Scott Brown Time Travails

摘要

I fear for the future of time travel. Not the real thing: That seems to be coming along swimmingly, according to a handful of renegade physicists (more on that in The Future! of this column). No, I'm more worried about that venerable pop institution fictional time travel. It's getting airier, subtler, distressingly less Rube Goldber-gian: No fewer than four extant network shows-Heroes, the soon-to-return Lost, and two newcomers, Life on Mars and Fringe-involve some form of time travel minus any obvious chronos-crunching machine. The new time travelers epoch-hop on pure longing, head injury, or strength of will alone-sizzling portals and sparking gizmos are now rendered beside the point. Sure, some might see this as the genre maturing, but to me it looks an awful lot like downsizing. Hello? McFly? Whither the DeLoreans of yesteryear? Outta time, it seems. η Which says something about The Present. Time-travel stories are wonderfully dated, pristine core samples of the ages that birthed them. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), an early instance, Mark Twain was essentially refight-ing the Civil War in satire. His mode of transport? A bump on the head. Twain was in the machine age but not of it. But just a few years later in 1895, H. G. Wells embraced the industrial: The Time Machine was an au courant postcolonial parable, but more to the point, it described time travel via device in detail-and became a timeless source of inspiration for future generations of geeks. One of these is Ronald Mallett, a University of Connecticut physics professor who is, in all seriousness, working on a time machine.