Wednesday 26 March 2014

War And Time Travel

Imagine:

you know as a historical fact that there will be a global nuclear exchange a year from now;

you can time travel.

You will not die when everyone else does because you will travel far enough into the past that you will have died of old age long before World War III. However, everyone will be dead a year from now.

I think that this would make an effective film or TV sf series: someone develops time travel, explores the future, learns of the war, returns to the present, investigates ways of preventing the war, learns that this is impossible and, at the outbreak of war, escapes into the past. Subsequent installments would show the protagonist surviving in an earlier period and exploring the last days a few more times but always returning to their new home era before the end.

I mention this idea first because I have thought of it before in relation to one of the Terminator films and secondly because the hero of Poul Anderson's "Wildcat" learns, while in the Jurassic, that, back home, the Cold War will go nuclear about a year after the current twentieth-century base date. If we knew for certain that this was going to happen, then we would at least be able to prepare inwardly for it. And time travel would help.

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