Nice Girl with 5 Husbands
by Fritz Leiber
“My husbands.” She shook her head dolefully. “To find five more difficult men would be positively Martian.”
“My husbands.” She shook her head dolefully. “To find five more difficult men would be positively Martian.”
The flight to the future is explained by scientific gibberish that contains a high concentration of mumbo jumbo, but the gist of it is that the speed of Allison’s plane (around 10,000 mph) added to the rotational speed of the Earth plus the speed of the Earth’s orbit around the sun plus the speed of the Solar System around the center of the galaxy plus maybe another speed or two, managed to bring his total speed close to that of light, which brought him to the future. Apparently, reversing his plane’s path is all that’s needed to return him to the past (ideally with Trirene beside him).
A self-defeating act paradox is set up nicely (if Alison stops the plague, then the citadel in the, future won’t be there to send him back to stop the plague), but the issue is never explicitly discussed and the ending of the film is inconclusive on the matter. Nevertheless, I commend the film for being the first to raise the issue of time travel paradoxes, albeit in the background.
The film draws in at least four important additional time travel tropes: suspended animation, a single nonbranching, static timeline (with the corresponding inability to go back and change it), experiencing the passage of time at different rates, and a trip to the far future. And according to the SF Encyclopedia, the film was originally conceived as a sequel to the 1960 film of The Time Machine.
The story has a classic self-defeating act: The Terminator goes back in time to kill Sara Connor, causing Kyle Reese to follow and become romantic with Sara Connor, causing John Connor to be born and eventually lead the revolution, causing the Terminator to go back in time to kill Sara Connor, . . .
Note: A dissertation by [ex=bare]Гулиус Наталья Сергеевна | Gulius Natalya Sergeevna[/ex] notes that this story is part of Bitov’s Teacher of Symmetry Cycle, which consisted of a series of avant-garde stories purportedly written by an obscure Englishman named [ex=bare]Э. Тайрд-Боффин | A. Tired-Boffin[/ex] and loosely translated to Russian by Bitov. The English version of “Fotografiya Pushkin (1799–2099)” was said to have been called “Shakespeare’s Photograph” (or possibly “Stern’s Laughter” or “Swift’s Pill”), and presumably it was about Shakespeare rather than Pushkin.
Sergeevna explains that all this artistic mystification was part of an extensive footnote to “Fotografiya Pushkin (1799–2099),” but up in the ITTDB Citadel, we’ve yet to track down the footnote. Perhaps it was part of the 1987 publication in [ex=bare]Знамя || Znamia[/ex], or maybe it did not appear until the story was published along with the rest of the cycle in Bitov’s 1988 collection, [ex=bare]Человек в пейзаже | Man in the landscape | Chelovek v peyzazhe[/ex]. It is not listed in the table of contents of [ex=bare]Преподаватель симметрии ] | | Prepodavatelʹ simmetrii[/ex](2008), which was translated to English as Symmetry Teacher (2014).
Eckles: So?
The film did a good job of bringing Brian Aldiss’s book’s premise to the screen, with a better pace than the book, but the short dream sequences were ineffective for me and Dr. Frankenstein is more of a clichéd villain than in the book.
Jack studied the picture of the odd-looking creature soaring through the sky.
“Ahhh!” screamed Annie.
“What?” said Jack.
“A monster!” Annie cried. She pointed out the tree house window.
This is the first tree house story where the kids’ desitination might be in the present time, although there is still some time travel since the tree house always returns to the same time that it left, presumably so The Parents don’t worry. In any case. we’ve decided to mark this type of possibly-present-day story as having debatable time travel to distinguish this kind of destination from those in the past or future.
This is the first story in Future Imperfect, a 2001 anthology of 12 original time-travel stories, co-edited by the prolific anthologist Martin H. Greenberg (1941-2011) who was also a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay.
As with several of the Magic Tree House stories, the kids’ destination in this one might be in the present time.
“No,” Charlie said quickly. “I’m sorry.”
His uncle hadn’t finished. “Henry’s parents mourned him, just as they mourned poor little Daphne. James was their only child and, as a result, he was probably spoiled. His father died in the war and his mother left everything to him, including her lovely cottage by the sea. You can’t change that, can you?”
None of the theories or what she had thought or even currently believed mattered. She know with every fiber of her being that Malcolm was the medieval laird of Dunroch.
Also in need of some help is the model of time travel in the story, which is a mishmash of popular representations that no person at age eleven or elsewhen should be exposed to. Specifically, I would have enjoyed an attempt to square the Branching Timeline implied by the hole in floor with the single nonbranching, static timeline and Ex Nihilo paradox hinted at by the time-travel device. I truly liked that ex nihilo paradox, and wish it had been explicitly dealt with rather than swept under the carpet.
It had survived the fire, untouched and unscarred; his wife, who had powerful magic, had not.
“No!” He leaped into time.
The actress Naka Riisa has another connection to time-leaping girls: In the first sequel to the original novel, , a 2006 anime adaptation, Riisa voiced the lead character, Makoto, who was Kazuko’s niece. So if I have this right: The original leaper is Kazuko; Kazuko’s niece Makoto is the leaper in the 2006 anime; and Kazuko’s daughter Akari is the leaper in the 2010 live-action movie. So in some sense, Riisa is her own cousin.
Fellow ITTDB indexer Janet found this one on the web, and we watched a daily installment with tea during my first September up in the ITTDB Citadel.
Tim and I saw this on Fathers Day Eve in 2012.
Although the book involves wormholes and scientists, it’s really a quantum fantasy, wherein an ordinary fantasy has the word “quantum” scattered throughout in key places, typically before the word magic, magician, or wormhole. Nevertheless, we’ve listed it as science fiction to match its publicity material.
The gang up in the ITTDB Citadel showed this five-minute film to me on my first prime birthday of the 2010 decade.
Morgan’s unshakable belief that Gabe is a good man slowly chisels away the walls he’s built around himself. As he comes to terms with living in the future, he must decide if losing his heart is worth more than holding on to the life he’s led in the past.
Joe: Wait—the what, now?
Barry: If you travel back in time to change something, then you end up being the causal factor of that event.
Cisco: Like . . . Terminator.
Joe: Ah!
Wells: Or is time plastic? Is it mutable, whereby any changes in the continuum could create an alternate timeline?
Cisco: Back to the Future.
Joe: Ah, saw that one, too.
By the end of the first season, one principal character has seemingly been trapped in the 2043, and Cole is stuck in 2015, having just gone against fate in a major way, but with a third principal character poised to spread the virus via a jet plane.
P.S. Whatever you do, whether in narrative time or elsewhen, don’t bring up this adaptation as dinnertime conversation with Terry Gilliam (but do watch it if you can set aside angst over a lack of a consistent model and just go with Cole’s flow).
—from “Splinter” [s01e01]
Writer and director Terry Jones acknowledges H. G. Wells’ “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” as inspiration for the story.
Handy Hint: The movie is eminently more watchable in a late-night group where everyone shouts “Great Scott!” whenever a character spews a sequence of pseudoscientific quantum mumbo jumbo that vaguely resembles an English sentence.
“I’m not saying you are,” Dr. Flynn said. “But there is a problem with your memory and there are people at Pinewood who may be able to find out wht it is.”
As you might guess, we enjoyed Far and his friends, but the thing that sealed an Eloi Bronze Medal was the fact that when a particular timeline actually managed to branch (not an easy feat) and the traveler then jumped to the future, she found her another self—the her that was born on that timeline—waiting for her. Most branching timeline stories ignore this issue entirely.
And just for fun . . . we get to see a flying pig three times! [Sadly, we have no Flying Pig tag. —the curator]
Ramazan: Assuming no one else had gone back and changed things before he did.
P.S. Don’t skip the end-credits!
The audio is mostly Telugu, but there are subtitles in broken English.
<spoiler!>One reviewer suggested that the story would have been better told from Margaret’s point of view. Certainly she has an interesting story of her own—one of loss so intense that it stops her world and kidnaps Mark. And yet, for me, Mark’s story is both compelling and well told, and I’m glad the author told his story. He is sensitive and lost and looking for his way in an upended world. He’s not particularly aware of how others feel, but maybe he’s getting there, and somehow Margaret grounds him and provides room to grow to the point where he can offer unconditional friendship to her (and to others) exactly when it’s needed. Is that a corny, uplifting story about tiny, perfect hypercubes that were meant to be? Yes, enjoyably so. I also enjoyed the nods to other popular-culture time travel escapades, though not so much the handwaving attempt at grounding things in science with Mark’s algebra teacher.</spoiler!> Sorry. Sometimes I feel a compulsion to drop into critic mode myself.
Sadly, the story comes close to being a slick static timeline, but alas, the writers could not follow through.