What is it with all this time travel business? It seems like every fricking science fiction story I read this year has some variation or permutation of a time travel theme. Take a look at Gardner Dozois' "Years Best Science Fiction" each year for the past decade and see what I mean. And with movies like "Looper" the formula seems so cliche. All this going back in time to change the future business. Of course, that is not to say that there are not cool time travel stories like "Things Undone" by John Barnes. And cool time travel movies like "Primer." I only mean to say that the time travel theme is ubiquitous.
Why are we so obsessed with time travel these days?
I supposed that Einstein may have opened the door for all this speculation with time dilation and the twin paradox business. Space time curves near a large mass. So you can mess with time and space depending on where you are observing it. Like in a black hole. That kind of business.
But time travel notions started long before Einstein. Even Mark Twain and Dickens dabbled in it a bit. But what I'm getting at is a specific kind of time travel--the time travel machine. Like H.G. Wells' Time Machine. A human technology that can manipulate time. Or more specifically, time as just another resource that we can manipulate with a machine. Time as a commodity. And I don't think its any accident that Wells wrote the Time Machine after the technological age had begun. When the natural rhythms of preindustrial life centered around the sun and moon were replaced by a machine and a rigid factory work schedule. The technology surrounding time is even more advanced now. How can we "maximize" time, cram the most we can into our day using our little hand held smart devices? All these concerns are new for humanity.
But getting back to time travel. And Heidegger. Heidegger critiqued modern technology as it “puts to nature an unreasonable demand that it supply energy, which can [then] be extracted and stored” for man’s purposes. Under conditions of modern technology, “the earth,” as Heidegger notes, “reveals itself as [only] a coal mining district, [its] soil as a mineral deposit." What I'm getting at is that it is not a stretch for humanity to now view "time" as just another resource (like nature) to be manipulated by our technology.
But it seems like the notions of viewing time as just another natural resource is taking another step toward abstraction that would cause Heidegger, former Nazi sympathizer that he was, to roll around in his grave even more. For unlike nature, time was always an abstraction. There is no "time" you can dig into to grow your crops. It always was an idea. So with the time machine, we have a machine that can manipulate an idea. And given that we are obsessed with "maximizing" this idea or manipulating the idea of time for our usage, I guess it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that we would also be obsessed with a machine that can manipulate time for our benefit.
Give me those old fashioned science fiction novels, where we are exploring new worlds that could actually be out there in the stars, instead of all this time travel crap--unless of course, its very good time travel crap...lol
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