Okay, #Trekkie CoSo. 🖖 It's #SNW time!
Today for #OnlySky, we talk about Strange New Worlds' time travel episode, which takes place more or less now in Canuckistan 🍁, and raises the classic Would You Kill Baby Hitler question around La'an's past.
Does it work? Does *any* time travel episode in #StarTrek? What does this #SFF trope actually do - and does the romance help or hinder?
Come for the morality play! Stay for the poutine & Carol Kane!
#CoSoTV #ScienceFiction
https://onlysky.media/mclark/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-how-time-travel-creeps-into-trek-today/
@MLClark usually time travel fails with audiences. Never understood why, exactly. The NBC series Timeless was a good example. Well written for the most part and we'll acted. It just didn't catch on.
Sadly it's often a season arc that does a show in. What stats it as a sub plot becomes the arc and the initial premise takes a back seat. That just open my personal Monster Of The Week can of worms.
I explore part of what makes time travel flop (the artificiality of the crisis) in this piece, but I *love* your example & closing note about season arcs, Graci! 👌
SNW has chosen to make the first 3 episodes strongly A-plot-driven character studies. I think this is an unfortunate choice that reduces opportunities to look at an ethical problem with depth through narrative contrast - but that's the arc so far. We'll have to wait & see if SNW S2 can sustain that structural choice well. 🤞
@MLClark Re the "ethical problem" ... I've long had a time travel story in my head, waiting for when I have the "time" (pun intended) to write it.
The "ethical problem" is that the protagonist seems doomed to fulfill the timeline. No matter what he does to "fix" it, it fails. The universe wants it a certain way.
There's even a scene where he puts a gun to his head to change the timeline ... but it won't go off.
It's my way of giving the finger to time travel stories. 😉
There have been a lot of really fun time travel stories in recent SF that play with that concept of inevitability. Not sure how much you're up on what's been published & TV/film-produced these days, but we've got versions that deal with the impossibility of breaking from systemic racism or generational violence, and versions that more playfully hash out the impossibility of breaking from closed loops.
Always room for more, of course! Hope you get to write yours at some point. :)
@MLClark If you're interested, DM me and I'll tell you about the book. I'm happy to share some chapters. The more eyes, the better.
We don't have a contract yet, but an academic publisher sees each chapter. They continually reassure me, "We are seriously interested." They're leaving me alone to finish the first draft, which seems to work for both sides.
@MLClark I retired two years ago after ten years doing education lectures and tours at Kennedy Space Center. The book was inspired by the common political questions I was asked by the public. My college education was Political Science, and I dabbled for years in politics, so this project is a natural.
I also have a YouTube channel, "Space SPAN," where I've been collecting space politics stuff.
@WordsmithFL
You're talking to someone who listened to NASA's whole 4-hour public meeting on UAPs to write an article on the importance of improving science literacy, so... that nonfiction book already sounds wonderful to me.
Hope you're finding it a joy to write - and may it find a good publisher and audience when it's ready to send out. 👌