch for The Curiosity Killers on social media to help me generate some buzz!

What I’m writing

In addition to making final tweaks to TCK, I’ve also got three short stories out on submission; two short stories, two novels, and one non-fiction book all in the editing phase; and twelve projects actively in the writing phase. Other projects are still being outlined or planned, but I wouldn’t call them “active” yet (and besides, I have to get through these other works first!). My 2015 goal is to finish all active works in progress before really digging into the next wave of planned projects. I’m really excited in particular about The Curiosity Killers, Blood Makes Noise (an urban fantasy novel), and the horror/mystery/urban fantasy novella The Skittering, which may just be the next work in The Red Eye series!

What I’m doing

In just seven weeks, I’ll be done with a graduate certificate in instructional design. This has been a challenging program, but I just adore it. I can now toss around fancy terms like “learner-centered teaching,” “course management system,” and “beyond bullet-point design” like a pro.

I’m also spending a lot of time with the kitten my husband and I adopted late last summer. She is a whirlwind and—parental bias aside—insanely cute. If you don’t already follow me on Instagram, head over there for an embarrassing amount of kitten-related amateur photography.

Monthly Archives: March 2015

Time Travel Media March: 10 Greatest Time Travel Movies

Time Travel Media March: 10 Greatest Time Travel Novels

Time Travel Media March

What I’m selling, pitching, writing, and doing

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