Just because I'm not supposed to, does not mean I don't.

Back to the Future II had a similar problem with Biff going back to change his past in the stolen Delorean. If he changed the future from that point, he shouldn't have been able to go back to 2015 (at least not the same one) and therefore Marty and the Doc shouldn't have been able to later follow him. Biff should have gone to the alternate future where he was a casino owning thug. Marty and the Doc should have been erased.

I much prefer the Doctor Who method of time travel. There are fixed points in time and space that cannot change. Whenever the Doctor goes to his own past, or the past of his companions, nothing he does can alter the future that has already happened. He can make things better for the people in that time (which is why he does it) but it will not effect himself or those who travel with him. A paradox cannot exist.

Even when the Master engineered a paradox, it was contained in a time bubble. Everything outside of it remained just the same as it ever was.

Don't even get me started on the time travel crap from the Terminator franchise. That just makes me mad.

If I ever write a true time travel story, my head may just implode.

I believe Heinlein wrote one like that called the I think? (crooked little house) it was about this guy who was a recruiter who by the end of the story had recruited his father, uncle, grandfather, brother and himself because he was all of them at one time of another.

Paolo, I think I just gave Cainanite a headache,

River

Riverwind (imported) wrote: Sun Sep 30, 2012 7:05 pm I believe Heinlein wrote one like that called the I think? (crooked little house) it was about this guy who was a recruiter who by the end of the story had recruited his father, uncle, grandfather, brother and himself because he was all of them at one time of another.

Paolo, I think I just gave Cainanite a headache,

River

The Heinlein story "—And He Built a Crooked House—" is about a man who built a Tesseract (hypercube) house that collapsed into the fourth dimension in an earthquake.

You are probably thinking about "By His Bootstraps" or "—All You Zombies—." It has been so many decades since I read them that I do not remember much of the details or what is different between them but they are both time travel stories.

I wrote a couple time travel stories in the 80 or so stories that I've had accepted.

"Meditations on a Dead Star wandering through the stars" has only one point of time travel and it creates a new timeline because the hero has already lived the old timeline. SO yes, I create paradox but since this is a Cthulhu story with the tentacled one, Yog Soggoth and his buddies, no one is going to care about the time travel. They want the monster and its gory deeds.

This might be printed this year but I think early next year is more likely. Editors and printers take their time doing anything on an anthology.

"The Day the Meth Lab Exploded" has multiple instances of time travel but it's like the movie "Millennium" where the people who go to the frutre are being retrieved just seconds before their death. Hence, no paradox.

The anthology is still filling. They like about 80,000 words to go to the publisher.

I despise what the TV series "Star Trek" did with time travel. The WHALE movie was fun and but scientifically dumb in a major league sort of way.Still it was enjoyable. The TV series trashed its way through time travel and eventually the final plots sucked so bad that no one even wants to discuss it anymore.

The TERMINATOR, works for me because I only watch the first three movies. The fourth is just a pile of nonsense that I can't even force myself to watch the second time. Again, I don't think about the time travel of the first three movies because they are set in this time and seem to fit with the simple explanations about why the robots keeps coming back to try to destroy one person. Skynet isn't all that knowing or omniscient and hat brings me to the next comment.

The biggest problem in time travel movies is that someone tends to be all knowing, all seeing, all omniscient, and my question is why? THat was the sin of Star Trek.

curious_guy (imported) wrote: Sun Sep 30, 2012 7:25 pm You are probably thinking about "By His Bootstraps" or "—All You Zombies—."

In one of these stories, the protagonist is his own father AND his own mother.

Spoilers Alert! I don't know how to point out the paradoxes without providing some spoilers. If you're going to the movies, you might want to wait to read this post.

Rian Johnson, the director of this movie bragged that even his grandmother bought all the time-travel elements in Looper. She might have, but I'll have to side with Cainanite on this one: I can't buy them.

That there is a need for loopers, murderers that kill

Slammr (imported) wrote: Sat Sep 29, 2012 9:22 pm and dispose of people sent back from 30 years in the future

makes no sense. They try to justify it by saying that in the future, it's impossible to dispose of a body without leaving a record, so they send them back to the past to have the loopers do it for them, yet we get a view of the future through Bruce Willis's eyes, and we see a world where murder is a common occurrence. The bad guy, the one Bruce Willis wants to come back and kill to change the future, seems to be in charge, and I can't imagine he would care about a few bodies showing up.

Bruce Willis wants to come back and kill this all powerful bad guy while he's still a kid of five to change the future and save the world, and in turn save his wife's life, but this guy is responsible for the existence of the loopers, and if he doesn't exist in the future, Willis's character will never have become a looper and will never meet the wife he's trying to save. Gordon-Levitt's character, a abandoned street kid, would had probably died on the street instead of becoming a looper. Of course, if he didn't become a looper and get sent back as Willis, he would have never been looking to kill the kid, who Gordon-Levitt, though some mysterious glimpse into the future, realizes becomes evil because of what Willis does trying to kill him.

If you're confused by all this, I don't blame you. You might enjoy this movie, but you will need to suspend the rational part of your brain and go with the flow of the action to do it. Clearly, I can't. Although I was entertained to some extent by the movie while watching it, I wasn't out of the theater before I was getting pissed off by all the paradoxes in it. The more I think about them, the more pissed I get at this movie.

Actually, they did explain that, somewhat at least. Or, at least that's my take on things.

*Spoilery spoilers*

Originally, someone sent Abe back and set up the loopers. And, things were good, loopers made money, the bad guys in the future got rid of bodies, everyone was happy. The person who set it up though, wasn't Rainmaker. It was only later on that Rainmaker came into the town and single-handedly took everything over. Once he had the power, he started 'closing the loop' on every looper he could find. Why? In all likelihood, the reason was because of Joe killing his mom. He saw a looper kill mommy, so once had had all the power he could grab he set out killing every looper, and probably everyone else who ever hurt him in the course of his tragic life.

This doesn't mean the story doesn't have some seriously inconsistent logic going on, especially after the ending. Why does Rainmaker still have a wound on his face after it's all over? Who shot him? What revisions happen to the world post-ending? If present-Joe is dead, they couldn't have sent back future-Joe to close the loop, the event which kicked off both timelines. Then again they never do explicitly say that they know for a fact their universe is paradox-intolerant. I mean, sure Abe figures killing someone out of order would be bad, but he's just a mob guy, not a physicist. Perhaps the rules there are perfectly willing to allow strangeness like what happened to Joe? I mean, they have to be somewhat paradox-tolerant, otherwise the first time a looper failed to kill his future self on schedule, the whole universe would have exploded. Hell, the moment future-Joe was one second late, nevermind appearing sans-head covering with hands free (directly violating version 1 timeline), the whole thing would have gone *FOOMP*

Cainanite, they definitely do address the whole 'changing my past self changes my own history' issue in rather an interesting method. At least, it's one I haven't seen used before. I mean holy crap, what they did to Seth.... It's never explicitly stated, but there does seem to be a rule that consciousness can bleed over from one version of history to another. I absolutely cannot see how Joe would wind up with the same future wife after Sara gets him clean, but future-Joe somehow manages to retain memory of how they met. Similarly, what they did to Seth only works if his consciousness bleeds through the various changes so that he actually notices them happening. *Shudder*

Then again, name me a movie involving time travel which doesn't have internal logic issues if you pull it apart. Primer is excluded from this, in that I can't even manage to follow the simplified diagram of what happened in that movie, nevermind try to pull it apart for logic faults.

That said.... Yeah, I would watch it again, and did genuinely enjoy it. Very fun movie, and I will be waiting for it to come out on DVD.

LOOPER is on the ENCORE channels.

It's rather interesting to watch and most of the description here missed the point of the movie.

The LOOPERS are men hired to kill people sent from the future where several crime syndicates (at least five syndicates- The number is unspecified) run the entire show. It's impossible to kill in the future but not 30 years in the past where the loopers live. They pay the loopers by the kill with bars of silver and they retire the looper by sending his older version of the looper back with gold bars. Killing your future self does not create a time paradox.

All sorts of problems arise when a few people start developing telekinetic powers and one LOOPER does not close his loop (kill his future self). Somehow that unleashes the RAINMAKER and it's all downhill from there.

Young Joe is Joseph Gordon Levitt from 2044

Old Joe is Bruce Willis from 2074.

Young Joe doesn't retire his older self (Old Joe) because Old Joe fights back. It seems he wants to kill a telekinetic assassin named "The Rainmaker" who is killing the heads of the crime syndicates. Old Joe is on a personal mission to kill the RAINMAKER as a child and thus preventing him from ever existing. Old Joe also wants to save his wife who was killed by Loopers coming after him when he started messing with the timelines.

That's my simple version of the plot. In the movie we see Joe live several different lives because he messes with the timelines. Plus other Loopers are running around trying to stop Joe and find the RAINMAKER.

The ending is very satisfying.

Added: THis isn't like VOYAGER which treated the viewer like a complete fool.

So it's free on ENCORE now. Go watch it.