Time travel isn't actually impossible (just really impractical)

[Retro]

We're actually doing it now in the gravity well of earth due to General Relativity, although the effect is extremely tiny, requiring high precision atomic clocks to measure. Still it's enough that the GPS system has to compensate for it, or its accuracy would be destroyed.

Anyway, any meaningful time travel is impossible to achieve with current technology. Note that I'm talking about forward time travel, where causality isn't broken. Reverse time travel is still stuck with those paradoxes.

Finally, no video on time travel has ever addressed the issue that you'll actually be in a different physical place if you go back in time, so you'll just end up in space, inside another planet, or the sun. Also, your matter will effectively merge with whatever is at that location and that can reasonably be considered to be catastrophic.

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[Mort]

There was a SF story based on this important point, called Timescape - how accurate of course is debatable, but some ideas are certainly interesting.

 

[Retro]

Looks like a book worth reading.

 

[Mort]

Had some interesting ideas. Not the most "out there" time travel SF book I've ever read thats for certain.

 

[Retro]

I don't have time to read books nowadays unfortunately, but when I was a kid, all the way up to about 25 or so, I would read lots of books, mainly of the science fiction variety. Some of the best authors of course were Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Robert Silverberg was very good too, but I didn't like the way that he kept putting in cliffhangers in his stories, switching to another area for a while, to make you keep reading to find out what happened. Frustrating and felt played by that, so I stopped reading him eventually.

 

[Mort]

Some writers did that - I think more common with ones who wrote regularly for serialiation in magazines.
Some writers have their own unique quirks which can be "cute" or very annoying. Stephen Kings obsession with Maine sort of comes between the two

 

[Retro]

Oh yes, it's definitely possible to identify some writers by their writing style in a blind test. And I mean that in a good way.

 

[HEXdidnt]

Speaking of writers and their quirks, I got heavily into E.E. 'Doc' Smith back in the late 90s, following the discovery of the 'Lensman' anime movie (loosely/barely) based on his most widely-known work. He's a very pulpy writer - lots of Very Manly Men and Super-Sassy Women - but his ideas about two non-corporeal alien races playing the long game against each other by subtly directing humanity over the course of millennia was fascinating, as was his idea of space travel by 'inertialess drive'. Loads of unique alien races, too. My favourite aspect, though, was his treatment of laser guns, whose strength were determined - logically enough - by the aperture setting. Firing a beam 'full aperture' could wipe out an entire room.

 

[Mort]

Lensman was probably part of the inspiration of the Green Lantern.
(Alan Scott did appear before some of the Lensman books - but he was actually supposed to be an update of "Aladin" - the idea of intergalatcic space cops was added for later versions of the Green Lantern - which had more similarities to Lensman. )
I was inspired by Doc E E Smith's Skylark series for a small contribution to a strip I helped co-create many years ago.

 

[HEXdidnt]

Skylark is also very cool - I managed to acquire the full set a few years ago... Can't remember if it was at PicoCon or at the Southbank book market... I can see the Lensman/Green Lantern connection, too - I think the anime movie played into the similarity a little bit too much...

...Thinking about Lensman again has, unfortunately, reminded me of the last book in the series... Which possibly ventured a little bit too far along its eugenics path, I think...

 

[Mort]

The last Skylark book went a bit off tangent too!



Great cover art