After years of reading and watching science fiction, fantasy, and other time-travelling fiction it’s nice to know that someone has had a serious think about some rules. Discover magazine, propelled by the latest Star Trek movie, has published a list of 10+1 time travel rules [^] that should be followed to maintain current scientific accuracy.
The first, and probably most telling rule is the rebuttal of the fiction favourite: the time travel paradox. Reality simply doesn’t allow for paradoxes. Two contradictory, mutually exclusive outcomes from one event (like the Grandfather Paradox [^]) cannot exist simultaneously.
What is really interesting is the amount of serious discussion that this article has provoked. Especially as the article notes that this is an area that is still in it’s infancy in the highly theoretical realm.
There is one thing that I am sure of, and that is that writers will never let some new theory get in the way of a good plot!
As for Star Trek [^], well it is one of the better Star Trek movies. It’s big, noisy, and enjoyable. And it doesn’t always take itself too seriously, quite a bit of which is down to “Bones” McCoy and Simon Pegg’s “Scotty”.
The one gripe that I have about the film is the completely unexplained “Red Matter”. Come on guys couldn’t you explain that a bit – it’s like there’s five minutes of tape missing. We don’t know what it is or where it comes from even at the end of the movie, and this is a key part of the story!
The 2009 Star Trek movie seem to be a good entry point for non-Trekkies/-Trekkers, and a fantastic excuse for a spot of revision. Oh, yes there is a time-travel twist in the movie, but it might not be as good as Discover’s:
“Spock travels to the past and gets a sex change and becomes Kirk’s grandfather lover”.
Wall-E – Copyright Criminal?
There is some interesting discussion about whether or not the ‘loveable’ Wall-E robot is a copyright criminal over at SFFaudio [^]. The link does have mild spoilers, but probably nothing that you wouldn’t have guessed at from seeing the trailer.
The case that Jesse Willis at SFFaudio make centres around the robot’s “jailbreaking” of a copy of the film “Hello Dolly”. As they point out, in the year 2805 the film would be almost 800 years out of copyright protection and in the public domain. But under the USA’s DMCA [^] and Canada’s about to be enacted copyright law circumventing copy protection is a crime. So even though the 1969 film would be in the public domain, if the original media was protected by some form of Digital Rights Management [^], which video tapes and DVDs are, copying it onto another device would be a crime. Another case of hypocrisy in this film? Consumerism is bad, but buy our toys [BrizBunny Comments]; and don’t copy our robot, buy an original DVD of this movie.
Despite this we here in the CannibalRabbit household are still looking forward to the movie.