Is Time Travel Right For You? (Part Two) "Somewhere in Time", "Frequency", "After the Fact", etc

"The time travel motif also has an ideological function because it literally provides the necessary distancing effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that concern people in the present. If the modern world is one where the individuals feel alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out."

—Sean Redmond, Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)

 

(to right: the cover of prolific science-fiction author Fred Saberhagen's "After the Fact", one of two "Pilgrim" novels concerning time travel.  In this one the "Flying Dutchman of Time"--Jerry Flint-- has to try and save Abraham Lincoln from assassination at the climax of the Civil War. Other good  good time travel novels I recommend include "The Book of Kells" by R A McAvoy (a story of Viking marauders versus the early Celtic Christian civilization in medieval Ireland, and the modern young man and woman who find themselves in a time portal to the midst of the trouble) and "Time Frame" by Michael Creighton (concerning a American billionaire who creates a way to travel back in time and how difficult it is for a group of young people to get out of the forests, castles and  battlegrounds of  14th Century France alive)  These books are  entertaining because they are also good history.    

Sean Redmond's comment on the "motif" of time travel does go a long way I think to explaining its hold on many millions of people. No matter what we believe about how and why we are existing at this time on this planet, we all strive at some points in our lives to matter, hopefully to matter in a way  to make our family/friends/society  better for our being here.

 

There is always the question of "what if?"  Whole religions like Buddhism are focused on resolving that which is flawed  within us and getting us off the wheel of existence. But many simply would prefer some more time with a lost loved one or a chance to rectify an old problem and redress it now that we as individuals have the wisdom to do so.

To travel back in time to fix a bad situation or cure a longing for something the modern world doesn't provide can be seen in two of the most memorable time travel movies I recall.  The first is a crime story within the time-travel motif called "Frequency" (2000). The story is explained by the movie trailer below.  There is no time travel in the film per se, but there is communication between father and son in 1969 up and back to 1999.  Thanks to a flare-up of sun spots and an old ham radio link-up, a serial killer might be stopped and a family life altered for the better.  This film is a  good suspense yarn also.      

 

One of the best things about the movie to me is how the character of the Son in 1999 gets his father to realize this is not a hoax is by giving him the details of the New York Mets improbable "cinderella" victory in the 1969 World Series over the juggernaut Amercian League favorites, the  Baltimore Orioles:  a shared passion for some great moments in  sports unite a family for a larger purpose! 

    

 

Twenty years before "Frequency" came "Somewhere In Time" (1980) starring Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer.  Based on a Richard Matheson short story, the film followed a young man who meets an older lady at a theatre party and  longs to discover  how she ever knew him.  This film became a true "cult film" in the best sense of the word, and even today generates a fan base that makes a pilgrimage to the grand resort hotel in Marinac, Michigan, where the film was shot.  Whereas most time travel stories concerned crime or spectacle, this one has a story which penetrates the heart, a unique film that even I, not exactly an arch-romantic, nevertheless find this little film somehow more moving each time I've viewed it.   John Barry's marvelous score---featured on the clip--is just one of the many great compositions he has done in cinema.   

  

My own version of a time travel novel was something I finished about ten years back and redacted it a bit in 2007.  I flogged about the agencies and book conventions for awhile.It never got a publisher so I did it myself with a great measure of help from Shirley  

It's something of what I liked best in all these novels and films and concerns a detective investigating his friends' murder, a task which takes into the world of modern theater and, later, to the time of Shakespeare's London. "Cursed Spite" is the name of the work and if you like stories of history and imagination, I'll be happy to send you a copy, gratis, since my wife would love to get more of these copies we printed out of our garage :-) 

I also think personally it's a good tale. You can get "Cursed Spite" by contacting me and leaving a mailing address at my e-mail: dnoakes@charter.net 

 

 

 

For more on the book, here's the website listing.   http://www.cursedspite.com

For those who perused and/or commented on the last "time travel" blog and stopped by for its sequel here,  I thank you! 

Is Time Travel Right For You? (Part One)

Time Travel was a big dream of mine since I was a kid.  I suppose I went through the period where I wanted to be an astronaut and all that.  But somehow the idea of going places people had already been to and seeing history take place before my own eyes, even if it was totally impossible, has had a hold on my imagination.  When the New Year rolls around my thoughts turn to the very serious and perhaps very rather comic possibilities of such a "trip" to see what really happen in the near and far past.

"The Time Tunnel" was probably the first exposure I had to the realm of this sub-genre.  The special effects today look rather cheesy and no one would mistake The Titanic on this first episode of the 1966-67 series for the ones Ronald Neame and  James Cameron employed  in their films "A Night to Remember" (1958) or "Titanic" (1997).  But the idea of how people would react to events of the past and if they could change these events with their foreknowledge seemed intriguing.

 

 

Of course this has been the stuff of popular science fiction for decades.  H.G. Wells wrote his short story "The Time Machine" in 1900.  H.G. reportedly sold that story for a pittance to a publisher who made a small fortune off of it.  In  1960 MGM made a feature-length film of the story with Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux.  Although in the Wells story the Time Traveller has no given name in this one he is named George and the girl he meets in the far-distant post-apocalyptic future is named Weena.  (Hell of a name to give  a girl, but things are rather downhill for the human race by the time George gets to the future. The Morlochs are pretty much using them for food, and even a nice blond lady doesn't even know how to wear her hair without asking some strange guy for tips. Anyway, even though I'd rather travel to the past, I have to rate this film as a favorite. )

Of the novels on time travel that I have read the most interesting in my opinion was Jack Finney's 1970 book, "Time and Again".  Finney (1911-1995) was an acknowledged master of the time travel story and published several novels and short stories o the subject, along with thrillers like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and some comic novels. 

  There are no time machines in this story, but, like the "Time Tunnel" series, the book concerns a super-secret group called "The Project" that recruits men and women to try and travel back into time using a sort of total immersion method, coupled with being in the same place that existed in the time needed to travel back to.

In the case of the book, the time traveller is Simon Morley, a commercial illustrator living in New York City. He is recruited by a mysterious fellow from US Army intelligence named Rube Prien into The Project because of his observed qualifications.  It turns out that Morley can travel back into time and is sent from 1970 to 1882 (via the Dakota apartment building, the same one John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived in ) to try and decipher a clue about a half-burned letter that may point to some kind of global disaster in the future.  The main scientist on the project D.D. Danziger is adamant that the past must not be altered; there is no telling what might occur. Rube Prien is more "liberal" in the promethean idea that the world can be a better place by tweaking the past.

Morley's interest in the past mirrors my own, which makes him a favorite character for me. He's the kind of guy who looks into an old photograph or a

bit  of film and wonders what life was like for those people, people now long gone who are now only an image but were once as real as I am sitting here typing away to you and you are reading this:

"... the sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you're seeing was once real. That light really did reflect into a lens from these lost faces and objects. That these people were really there once, smiling into a camera. You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can - what was just inside the door. (Time and Again, page 19)

 

In Victorian New York, Si Morley falls in love with Julia, a beautiful woman who also is the object of the man he is pursuing to find out the mystery of the letter.  After many twists and turns, Morley does alter something important in time--the meeting between two people who will eventually become parents to a member of The Project--and he stays in New York to settle in to a more sedate and tranquil life .  (Julia does a little time travel of her own and is less than impressed with dangers of the modern metropolis.)   "Time and Again" is  a fine novel, one that spawned a very good sequel, "From Time to Time", (1995)  and one I would recommend to anyone who likes a good suspense novel, and won't mind a little stretch of the imagination. 

Part Two coming soon.

 

 

CURSED SPITE

http://www.cursedspite.com
This is a book that I wrote that was published last year. It's a mystery involving time travel and Elizabethan England. Check out the "Birth of Cursed Spite" page on the site to see more information. All comments and questions are welcome!

Bald Man Talking : The Writer Can Speak!

Tonight I had a reading for my book, "Cursed Spite", at Bloomsbury Books in downtown Ashland. For a double introvert like me, this was a bit of a challenge. I spoke for about 50 minutes, answering a couple questions about the book. I think it went off well; no one appeared to be seriously injured before, during or after the reading and Homeland Security didn't have to up the color-coded alert system. Hoo-rah!

Although the event was sparsely populated (okay, only 4-5 people came, five only if you count the one lady who left early) it was the first time I had taken to a a podium and spoke to a crowd for twenty years, not since I took a night class in Speech Communications at Diablo Valley Junior College back in Pleasant Hill, CA. I did okay in the class but I never felt all that confident.

I found I had a lot less anxiety as I went along with reading my two sections of the book. I read a selection of hard-boiled detective stuff (gun and shots fired and danger and all) and a time travel scene, folowed by opening the floor to questions. A couple were about my writing habits. and the other one was about Shakespeare and the background of the early English Theater. I think I handled that last one in a half-way informed way---for a layman that is. I think I did as well as the two authors I had seen at Bloomsbury in the "Author's Night" I attended to help prepare for this.

But, I'm still bald and looka bit like Boris Karloff. I think George Clooney would have drawn a bigger crowd.

My book was profiled in the Medford Mail Tribune Weekend Section , courtesty of columnist and theater and book critic Bill Varble. This was my first interview for the book and it was a bit of a coup since Mr. Varble doesn't usually write about self-published tomes. But the Shakespeare theme was a grabber for him I think: he is the top local reviewer of the plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival .

By the way, here's the Mail Tribune article:

Bringing Shakespeare to the present

Ashland author's detective story has a twist

By BILL VARBLE

Mail Tribune

Forget the authorship question. Like Sam Spade, fictional sleuth Harvey Wells just wants to find out what happened to his partner. Wells is the gumshoe in "Cursed Spite," Douglas G. Noakes' new novel with a Shakespearean twist.

Noakes, of Ashland, plans a reading from the book at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 9, at Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 1400 Biddle Road, Medford.

The "authorship question" is a term used by those who admit doubts about who wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare.

Noakes lives in Ashland, a town where the Bard's presence is keenly felt, and works a day job at Sears in Medford. He saw a documentary on public television that made the case for Edward de Vere, the 16th Earl of Oxford, as the author of the Shakespeare canon.

That gave him a thought. What if you could bring Shakespeare to the present so he could see the impact he still had? And what, assuming Shakespeare was in fact Shaksper, the man from Stratford, would he think of those who ascribed all those great works to Oxford or some other pretender?

Noakes wanted to write a book. But bringing Shakespeare to the present sounded like a dead end.

"But," he says, "if you could time travel the other way, you could go back and leave a manuscript behind and 'find it' 400 years later. It would be impossible to de-authenticate."

You could prove Shaksper was Shakespeare.

"That's when it got more interesting," he says of his book idea. "You could do it as a detective story."

Wells, the detective in "Cursed Spite," is not a partisan of either side in the authorship question. His partner disappeared, and he's on the case in Rogue Falls, a town very much like Ashland, where Noakes says he has seen one or two plays a year at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival since the early 1990s.

In "Cursed Spite," an evil corporation and a rogue actor get ahold of a time machine that can be used as transportation to an amazing destination: Elizabethan England, as in the real thing.

"It can only travel in set periods," Noakes says. "This is time machine 1.0."

Will Shakespeare is only a minor character in the book, which is less science fiction than crime story. Sir Francis Bacon pops up, too, and a couple of other well-known Elizabethans who have been doing some time traveling of their own.

The authorship controversy is not in the foreground. That position is occupied by the dick's quest to find who killed his partner, and to defeat the bad guys.

"And he's not sure of his love interest, which side she's on," Noakes says.

He's been talking with agents in hopes of selling the book to a publisher. In the meantime, it's available at www.cursedspite.com for $29.95.

Noakes, 46, moved to Ashland from Medford in 1992. He says he spent two years writing "Cursed Spite." It ran almost 1,100 pages. He did some cutting, and it's now a svelte 746. He says he's pretty much a believer in the orthodox Shakespeare, although it's beside the point here.

"If you wanna believe Queen Elizabeth wrote those works," he says, "more power to you."

Admission to the reading is free. Call 858-0203.

Please note: The price of the book is $19.95.

(photo by Shirley)

Cursed Spite: The Book is Also the Website

Those who enjoy a good combination modern mystery/thriller (with a added-at -no-additional-charge twist of time-travel into the London of William Shakespeare) may like "Cursed Spite". It's in the spirit of works like Jack Finney's "Time After Time", Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughter House 5", Fred Saberhagen's "Pilgrim" novels, et al. And, to add to the pleasure of reading this story, I promise no mention is made in the story of the Iraq War, Rosie O'Donnell or the Donald or even Madonna!

I invite you to take a look at the web advert for my book, and consider purchasing a copy of "Cursed Spite". The website for the whole hard-boiled and fantastic tale is now up and running at:

www.cursedspite.com

Any specific questions for non-Yahoo members and general web surfers about the tome will be answered by writing me directly at douglasnoakes@charter.net

I'd also like to thank all the people who have read or are reading the book and have given me such positive feedback so far.

"Cursed Spite"--The Book I Wrote

A Personal Word about "Cursed Spite"

My novel is about a guy named Harvey Wells, a 30-something ex-cop turned private eye. He gets kicked off a police force in a California town for drinking, then sobers up and comes to Oregon and gets a job as a private investigator with a company run by his lifelong friend, Dave McCreedy. When his partner comes up dead, an apparent suicide, Harvey doesn’t buy the local law’s verdict. He needs to find out who killed his pal. What starts out as a quest to nail a killer soon turns into a labyrinth that leads him to a small group of people with a device to travel back to set periods in the distant past. One of those periods happens to be the London of William Shakespeare. That’s where Harvey has to go to solve his friend’s death and find out the whereabouts of the famous film and stage director, Jack Benchley, his pal McCreedy was looking for.

Along the way some uncouth types abuse their authority on him, or threaten him with jail or mayhem, or make snotty remarks about his past job titles and the way he chews his fingernails and cleans his ears with a used Q-tip. Some people are so devoid of good manners they even try to kill our hero Harvey Wells, not just sap him over the head and into a year-long coma the way things used to be when people were generally nicer and dogs didn’t bark so much when you were trying to catch a nap on a Sunday afternoon.

Well, he is a private detective after all. You have to expect it, right?

"Cursed Spite" started out as a simple, if absurd, idea–what if you could bring William Shakespeare ahead in time to see the great impact his plays had on the world? Living in a town that is home to one of the major mostly-Shakespeare theatrical festivals in North America brought it to my mind. I’d seen some of the plays the company has put on over the years and I wondered what Mr. W.S. himself would think of his work in, say, a modern setting? Or how about the pseudo-scholarly cottage industry that has grown up for the last hundred years or so that tries to take credit away from "the Stratford man" and give it another, usually more eminent Elizabethan like the 15^th Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon?

Well, that was where I started. But really Cursed Spite is first and foremost a detective story and William Shakespeare is a minor but important character in the book. I decided when I started to write my story that it really shouldn’t be The Bard of Avon who makes the jump 400 years forward in time, but that I should have my main characters go back and visit his world–the bustling and dangerous London of treacherous nobles and their hirelings, struggling players of a emergent art form (the great dawn of English-speaking theater) displaced soldiers, grubby apprentices, tavern tapsters, pickpockets and con men (AKA "cony catchers") , and the general flow of people living unawares of what an amazing time they are caught up in.

That way my main characters, Harvey Wells and his romantic interest Bonnie Noel, could see this world from the perspective of visitors to a place and time that is truly extraordinary–and try and stop the William Randolph Hearst-like Sherwood Strunk and his ally, the rotund actor Trevor Wearbeck , from damming up and destroying the steady flow of time and, among other nasty ventures, tear down the true legacy left by the Bard of Stratford

A quick word about the centuries-old "authorship controversy": a lot of eminent people from Sigmund Freud to Mark Twain to moderns like Sir Derek Jacobi and dozens of amateur literary sleuths believe that there was some conspiracy to use Shakespeare as a front for a more educated man/men. Such unalloyed snobbery from those living and dead propelled me in part to write the novel in the first place. My main goal, however, is to entertain and keep you guessing how it will all turn out. I’m happy to report most literary scholars don’t bother with such conspiracy theories. Since my desire is to entertain and not get didactic, I recommend that those interested in finding out about how Shakespeare wrote and thought look up solid books of scholarship like Peter Greenblatt’s recent Will in the World or A.N. Wilson’s Shakespeare: the Evidence or anything the late, great A.L. Rowse wrote on the subject.

In a way it’s a compliment to William Shakespeare, the glover’s son from rural Warwickshire, that some people think he couldn’t have possibly write really write his plays and sonnets and epic poems, but, implausibly to me, that another more noble figure did (or as one recent author suggested, a veritable pack of Eminent Elizabethans working working together.) As a distinguished American literary critic, Professor Rufus Fears put it, "Shakespeare is the Dante, the Virgil, the Homer of the English language..." All in one package, folks. Perhaps the man himself sensed that when he wrote these lines from Sonnet 18 :

"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and gives life to thee."

Time is the great fourth dimension--we cannot halt its forward flow. Albert Einstein himself postulated that the only way to slow down time was to get into a rocket ship and travel at the speed of light. And, as for traveling backwards in time, well just...fergettaboutit!

But fiction writing and the human imagination have no such barriers. Just about everybody I’ve ever talked to on the subject has a favorite time and place they would like to travel back to (assuming they could get back to their own time again). Admittedly, there are some folks for whom the thought of travel into the future sets their hearts going. What will the world be like 50 or 100 years from now. You know who you are. Excelsior!!! Yeah, let’s see what happens way down the road!

Nothing personal, but I am just not one of those people.

I figure the future can take care of itself. Maybe their will be a cure for cancer, have great new technologies so we can talk to people all the globe for practically nothing and our motor vehicles will run on canola oil. Who knows, maybe the San Francisco Giants might win a World Series!! Still, I’m not in any hurry to jump ahead in time. I bet the price of real estate will be murder, the ever-powerful consumer-oriented corporations will figure a way to put commercials in our dreams at night, and good luck finding a parking space even if you can drive your car on hydrogen or whatever.

Although admittedly not a great fan of the future oriented novels of Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlein, or the anti-utopian futuristic allegories that are served up often on television shows that are mostly rehashes of the original "Star Trek" series, the idea of going BACKWARDS in time has intrigued me ever since I was a kid. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is an influence, but I’ve also read Jack Finney’s classic science-fiction novels Time and Again, The Woodrow Wilson Dime and About Time. I've also been drawn again and again to numerous films on the subject. (e.g., The Time Machine (1960), Somewhere in Time (1979), Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home (1986), Freguency (1999), et al.

In addition, like a lot of people, I’ve taken serious note of the American "hard-boiled" detective writers of the past (Raymond Chandler and Hammett are, of course, favorites) and fine artists like Sue Grafton and Stuart M. Kaminsky who have kept that blend of sardonic humor and core humanism alive and well. I hope a sliver of what they did has been constituted in my own way into the backbone of the story and its characters.

O.K., I admit Cursed Spite is rather an eclectic contraption. Go ahead and sue me for not sticking to one genre...but read the book first.

The time is out of joint. Oh, cursed spite,

that ever I was born to set it right.

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V