comments in others' journals

[scarfman]

evilgrins reviewed the latest Terminator film over at multi_genre_fan, spotting what seems to him an inconsistency in time travel causality in the series.

Time travel is the new space travel. In the 60s and 70s space opera was the final frontier, with Star Trek making the conventions mainstream and Star Wars making them saleable. Then in the mid-80s Terminator and Back to the Future came along, and ever since then even space opera has been about time travel as often as not. Look at all the time travel in all the Star Trek spinoffs; including Enteprise's three-season temporal cold war, including this month's movie. Look at the popularity of the Doctor Who revival, and how often time travel is now worked into the stories instead of just being the agency used to get the heroes into the stories. James T. Kirk and Luke Skywalker gave us the universe, but John Connor, Marty McFly and the Doctor have given us eternity.

Maybe it wasn't exactly on topic, but it's something I've been wanting to articulate for awhile and it just poured out.

Comments

[rose-cat.livejournal.com]

I hadn't looked at it that way. Time travel does seem to be more front and center in fiction (all medias) than it used to be. Do you think it's got to do with the fact that we've accomplished so much in space travel -- from manned and unmanned physical missions to technology that lets us see and understand further and further out -- that it no longer captures our imaginations like time travel does? Time travel really is a brand-new frontier. (Aside from the slow path variety, that is.)