help! time-displacement stories - Science Fiction Fantasy Chronicles: forums

Symbolt · 14th March 2006, 02:19 PM

Hey everybody! This is my first post here.

I'm working on my M.A. Thesis ("Models of time in time-travel-related science fiction" - cognitive linguistics meets literary criticism) and I need some help finding my materials. I'd like to devote half of it to case studies of stories which have some sort of time-displacement (temporal displacement?) stories in them. By time-displacement I mean a situation where a character is subjected to a technology which makes them interact with the timeline in an abnormal way - e.g. they "lag behind" or are ahead in time. I will also treat the time-loop as a special case of this.

What I would like to ask you guys for is to suggest stories I could use. For now, I have chosen "Fault" by James Tiptree Jr and the episode of Star Trek: TNG entitled "Time Squared" for the temporal-displacement case-study section, and "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" by Geoffrey A. Landis for the time-loop. Honestly, though, "Fault" is not the best / most sophisticated Tiptree story out there, and generally, I would like to find some replacement. Any ideas?

Quokka · 14th March 2006, 02:37 PM

I've always liked Gregory Benford's Timescape but the characters only interact with the timeline via communication. The story does suggest concepts for how communication with the past would affect the timeline, I'm not sure if this fits within your Thesis or not.

Symbolt · 14th March 2006, 10:27 PM

Thank you. I'm looking for something not really involving time-travel per se, or temporal paradoxes effected thereby, but specifically stories where a person is still accessible within a "base" timeline, however their own progression through it has been altered - e.g. their bodies age faster, or they react to what happens with a delay, etc. Also, what I'm doing involves meticulous analysis of the language used to arrive at a description of the cognitive mechanisms behind the possible comprehension of the text - and for this reason, anything longer than a short story falls out of the scope of my interestst - too much text would simply take too much time to analyze.

14th March 2006, 02:19 PM	#1 (permalink)
Symbolt Registered User Join Date: Mar 2006 Posts: 8	help! time-displacement stories Hey everybody! This is my first post here. I'm working on my M.A. Thesis ("Models of time in time-travel-related science fiction" - cognitive linguistics meets literary criticism) and I need some help finding my materials. I'd like to devote half of it to case studies of stories which have some sort of time-displacement (temporal displacement?) stories in them. By time-displacement I mean a situation where a character is subjected to a technology which makes them interact with the timeline in an abnormal way - e.g. they "lag behind" or are ahead in time. I will also treat the time-loop as a special case of this. What I would like to ask you guys for is to suggest stories I could use. For now, I have chosen "Fault" by James Tiptree Jr and the episode of Star Trek: TNG entitled "Time Squared" for the temporal-displacement case-study section, and "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" by Geoffrey A. Landis for the time-loop. Honestly, though, "Fault" is not the best / most sophisticated Tiptree story out there, and generally, I would like to find some replacement. Any ideas?

14th March 2006, 02:37 PM	#2 (permalink)
Quokka wandering Join Date: Mar 2005 Posts: 1,228	Re: help! time-displacement stories I've always liked Gregory Benford's Timescape but the characters only interact with the timeline via communication. The story does suggest concepts for how communication with the past would affect the timeline, I'm not sure if this fits within your Thesis or not.

14th March 2006, 10:27 PM	#3 (permalink)
Symbolt Registered User Join Date: Mar 2006 Posts: 8	Re: help! time-displacement stories Thank you. I'm looking for something not really involving time-travel per se, or temporal paradoxes effected thereby, but specifically stories where a person is still accessible within a "base" timeline, however their own progression through it has been altered - e.g. their bodies age faster, or they react to what happens with a delay, etc. Also, what I'm doing involves meticulous analysis of the language used to arrive at a description of the cognitive mechanisms behind the possible comprehension of the text - and for this reason, anything longer than a short story falls out of the scope of my interestst - too much text would simply take too much time to analyze.

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