Quote:
Originally Posted by Belle2Be
So, couldn't you say that it is all science fiction? Who can really say that time travel/space ships/ aliens/ magic will NEVER happen? Even goblins or unicorns could develop from some virus or something that scientists develop.
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I tend to agree
. In fact, the last interesting fantasy work I ... experienced ... was as a kid. Experienced because it was an adventure game - Deathgate. It didn't make any effort to add an SF flavor to the thing but I felt one anyway - spellcasting was explained as the art of pulling an alternate reality into this one so that all the parts meshed together except for the thing you wanted changed.
Compare this to a very crucial plot device in Clarke's
Against the Fall of Night (you may have read it as
The city and the stars) - an ancient robot is found by the last child on Earth. It is locked in some way so it cannot be interrogated. The advanced computer of the city duplicates the robot with the offending piece of code removed during the duplication. Sounds like magic
.
But anyway, to get back to
Deathgate - it is a teeny tiny step from this description of magic to Crichton's
Timeline, where a very similar process is used to initiate time-travel. The movie doesn't make this clear, but the novel's detailed description (with Crichton, how can it not be detailed
) is quite clear on the speculative physics used. In passing, that novel's significance was that it was the first time that specific gimmick had been used for time travel in the literature.