Working the Time Machine: Writing Time Travel So It Makes Sense

I've got quite a busy week on this week, and the movie I wanted to blog about isn't actually out yet. So this week I'm posting something that has nothing to do with apocalypses of any kind. This was a talk I gave at a conference at the University of East Anglia a couple of years ago. So, here's my guide to writing time travel so that you don't end up with any of those annoying paradoxes.

Working the Time Machine: Writing Time Travel So It Makes Sense

When H.G Wells first conceived of the Time Machine, it must have seemed like a fairly simple conceit. If you have a character in the present day, and you want him to have an adventure with dinosaurs, or medieval knights, or futuristic robots with laser guns for hands, have him hop into the time machine and it will take him where, or when, you want him to go. These stories are usually very straightforward, the past is almost literally another country.

But it wasn't long before writers worked out that you could influence events in this other country, and by extension, alter the nature of the present. Puzzlingly, a lot of the time, the first thing people wanted to change was that their own grandfathers had never been shot. I don't know why this is, personally I like my grandfather, but once you open up that option, time travel has some mind-boggling implications. If your grandfather dies before your mother or father is conceived, they won't be born, so you won't be born, so just who's going to shoot your grandad?

Because fuck that guy

For the writer, there's clearly the potential for some good storytelling here. But from the get go you've also got some major problems. One thing causing another is pretty much the simplest definition of a story you can get. If you start mucking about with that, you better know what you're doing, because events can get tangled up in themselves, very quickly.

That's what this talk is going to be about. If you're writing a story about time travel there are various models you can use to explain how cause and effect work, and we're going to go through them. We will look at the restrictions these models place on the writer, the options they give, and the loopholes they create.

What Happens, Stays Happened

Let's start with what might be the simplest model of cause and effect. What happens, stays happened. You can't change history.

No matter how good an idea that might be

You take your DeLorean back in time, try to shoot your granddad, but you miss. You try again, but the gun jams. You get a new gun, shoot him in the head at point blank range, and it turns out he wasn't your real granddad, and if you'd asked your grandma before you set out, she would have told you that that was the way he'd always died.

This is a popular model, a lot of scientists are big fans of this model, less for any scientific reason than because of a vague feeling that anything else would just get silly. They may be right, but I intend to show they've vastly underestimated people's potential for silliness.

Often this rule will be taken even further, and someone trying to change the future will inadvertently cause the thing they wanted to prevent. You try to kill your granddad, but some hilarious slapstick sequence of events mean you actually save his life.

This is an old plot, you can date it back to before Oedipus's dad had his son left on a mountainside because he'd heard that when the kid grew up bad things would happen. This is far from the last reference to Oedipus in this paper.

Why do all my blogs end this way?

For the writer, this model of time travel can work nicely. As I said earlier, what happens, stays happened, you don't have to worry about things your character does in Chapter Twelve wiping out what they did in Chapter Three. Actions have consequences, and those consequences are permanent. There's no hope of a quick fix when your character goes back to alter history to suit themselves.

At the same time, although your story can't go back and negate itself, there is still a lot of room for plots to loop back on themselves, and often the story you end up with will be far from linear. If you're going to attempt this sort of story, it's a good idea to be good at plotting. Often, these stories will end up following the structure of a detective story, starting at the end, and spending the narrative working out how the protagonist gets there, but this is just the simplest structure this sort of story can take.

An excellent example of the use of this sort of time travel can be found in The Time Traveller's Wife.

You know, I didn't know how creepy this paper's underlying themes were until I started illustrating it

For those of you who haven't read the book or seen the movie, the Time Traveller in question is Henry DeTamble, a man who frequently finds himself hopping backwards and forwards through time, with no control over where or when he will end up, or for that matter, any clothes when he gets there. A lot of time travel seems to involve nudity. I don't know why.

Also, everyone seems to come out of time travel looking ripped

The story switches between being narrated by Henry, and his wife Clare. Henry meets Clare when he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. Clare meets Henry when she is six and Henry is thirty-six. They both experience exactly the same events, but in a different order. They also have to deal with the knowledge that their future is set and immutable. Henry regularly travels back to events in his own past he would want to change – his mother's death in a car crash, an accident he sees at the ice-rink, and the time his father walks in on him as a teenager making out with his future self. He is powerless to prevent these things from happening.

But this doesn't render Henry and Clare completely powerless. It doesn't stop them from being able to win the lottery, should they ever want to. It doesn't stop them from using information about a doctor's unborn child to manipulate him into taking on Henry's case. And it doesn't stop Henry from giving six year old Clare a list of dates, telling her exactly when and where his trips through time will bring him to her.

We'll come back to these tricks in a second, and see just what we can do to push them to breaking point, but before we start getting pleased with how clever we are, I'd just like to point out what the time travel manages to do for the part of the story we're actually supposed to care about, the relationship between Henry and Clare.

For a start, we get to see Henry and Clare's relationship from several different angles. Every time Henry and Clare meet they are different ages, knowledge of the past and future is divided up differently between them, and this affects the way the relationship works. For Clare, Henry goes from being a cross between a parental figure and an imaginary friend, to a teenage fantasy, until eventually he becomes Clare's life partner. On the other hand, when Henry meets Clare for the first time, she's a complete stranger who already knows a large part of Henry's future before he does.

The other notable use time travel has in this story, is something sci-fi has always been very good at, taking a metaphor and taking it absolutely literally. A relationship is full of metaphorical time travel, you spend a lot of it in your imagined future, with the fantasies, hopes and fears that accompany that. Equally, nostalgia, grief and regret can draw you to the past. For Henry and Clare, this isn't just flowery language, it's a physical truth.

Which is all very touching, but we're not here to talk about love stories, we're here to screw up the laws of causality, so let's focus on one of the tricks this book pulls off- going back and doing favours for yourself in the past. If you remember your future self helping you out before, you're not changing history, you're just completing a loop. Once you allow for that, we can really start to enjoy ourselves.

My personal favourite example of this trick is in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, probably the third greatest film about evil robots from the future ever made. The Bill & Ted movies follow the adventures of the Wyld Stallyns [sic], who will eventually become the greatest rock band who ever lived, saving the environment, bringing about world peace, and making the air guitar the standard form of greeting.

These films were so good, Keanu Reeves decided to never act again

At the climax to the second film, Bill and Ted face off against the villain who has come back in time to destroy them. It seems that Bill and Ted are doomed, until Bill comes up with a fool proof plan:

“After we get away from this guy, we use the [time machine]. We time travel back to before the concert and set up the things we need to get him now.”

At that point, it turns out a sandbag and cage have been set up to drop from the ceiling, disarming the bad guy and trapping him. The bad guy's response to this is to point out that when he has defeated Bill and Ted, he's going to go back in time and equip himself with the key to the cage and a spare gun, promptly, it turns out he has both those items. Only for it to turn out that the gun is a dud because "Only the winners are going to be able to go back and set things up!" Bill and Ted set up the key and fake gun for kicks.

Despite appearances, at no point is time changed. Bill and Ted had always gone back in time after defeating the bad guy, and the cage had always been hanging in position, waiting for the right time to drop down.

Okay, so let's see if we can push this even further to breaking point with another, entirely hypothetical example.

Supposing, just supposing, that instead of spending the last few weeks studiously researching and preparing this paper, I instead spend the last few weeks playing Halo 3 and watching reruns of The Gilmore Girls. When today comes round, somehow I sleep in until three in the afternoon, and only just have time to get to campus. We've all been there.

It's like a hug for your eyes!

Luckily, as I'm on my way out of the house, I find an envelope on the doormat. I look outside, but there's no-one there, just a couple of flaming tire tracks and a number plate spinning in the road. The envelope, rather handily, contains this very paper. I deliver the paper, and it's a huge success, then slip I out of the building, climb into my DeLorean (did I mention I have a DeLorean?) and travel back in time to this morning. I put the paper in an envelope, push it through my own letterbox, then hop back in the car and disappear.

Then I use my DeLorean to pick up chicks, because Relativity says the DeLorean is the sexiest of cars

Again, this series of events is entirely consistent with itself, past present and future form a neat little mobius strip. But I'm sure some of you are wondering, if that's the case, who actually wrote my paper?

Well, until anyone else steps forward, I'm still going to take the credit.

Robert Heinlein was a big fan of this sort of loop, and pushed it about as far as you possibly can with his story All You Zombies. In that story, a girl grows up in an orphanage, is impregnated by a mysterious stranger, who later turns out to be her transexual future self. The transexual future self then steals the baby, takes it back in time, and drops it off at the orphanage. The girl is her own mother and father, begging all sorts of questions. I told you that wasn't the last Oedipus reference, didn't I?

There are all kinds of tricks and paradoxes you can pull without altering so much as a second of history. However, handled poorly, the unchangeable history has its own pitfalls.

For a start, it can lead to your characters having to behave unnaturally just to keep the plot consistent with itself.

I think it's fair to say that a lot of people, finding themselves in the past, would try to alter history just to see what happened, even if they didn't have a motive for doing so. We're just spiteful like that. If the writer acknowledges that, they will often find themselves creating ever more contrived sets of circumstances and coincidences to keep time on the correct path. You can only keep this up for so long before it begins to stink of deus ex machina, and maybe even end up with people talking about “Time” as an anthropomorphic entity, which I've always felt borders on cheating.

Plus, let's face it, the laws of causality would have to work pretty hard to keep this guy alive

But what if you can change history?

“The future is not set.”

That's a quote from The Terminator, a film that, at first glance seems to follow the standard plot of “go back in time, try to prevent something, inadvertently cause it to happen.” Arnold Swarzenegger goes back in time to prevent John Connor from ever being born, and in the process, accidentally introduces Sarah Connor to John's father. There are even deleted scenes to show how the mangled remains of the Terminator end up inspiring the creation of the computer that will eventually become Skynet and kill us all. It seems like a perfect loop.

But in the first film, James Cameron keeps dropping hints that history can be changed. There's the above quote, from John Connor of the future, there's Kyle Reese insisting that he's from “one possible future”

Then, in the second film, John, Sarah and another Terminator track down the man responsible for building Skynet, blow up all the information relating to it and prevent Skynet from ever coming into being. From a storytelling point of view, this serves several purposes. It handily explains why we didn't all die in a nuclear holocaust in 1997. It allows John and Sarah Connor to have a happy ending, which they couldn't have had if the future was set . And it means we can all pretend Terminator's 3 and 4 never happened.

Wiped from history

For those of you keeping count, Terminators 1 and 2 are the second and first best evil time travelling robot films ever made, and two more examples of time travelling nudity.

Now, in the name of full disclosure I should point out here that I prefer this sort of story. I feel like the stakes are higher if the future is changeable, and it’s easier to become invested in characters who can take full credit or blame for their actions. Of course, having said that, I should point out that if history is changeable, that doesn't automatically imply free will exists. It could just mean determinism is really badly organised.

A Matter of Perspective

Writing a time travel story with a changeable history does give you a lot of options, but it also confronts you with a brand new set of problems. Perspective, for example, now has to be a much more precise tool.  If you can't change history, you can view the story from any angle you like, the actual events will always be the same. If history is changing, that isn't the case.

The easiest solution is to keep your perspective nailed to your time traveller. After all, your time traveller is likely to be the only person to actually notice history changing, so they will probably be in the best position to watch events. They will know how history has changed, what history was like before, and what caused it to change.

Another solution is to place your perspective with a character from the past that's being travelled back to – this is pretty much how the Terminator films work. Again, this is reasonably straightforward. You don't see history changing, you only see events unfold, and how the time traveller is influencing them. The time traveller might explain how history originally unfolded, and you might be able to guess at how things would have turned out if the time traveller wasn't there, but for all intents and purposes you only see the one version of events.

The other alternative is a lot more tricky, and that is to tell the story from the perspective of the future that is being altered. If you're going to do this, you've obviously set yourself quite the challenge, as character's memories will be changing from one scene to another and the reader will often be the only one who can see what's really going on. If you're going to write your time travel story this way, you're going to have be very good at getting information to the reader subtly, and often you'll have to depend on them to fill in the blanks for you.

Of course, it's possible to switch between these perspectives, but if you do you will risk confusing your reader for the sheer hell of it.

Photoshopping Through Time

Regardless of what point of view you're watching from when history gets changed, we're still back at our original question – what's going to happen when you shoot granddad?

One option is you shoot your granddad, and then mysteriously fade away as you've erased yourself from history.

Many of you will remember this version of cause and effect from that other great example of an Oedipal time travel plot, Back to the Future. For those of you who haven't seen this masterpiece of modern cinema, Marty McFly travels back to 1955, and accidentally disrupts his parents' first meeting, causing his teenage mother to develop a crush on him, and negating his own existence.

Having sex with Lea Thompson is widely considered one of the better ways to negate your own existence

We know he's negated his own existence, because on a photograph he's brought from the future he can see his older siblings fading away, one by one, until eventually his guitar playing hand also begins to disappear.

Changing the fabric of causality is just slightly less efficient than using photoshop

Now if we're going to start picking holes in the logic here, there are rich pickings, and that's without even touching the sequels. For starters, you have to wonder what George McFly thought when his third born child came out looking exactly like the guy his wife used to fancy in High School.

It's telling that an earlier timeline, Marty McFly looked more like Eric Stoltz

But aside from that, the biggest problem with the fadey-photograph method of showing how history changes is that when Marty changes something in 1955, it seems to change in 1985 at the same time. You can get this problem quite often when writers think of the past as literally another country. You can trace this right back to H.G. Wells' Time Machine, when his narrator suggests that “even now” the Time Traveller is on some “on some plesiosaurus-haunted [...] coral reef.”

We're going to give Back to the Future some slack here though, and not just because nobody has yet designed a time machine that looks cooler than the DeLorean. Back to the Future is, as the title suggests, ostensibly about Marty trying to return to a time period that hasn't happened yet. Since the plot demands he have some difficulty doing that, he can't keep nipping forward thirty years to see how his actions have affected 1985. Even if he could, it would make for a fairly unwieldy plot. The fading photographs give the audience a shorthand for how events are going to play out.

And despite the title of the film, the central pillar of Back to the Future's plot isn't Marty's attempt to get home. The main story arc is arguably George McFly's. The film is the story of a wimp's struggle to get the courage to stand up to the bully and ask out the girl. Marty is there partly as a catalyst for setting events in motion, and partly to raise the stakes, and make George McFly's teenage concerns a matter of a life and death (or at least, life and not life).

Branching Out

Still, if you want to have a time travel story where history is mutable but your plot still stays internally consistent and there's no “meanwhile, in the future” nonsense, we can do that too. The way we do this, is quite simply, to cheat.

So, let's get our gun, climb into our DeLorean and head back in time to a nice little cafe where your grandfather's just sitting down for lunch. Your gun's in perfect condition, you're going to be firing it at point blank range, and you've performed extensive DNA testing to prove he is in fact your biological grandfather, we have all our bases covered. You walk in, pull the trigger, and before you know it there are granddad brains dripping off the walls.

"And that's what happens when you only put a five pounds in my birthday card, bitch."

At this point, the time line splits in two. There is the first time line, where your granddad finishes his lunch in peace and goes on to have grandchildren who harbour some sort of unspecified resentment towards him, and then there's the new time line, where he doesn't. You're not about to disappear, you're fine, because you're from time line number one, but in time line number two, you will never be born. When you return to the future, it won't be a future you recognise, and nobody's going to recognise you.

For an insanely complicated version of this, see the movie Primer

This version of time travel helps us resolve a whole lot of other paradoxes. Remember the mystery of who wrote my paper? Well now we can solve that one. At some point, there was a time line where Chris wasn't conveniently saved by a postal delivery from the future, and went on to look really quite silly. Unable to live the humiliation down, he decides to actually write the paper, then take his DeLorean and post the paper to his past self. Rather than altering his own past however, that version of Chris ends up creating a new time line, which we've already described. After that, the loop becomes self sustaining, spreading out across various alternate time lines.

Of course, when I tried to redraft it, things got kinda complicated

If you put your mind to it, you could probably even create a loop of the kind seen in All You Zombies, although after a few different time lines, that baby would be seriously inbred.

Of course, even this model of cause and effect has some problems. For example, stories that use this model rarely, if ever, explain what happens to the original time line. Does it break down and disappear as soon as our time traveller leaves? Does it keep going on without him? If it keeps going on without him, then just what is the point of Skynet sending the Terminator back to kill John Connor, and why bother sending Kyle Reese back to stop him? In time line one, Skynet's already beaten. If you think about it too long, it also makes you wonder, just who was John Connor's real dad in the original time line?

He wasn't originally John Connor's father, he was just aiming for the best "Your mum" zinger in history

Your time traveller will also have to be careful not to do anything that will prevent their past self from going back in time. If their past self doesn't get in the time machine, it won't cause anyone to fade away, but now there are two versions of your time traveller.

If you're telling your story from the perspective of the past that's being travelled to, things can get even more complicated. Kyle Reese says he's from “one possible future”. Implying there is more than one possible future. You could feasibly get time travellers from several possible futures, or even the same time traveller coming from several possible futures. Personally I'm still waiting for Terminator/Planet of the Apes crossover, where the hyper evolved apes duke it out with robots to see who gets to overthrow humanity. Basically I want to make Arnold Swarzenegger fight a gorilla.

Come on! I know you've still got it!

We've looked at various different ways of portraying time travel over the course of this paper, but the important thing to remember is that time travel is a story-telling device, it can't make the story on its own. The stories we've looked at have been about a complicated romance, a dweeb trying to get the girl, and killer robots (which can make a story on their own). Time travel allows us to do things with those stories we otherwise wouldn't be able to. We can see relationships you otherwise wouldn't get to portray – how a parent and child might get on when they're the same age, how an ageing conservative might get on with his hippyish, lefty younger self. We can see how characters react to seeing their own future, or how their lives might have turned out differently. But the thing to remember is, if your characters are convincing and compelling enough, your time travel logic can be as sloppy as you like.

#23 Robopocalypse: All Watched Over By Machines Who Want To Kill You

This month we’re going to be taking a look at some non-zombie related apocalypses. After all, I deliberately called this blog “Chris Writes About the End of the World” not “Chris Writes About Zombies” so that I had a get out clause in the event of zombie overload.

So, with zombie apocalypses off the board, let’s take a look at the next best thing: Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse.

A robot uprising differs from a zombie apocalypse in a lot of ways, but perhaps the most crucial one is plausibility. When the zombie apocalypse happens we don’t need to know how it happens, only how people react to it. The zombie apocalypse is the story of how humans respond in the face of an irrational and impossible event that flies in the face of everything we knew about the world.

Like Ted Danson becoming the lead on CSI

A robot uprising is different however. The robot uprising is the culmination of advances in technology that are supposedly taking place right now, it is the logical extension of where our society is already heading.

A Brief History of You Getting Killed by Robots

So it is that previous robot apocalypses have been very much a reflection of current concerns. The very first robot uprising- in fact, the very first use of the word “Robot”-dates back to 1921, not all that long after an actual uprising had taken place. In R.U.R or Rossum’s Universal Robots, the robots are less mechanical men and more artificial humans, built as a slave race. It’s not hard to see why, not long after the Russian Revolution, people (by “people” here I mean “rich people”) would be scared by the idea of such an uprising. The robots here aren’t just a slave race, there the basis of an entire economy. They keep the factories working, the streets clean, and what’s more they’re doing tasks in your home. If they revolted, your society would collapse and your home would no longer be safe.

Poor people are nature’s robots!

Skip forward a few decades to a better known robot apocalypse. This one, admittedly, takes place almost entirely off screen, with the entire battle being symbolised by a punch up between that space marine from Aliens, and that body builder from Jingle All The Way.

This time the rebellious robots weren’t our slave race of robofactory workers and robobabysitters. Instead, the rebellion came in the form of Skynet- a "Global Digital Defense Network" and given command over all computerised military hardware and systems. So, being a massive super-intelligent computer, it did what all massive super-intelligent computers do- became sentient and dropped nuclear bombs on everyone.

This film came out in 1984- Your guess is as good as mine as to why people in 1984 might have been scared of a vast, faceless machine killing us all with nuclear fire. Maybe it was a metaphor for fast food or disenfranchised youth.

My generation’s parents saw this video and thought “Hey! Let’s bring a child into this world!”

So while R.U.R’s robot apocalypse was a metaphor for poor people, and The Terminator’s nuclear Armageddon was a subtle metaphor for our fear of nuclear Armageddon, today the robot apocalypse is a metaphor for... well.

We live in an age where the army regularly deploys robotic drones. Remote controlled robotic drones, but they’re working on that, and occasionally they have been known to lose control go rogue. Meanwhile we have AI controlled cleaning robots and MIT has built a computer that can teach itself to read English, in order to learn how to play Civilisation- that game about taking over the world.

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. Oh wait! Nukes!”

Aside from the scientists who seem to be actively working towards our own annihilation however, we’ve got the same anxieties about machines that monocle wearing factory owners at the start of the last century has about the proles. We rely on them, they keep our economy running, they’re telling us where to drive and they’re in our home. And they know us, everything we do, from shopping online, to using our bank cards, to wandering around with your smart phone in your pocket, is resulting in information being collected by us.

More overtly than ever before, our fictional worries about technology are a mirror to our actual worries about technology. This is when Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse steps in.

An Actual Review of the Book We’re Supposed to be Talking About

Spoilers from here onwards.

First things first- Robopocalypse does feature some similarities to Max Brooks’ World War Z, a story that some might think is more suited to this blog. Like World War Z, Robopocalypse is a novel by a writer who has previously written a How-To guide to surviving just that sort of event. Like World War Z, Robopocalypse starts its story in the aftermath of the war, then takes on the form of an oral history telling the story of the war from several different points of view. Whether or not Daniel H. Wilson was deliberately mimicking Max Brooks’ style, his book’s publicists certainly did. We at Chris Writes About the End of the World aren’t that bothered by this however, because as we’ve said before, all writers are thieving bastards.

What matters is, what does it do with the rip off?

Another way that the robot uprising differs from the zombie apocalypse is that in a zombie apocalypse you don’t have to pay much attention to the zombies. Zombies do what zombies do- which is mostly walking towards you going “Nom!”

With the robot apocalypse the writer has to think about how the robots look, how they’re designed, and, in its biggest departure from the zombie apocalypse, what the robots want. Most of these questions are ones that Wilson has good answers for. He’s the first to admit that if you’re trying to design the ultimate killing machine for a combat environment, you don’t base it on a shape that can’t survive a car crash without a seatbelt on.

That’s right you guys! I’m talking to you!

There are humanoid robots in Wilson’s world, but it’s repeatedly pointed out that the only design advantage the human shape has for robots is that it’s better for interacting with humans. Far more useful are the gigantic preying mantis shaped robots, or the exploding insect-like stumpers. Think about that name for a second. Lovely.

The scariest portion of the book however, is the opening chapters that emphasise just how dependent we are on the machines that turn on us- from the robotic toys that start trying to blackmail a senator’s child in a sort of Satanic version of Toy Story (In fairness, a talking doll will always be more terrifying than anything that isn’t a talking doll) to the hacker who finds the phone and computer network he uses to screw with people turning on him, to the sheer chaos when an air traffic control computer just decides to crash planes into each other. Once the robots finally decide to just go nuts and kill everybody a survivor looks out his window to see what the robots have done to his New York Street. What he sees isn’t an image from a zombie apocalypse, or even a war zone- he sees a perfectly clean, well maintained street, because cities are environments designed to be convenient for machines to get around, and why would you screw with that?

Although a road paved entirely with human skulls works too I guess...

One area where the book misses a trick is with its Afghanistan plotline, where a US soldier ends up fighting alongside Taliban insurgents for the justifiable reason that the Taliban have been fighting robots for years. Given that, like World War Z, this book makes a point of giving us protagonists from every conceivable age, race, nationality and background, I do wish that as well as giving us the US soldier as a PoV character the story had given a chapter or two over to an Afghani narrator fighting alongside him.

It’s also worth noting that, given that this is a story about mankind fighting machines, the book doesn’t take the easy and obvious anti-technology standpoint. Humankind wins the fight not by resorting to slingshots and bows and arrows, but by salvaging and repurposing robot technology, eventually even working alongside other robots that don’t fight for “Big Rob”.

And Big Rob himself is never painted as necessarily evil. Throughout the book he is curious about humans, as well as all other forms of animal life- it’s repeatedly pointed out how well the natural world seems to be doing once the humans are cut back. We never really learn exactly what his motives are, but whatever they are, they are complex.

I guess what I’m saying is that should a super-intelligent homicidal AI- maybe one that’s taught itself to learn English- be unleashed upon the Internet, I want to point out that I wouldn’t necessarily be against it, and could in fact be an extremely loyal and useful ally, totally willing to serve his probably completely benevolent dictatorship.

Just saying.

Right- the drinking game.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? One character does end up building a massive fortress for survivors to take shelter in, and many other fort-like outposts form throughout the book, so I’m going to let you take a shot.

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? Is mankind the real monster? I’m actually going to go with no on this one. The Big Rob does seem to think humankind are fairly monstrous, but in terms of how they actually behave throughout the story, humans actually seem like a decent enough species.

Are the zombies walking dead who move slowly and can only be killed by destroying the brain? This a book about robots, not zombies. So it’s actually pretty surprising when, near the end of the book, the human survivors have to face off against a bunch of slow moving (take a shot) walking dead (take a shot) soldiers who have been taken over by robots, and who can only be killed by shooting the (robotic) brains (take a shot). Who knew?

#22 Community, Epidemiology: TV Shows That Need More Zombies

One of the great things about being self-employed and working from home is that you very quickly become familiar with a number of sitcoms you weren’t familiar with before. I’m still a full four episodes off finishing the first season of the Wire, but in the space of a fortnight I’ve brought myself fully up to date with campus sitcom, Community.

For those who don’t know it, it’s a series about discredited lawyer Jeff Winger being forced to go to a community college after his BA is revealed be a fake. He falls in with a study group of loveable misfits and hilarity ensues. It’s a fun series, while it has a few episodes that rely overly on characters passing The Idiot Ball, and it’s rife with geeky references, or Chris Candy, as I call it. While it has plenty of episodes set around typical sitcom and high school plots, these are interspersed with episodes based around a Dungeons and Dragons game, or a rogue space simulator, or, a staple of the geeky sitcom genre- a paintball episode (Community actually has three).

However, for its Halloween special, the sixth episode of season two, Community went a step further with the geekiness. It actually just flat out had a zombie outbreak in the episode- it doesn’t explain it away or make it a dream sequence, for one episode, and one episode only, Community became a sci-fi horror. A sci-fi horror with an Abba soundtrack and one guy wearing a banana costume, but the point still stands. And it does it the same way Shaun of the Dead does- by playing the zombies straight and letting the characters tell the story.

This brings me back to a point I somehow never get bored of making- that in the zombie apocalypse genre the zombies exist just as a catalyst to see how the characters react. They’re good as that sort of catalyst, because we all know the zombie rules more or less, and so we’re able to keep the camera firmly on the survivors.

Community isn’t the first to do something like this- the Simpsons had an out-of-continuity zombie story for their Halloween special one year, and the Smurfs did a version of a 28 days later style plague with The Purple Smurfs decades ago (Based on a comic which actually predates Night of the Living Dead, but which is usually forgotten because the “Infected” smurfs aren’t purple, but black).

This got me thinking about which other TV series could use a zombie apocalypse episode to spice things up. And because I hate having to think of things, I recruited the Internet for some suggestions as well. Of course, the first few suggestions were all hilarious- Newsnight, the Antiques Roadshow, Waking the Dead (Although seeing Boyd and Dr. Foley fighting zombies would actually be pretty badass). But then, we got to the televisual genius...

House

This one should be a no-brainer really, and not just because we’ve seen what a badass zombie killer Greg House M.D. makes in this dream sequence. It’s because we know exactly how House would respond to zombies- he’d want to know what’s causing it. Since zombie movies are usually pretty shut-mouthed about the cause of the outbreak, this could get interesting, especially as the outbreak gets worse. Imagine all the microscope peering scenes in I Am Legend, only instead of The Last Man on Earth, it’s House and his team bickering the whole time.

On top of that, one theme zombie stories frequently return to is how far our ethics will bend in the face of human extinction. Given how bendy House’s ethics are anyway, we can expect stuff that’ll make the lab in Day of the Dead look like a petting zoo.

Glee

Okay, let’s make it clear from the start, when we’re talking about a zombie episode of Glee, we are definitely not talking about their rendition of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which is an entirely different interpretation of how things can return from the dead a mangled, revolting version of what they once were. We’re talking about an episode where real zombies rise and invade the school with lots of songs on the run leading to a climax when they discover Kurt's falsetto can explode zombie heads. This idea came from Anil Godigamuwe.

CSI/CSI: New York/CSI: Miami

Yes, I’m imagining a massive three way crossover for this story, all over the world the dead are rising from the grave, but the CSIs still have a job to do, even if their corpses keep wandering away from the crime scene. Of course, each series would have their own approach to the zombie menace.

In vanilla CSI Grissom (They’d bring Grissom back for this, I’m sure of it) would notice interesting parallels between the zombie epidemic and the effects of a certain mind controlling fungus on ants. 

In CSI: New York we would see how the zombie apocalypse has caused all sorts of zombie-related subcultures, including at least one fetish group and an underground urban zombie killing sport. Mac, Danny and Lindsay would of course do some serious zombie killing.  Jo Danville would die in the most painful and gory way possible, probably while dispensing some sort of folksy wisdom.

By the opening of CSI: Miami Horatio Caine would already be the only survivor, climbing a hillside made up of the corpses of his team mates. From atop his mountain of corpses, he would spot a figure running up the street. In one swift movement Caine would shoot the figure dead without checking to see if it was a zombie, while simultaneously swiping up his sunglasses with his other hand and placing them on his nose before saying “Looks like I got you, dead to rights.” (Click this now. DO IT.)

Mad Men

Even as zombies they will look better than you

This was another suggestion, this time from Tom Hunter. Now, like I said, working from home has got me completely caught up on Community, while still four episodes away from finishing the first season of The Wire- so as you can probably guess I’ve not seen Mad Men yet. All I know about it is that everyone wears amazing outfits, it makes smoking and misogyny look cool and that it has the sexy con-artist lady from Firefly in it. Having listed all these things I can’t really tell you why I haven’t seen Mad Men yet, the only possible reason I can come up with is that it doesn’t feature a zombie apocalypse. Well dressed misogynist zombies! Who doesn’t want to see that?

Gilmore Girls

I work it out as, starting top left, lives, lives, dies, dies, dies, lives, dies, dies, dies, lives, lives, lives... ummm... dies.

Okay, so Gilmore Girls has finished- but hope still abounds for the movie version!

The trouble is, making the jump from TV to Cinema is a difficult one. You need a story that feels bigger than just an extra long TV episode- you need to raise the stakes and make everything feel just a bit more epic than before. Many TV series have done this really really badly by simply assuming it’s enough to put their character in a different location- usually Ibiza. This always results in a terrible, terrible movie. However, you know what would work?

Yeah I’m going to skip the rest of my preamble and say it’s a zombie apocalypse. This would be great for Gilmore Girls, because as the series has developed we’ve come to care not just about the eponymous girls, but the entire community of Stars Hollow. You know what that means? Lots of characters who the audience cares about, but who are expendable enough to be killed off!

Can’t you just see it as the community is, bit by bit, forced to retreat to the Inn? I can see Lorelai generating a real Ripley vibe when it comes to the crunch, and Luke, being a generally aimless slacker, will of course end up saving the day (because if zombie movies teach us nothing else, it’s that generally aimless slackers are the best at fighting zombies). Kirk, I’m sorry to say, is probably a dead man, and Lorelai’s parents will likely meet a dignified, but inevitably grizzly end. However, I imagine Lane and Michel will discover previously unsuspected levels of combat badassery.

Come on! You know it makes sense! One of the writers, Jane Espenson, even has extensive experience writing about the undead for the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Now, returning to the episode of Community that triggered off this fountain of television genius, it’s time to play the drinking game.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? Yes, the building being Greendale Community College- particularly their study room.

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? It’s hinted the army is planning kill everyone off, and it takes them six hours to get there, by which point the crisis has been resolved. So take two shots.

Is mankind the real monster? There is plenty of infighting, and Jeff does point out he likes one character better as a zombie. So let’s take a shot.

Are the zombies walking dead (No, just infected) who move slowly (One shot) and can only be killed by destroying the brain? (Someone does mention the importance of destroying the brain, so take one shot)

Do the dead rise regardless of whether they were “infected”? Nope.

#21 Falling Skies: Don't Mention The War

We’ve not really done any alien invasions in this blog so far. There’s a reason for that. While this blog was never intended to be exclusively about zombie apocalypses, I did want to stick to Earth-bound apocalypses. Not that I don’t enjoy alien invasions as much as the next nerd, but they seem to pose a different set of questions to the ones we’ve been looking at here. Zombie apocalypses, as well as other post-apocalyptic fiction such as The Road, The Time of the Wolf, or The Stand, are about the end of civilisation. The protagonists are looking at a time where there will be no new art, no new technology, no future generations writing the history of the time they live in.

Alien invasions are rarely truly apocalyptic- even War of the Worlds seems to jump back to a comfortable status quo remarkably quickly after the Martians all get wiped out by bacteria- but even when they are apocalyptic, the story isn’t about the end of civilisation, it’s about our civilisation being crushed by a bigger and more powerful one.

However, watching Stephen Spielberg’s Falling Skies I found it demonstrated some good points about what not to do when creating a post apocalyptic storyline. As I’ve said before, the Internet has more than enough people being snarky and slagging things off, and so as a rule I only write about works that I happen to really like- apart from when I don’t.

Also, in the interests of full disclosure, I have a longstanding grudge against Stephen Spielberg. In my last year of university I wrote a dissertation on War of the Worlds and how over the last century various people have adapted it to suit the politics of the time. Spielberg brought out his adaptation- full of juicy Iraq War imagery and post-9/11 imagery, about a month after my dissertation was due in. That Spielberg hasn’t put that much effort into making this series all that different from his War of the Worlds means I’ve got plenty of opportunity to use up all those left over dissertation theories.

Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds: The TV Series

So, let’s start off by saying Spielberg’s fingerprints are all over this. On the surface this is a very gritty and dark looking portrayal of humanity’s last stand against alien invaders, but it’s spliced all the way through with the sort of saccharine moments you’d expect from the man who can’t bear the idea of secret service agents pointing guns at Alien-napping children.

This picture has brought more hits to this site than any actual blog entry

You’ll see plenty of tropes and ideas reused from his War of the Worlds film. The main character of the series is a history professor- we know he’s a history professor because he keeps comparing events to things from history, and if that’s not a big enough hint, every five minutes a character has to roll their eyes at him and say “Ever the history professor!” Because he’s a history professor. He professes history, is what I’m saying.

"I'm a history professor!"

Spielberg uses his history professor character that is a history professor to repeatedly make a point he also made in War of the Worlds, that no occupying force can ever be successful- here citing the American Revolution against the British as an example. Here, as in War of the Worlds, this comparison raises some interesting comparisons considering Spielberg’s vocal opinions on other occupying forces. Here however, a character,  who I think is supposed to be a loveable anti-hero despite being both a racist and possible rapist, finally poses the shockingly obvious counter example to that argument that really, any American ought to be completely ashamed of not thinking of- That the aliens aren’t the British trying invade the United States, they’re the first settlers invading the home of the Native Americans.

"I already knew that, because I'm a history professor!"

It’s About What You Don’t Say

One thing that struck me about these opening episodes of Falling Skies however, and the reason that I thought it deserved a blog, is that the world building, the way the series tried to introduce us to the circumstances of the characters and the rules of the world they lived in, was clumsy in such a way that it actually highlighted how to do it well.

It’s been said before that readers of science fiction are also pretty good at reading historical fiction.

"I read historical fiction, because I'm a history professor!"

Both modes of fiction require you to be plunged head first into a world with unfamiliar technology, etiquette, language, and even history. This is a skill useful for reading anything that isn’t set in the same period and culture that you happen to be living in- it’s as true of space opera and sword and sorcery fantasy as it is of Victorian family saga or wartime romance. Not many of these works will start off by giving you a potted history of the culture you’ll be reading about or seeing, you have to pick up the cues as you go along. In historical fiction, you either have to figure out the bits you don't understand by their context, or read the whole book with wikipedia open to one side- and using a wiki isn't an option with a new piece of science fiction (Oh wait!)
One of the ways to do this is to look to what people aren’t saying- because those are the things everyone takes as given.

Looking at it another way, if on a typical day in Britain you hear someone say “Wow! This country’s really rainy isn’t it?” you will automatically think one of a small number of things, either “This person’s new to Britain” or “This person has been away from Britain for a while”. We love complaining about the weather in this country, but saying “Britain gets a lot of rain” is something nobody feels the need to say- it’s a given.

Likewise, if you watch the news or listen to people talking about 9/11, you’ll find people can talk about it for a very long time without ever saying what 9/11 actually is. 9/11 was such a huge event, seen by everyone, with repercussions felt worldwide for the whole of the last decade. We don’t need to tell one another what it was.

So, here’s the problem with Falling Skies- they’re six or seven months into the planet’s occupation by an advanced alien army. There are conversations I’m willing to give a pass on- the moment when two characters look at a huge alien structure and swap theories on how they would destroy it feels like a conversation they’ve had many times before (and then history professor walks up and says how he’d destroy it with a Trojan Horse, which is a thing he learned from history, being a history professor).

"Yeah, I'm a history professor."

I’m also okay with the opening scene, where children use drawings to tell the story of the alien invasion- this seems like the sort of exercise a teacher would set to try and get their kids to deal with a massively traumatic event. Plus, kids would tell you at length and in detail about that one time they saw a red car.

However, other scenes grate. There is a scene where characters are waiting to get their weak oatmeal and talking about how they would really like a steak, or pie, or some other delicious thing. You could see this happening a few weeks after the invasion, when food starts to run low. When you’re six months into a period of prolonged famine and rationing however, the guy who goes on at length about how he really wants a burger is the guy who everyone hates.

"You know where they had better food? That's right! History!"

Saying “I wish there was more food” when you’re looting an empty convenience store is... well, duh? Even the kid (who you will remember, I was lenient with about the opening) saying “I wish everything was back the way it was” just felt like it wasn’t something you would say if this was a reality you’d been living with for over half a year.

Having people who live in the middle of an alien occupation explicitly saying “Gee, I wish we didn’t live in the middle of an alien occupation” feels as genuine as us saying on a near constant basis “I’m going to use this glowing rectangle to talk to other people who have glowing rectangles!”

A great contrast for this is Game of Thrones (which, having not read the books yet, I strongly suspect is heading in a zombie apocalypse like direction). Throughout the opening episodes of Game of Thrones the viewer is made constantly aware that this story is set in the aftermath of a larger, more dramatic story. Cryptic mentions of The Mad King, The Winter and The Dragons hint at huge events, but nobody every directly narrates these events to the viewer, they are just a background to the character’s more present concerns.

Perhaps an even better example is Spielberg’s own E.T.

E.T. is a powerful story about divorce- the character of E.T. is based off of Spielberg’s own imaginary friend “who could be the brother I never had and a father that I didn't feel I had anymore." The divorce is present in every single scene of that movie, in the way the kids deal with each other and in the way the mother acts, but at no point do we ever get anyone really talking at length about the divorce. Everybody in that family knows there’s been a divorce, but now they have day to day stuff to deal with.

I feel like much the same attitude should be had towards a global apocalypse.


Okay, drinking game time.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? Sadly no, they're on the run for most of the two hours.


Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? Well, the history professor seemed to thinking he was making a really insightful point by saying that you know, looking after the civilians is important, he knows that, because he's a history professor. So let's say one shot.


Is mankind the real monster? After the special effects are used up in the first hour of the pilot, they're forced to throw in some evil humans that can be mostly defined by words spelled R-A-*-I-S-T, so take a shot.


Are the zombies walking dead who move slowly and can only be killed by destroying the brain? No zombies, but everyone seems to agree headshots are the only way to kill the aliens, so one shot.


Kiddy zombies? Well, I say no zombies- there are slaves that are controlled by weird spikey worm things on their backs, and a lot of them are kids. Yeah, take two shots.