So why do I count this as time travel when, for example, The Gap in the Curtain is not? The future newspapers in Gap never actually appeared, and it felt as if they were mere visions of a possible future, whereas we had no doubt that Larry holds an actual copy of tomorrow’s paper in his hands. And besides, It Happened Tomorrow had a great take on how events may be fated and yet, when accompanied by charming misunderstandings, lead to the unexpected.
Early Edition, one of my favorite TV shows, uses the same idea of tomorrow’s paper, but its creators said that the show was not based on this movie.
He nodded. “It could be,” he said, “since, in the absence of any real passage of time, it would be in temporal ratio to our involvement in our pasts, which might force it into a different time plane altogether.”
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.
Oh, and Dave’s grandfather had a plot to go back and kill Hitler, but that’s not really relevant to Zelda (and Cassie and Walter and John and Charlie).
* The other, of course, is Paul J. Nahin’s Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction, Second Edition.
(P1) If backward time travel were possible, it would be possible to perform a self-defeating act.
(P2) It is impossible to perform a self-defeating act.
(C) Backward time travel is impossible.
Suffice it to say that when all the Librarians up in the Citadel woke from their sleeps and returned from their treks, we had a celebration that was strident enough to raise Lazurus Long himself from the dead (if he is dead, that is).