Ever since I read Isaac Asimov's novel
The End of Eternity, I've been a fan of the time loop. That does not mean that I like all stories with a time loop. The first time travel story that I ever read was “
All You Zombies–” and I hated it.
Mass Market. The year was 1993 and the film Groundhog Day was released, bringing time loop fiction to millions of film fans. I did not see that movie until it was on network television a few years later. Why is Groundhog Day a "fantasy" while here in 2021 The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is called "science fiction"? The author of the original story describes himself as a fantasy writer. So why not call a fantasy story "fantasy"?
Origins Project. I went back and read "Doubled and Redoubled" by Malcolm Jameson as published in the
February 1941 issue of
Unknown. The story concerns a man (Jim) who is granted three wishes by a witch. Near the end of a great day, Jim hands the old woman some cash and can't hear what she says as she mutters quietly, but she just granted him three wishes.
One wish made is that Jim can repeat that great day again and again. Thus, he is trapped in a time loop, but Jim does not know why. Eventually he gets the help of a thaumaturgist who helps Jim realize that the witch is the key to escaping from the time loop.
Snap Back. Before
Groundhog Day made it to the big screen, there was a 25 minute film called "
12:01 P.M." based on a story published by Richard A. Lupoff in the
December 1973 issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Apparently there was almost
a law suit claiming that
Groundhog Day was a theft of Lupoff's story. I guess we are supposed to call this film "science fiction" because a physicist has predicted a "time bounce".
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1993. The Disintegration of Martin Landau.
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The longer
1993 version of 12:01 adds in a mad scientist (Martin Landau) on an impossible mission to accelerate particles faster than the speed of light. He insists on causing the time bounce because he's old and he must vindicate his life's work in physics... or something. In the thrilling climax, Landau ends up in front of the particle beam source; he gets exploded to bits, but that ends the time loop. We finally get a sciensy "explanation" of why only one person in the world is aware of the time loop... because Barry got an electrical shock at the start of the time loop, he gets to remember each cycle of the loop.
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shot right in the roses
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Anti-science fiction. Okay, someone actually tried to make
12:01 into a science fiction movie, but sadly the plot makes no sense. We get car chases, mysterious hit-men who make hits in public in front of dozens of witnesses or deep inside high-security facilities. Barry's love interest is a theoretical physicist, Lisa, but we learn more about her pet bird than her role in the Big Physics Project Gone Bad™.
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the thrilling count-down
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In traditional Hollywood style, when the count-down timer is relentlessly counting and the Intruder Alert is sounding and all the security guards are frantically running, they can't get into the room where the mad scientist is going to bounce time.
Never fear,
super-girl Lisa is here. Her fingers fly over the control panel and then only she and Barry can get to Martin Landau as he prepares to start his insane physics experiment.
Two Perfect. But why should only one person be caught in a time loop? For The Map of Tiny Perfect Things the magical witch traps herself in a time loop, but along for the ride is her way out: a second person who is conscious of the time loop.
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Rita waiting for the spring thaw.
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No,
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is not science fiction. Just because someone mentions black holes and the speed of light, that does not mean it is a science fiction movie. The big mystery lurking in the plot is why Hollywood insists on having twenty-year-old actors playing the roles of teenagers. Okay, no movie is perfect. Apparently the original script for
Groundhog Day involved the time loop first trapping Phil then Rita, which could have provided a more realistic explanation of why after always previously rejecting Phil, in the end she too has changed.
As a fan of science fiction, I can't watch these magical fantasy time loop films without imagining how they could be turned into interesting science fiction.
However, I don't have much motivation pushing me along in that direction because I can't escape the feeling that Asimov got just about everything right in The End of Eternity. I wonder if Hollywood might some day move past its limiting conventions and make a film version of The End of Eternity.
Related Reading: another 1941 time loop in "
Time Wants a Skeleton"
- another kind of loop;
Escape Me Never by J. T. McIntosh - fantasy
time travel genetics -
more Hollywood time travel fantasy that reminds us why there are no swords in science fiction.
Next: Part 10 of "Telepaths of Site Q"
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how to rank films
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