I'm rather obsessed with science fiction stories about
time travel. Back when I was a young boy, I saw
The Time Machine on television and I was exposed to the idea of time travel technology: using an imaginary machine that can transport people through time. Great fun!
Mutants
What about other types of time travel that do not involve moving an entire person through time? I like the idea of
science fiction stories that involve a technology for sending just information back into the past (
example).
What about a time travel story where there is no technology needed, no machine required to transmit information to the past? What if a human brain had the ability to "see the future"? One such story is "
The Golden Man", a story by Philip K. Dick from 1954.
The issue of
If magazine containing "The Golden Man" can be downloaded from the
Internet Archive.
My Problem
The "golden man" is a
mutant. As a biologist, the frequent appearance of mutants as characters in science fiction stories is a great source of aggravation for me. The mutants found in most Sci Fi stories are not biologically plausible; the mutations often confer amazing (and absurd) super-powers.
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| ladies love the super hard Hugo |
Tales about dudes with super-powers can be traced back to old Sci Fi stories such as "
The Gladiator" by Philip Wylie (in 1930). But why stop there? We could interpret some of the Greek myths as being stories about "mutant" humans with super-powers.
Super Atom
Then along came the atomic age. I suppose that back in the 1940s and 1950s every science fiction story writer simply had to write a story about a mutant human with some super-power.
Isaac Asimov did it with his story about
the Mule.
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| Cris knows when he is about to be shot |
In the aftermath of a nuclear war, mutants pop up within the human population of Earth. Dick's Mutant of the Day (named Cris) is literally a golden man, physically perfect except for his golden skin. Cris represents the 88th type of human mutant discovered. All the previous 87 types were exterminated because the government agents who hunt down mutants don't want we humans to end up like the Neanderthals: extinct and replaced by a new type of mutant human that is superior to us.
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| Nicolas Cage and Jessica Biel |
But the golden skin is just the surface. Cris' brain allows him to see the future. Not ALL the future, but 30 minutes into his immediate future.
2017
This is the 10th anniversary of
Next, a film that was inspired by "The Golden Man". For this film, Nicolas Cage plays the role of the "mutant" who can see into the future. For
Next, Cage was put on a shorter leash than Cris; Cage can only see 2 minutes into the future, which provides enough information from the future so that he can make a living by playing blackjack.
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| Jessica Biel |
In "The Golden Man", everyone is impressed by the ability of Cris to survive to the age of 18 without being caught by the army of government agents who constantly search Earth for hidden mutants. In
Next, Cage plays the role of a middle aged man who had lived for decades without anyone noticing that he can see the future. He disguises himself as an unpopular Las Vagas stage magician. Maybe as compensation for only being able to see two minutes of the future, Cage gets to spend the night in a motel room with Jessica Biel.
There is some kind of unexplained connection between Cage and Biel. Maybe Cage is like a "receiver", able to cognitively process information that arrives from the near future. And maybe Biel is a kind of transmitter.
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| see the future |
Biel seems to be able to transmit information back to the past and so Cage discovers that it is possible for him to "see" several days into the future as long as he can "tune into" Biel's transmission from the future. Working together, they are a powerful, if faulty, "device" for looking far into the future.
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using time travel to get the girl
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Given the age difference between Cage and Biel, I was wondering if we might be told that Biel is playing the role of Cage's daughter and that she had inherited her ability to send information through time.
In "The Golden Man", Cris has two special super-powers. The first is his ability to see the future. The second is that woman seem to find him irresistible.
In
Next, we see how Cage can look into the future and see how to behave exactly right so as to first win Biel's trust and eventually, get her into bed.
Next is like the movie
Groundhog Day, where even-though the character played by Andie MacDowell dislikes the time-looping character played by Bill Murray, because of his ability to keep repeating his day with her, eventually he figures out how to successfully seduce her.
If a new mutation conferring the ability to see the future did appear in the human population, how could that new gene combination be passed on to future generations without being lost?
Next: another film from 2007,
The Man From Earth
