On the myclasses portal where this learning episode was found there were links to the three short stories, found on the web in text format, as well as a link to the first of the podcasts for this 'fate & predestination' theme area. Some of the actual short stories noted here are removed from this version but citations are included for these very well-known texts, in the Readings and links section of this page. The following text with links were offered to the students, excluding the short stories and some images from broadcast films, due to copyright reasons.
Students attending a face-to-face class for this study watched the DVD version of the film in class with computer and overhead projector, while students studying as flexible learning were offered a copy of the film on CD-ROM, copied under the special provisions of local Copyright laws.
| Notes on the Forum responses for this theme area |
| Arthur C Clark and 'Time's Arrow' |
| Ray Bradbury and 'A Sound of Thunder' |
| Notes on Star Trek IV: The Return Home |
The points at the start of these notes are to be discussed in the Forum area. You are asked to jump to the Forum area, using the link here and making a comment in the appropriate Forum thread. Please remember, your participation in discussions is expected in this study, as part of your overall participation.
Forum topics for discussion: |
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What do time travel stories back into time tell us about the use of technology to alter the past? |
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Do the writers of the time travel narratives approve or disapprove of travelling through time? |
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If there was one thing in your past that you would change, using a time machine, to make your present life better, what would it be and how would you do it? |
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In the time travel narratives studied in Learning Episode two, to what extent is time travel a simple literary device to create sensation: to amuse or interest the reader? |
In the mySF Project there are several, different theme areas. The theme areas cover different areas of content, like aliens in SF, views on genetic engineering, time travel narratives and artificial intelligence, as examples. Here we are in the fate and predestination theme area, looking at time travel in SF.
Each theme area has a special name to describe the main focus of the theme and all theme areas have learning episodes running from one to ten for that theme area.
In the learning episodes there are links to further readings, notes on the texts covered in that learning episode, and discussion points. These discussion points occur in a myclasses property called the Forum.
When you open a learning episode, say learning episode two for the fate and predestination theme area (you are here now!), the text in that episode will ask you right at the top of the page to go into the Forum area and make some comments about the topics that are found in the learning area notes.
It is very important that you read the notes on the page for that learning episode before you jump into the Forum and make comments. The notes are designed to give you some background to the points discussed.
When you are ready to go into the Forum and discuss the points in a particular learning episode, you should take care to write formally and correctly.
Your participation in the Forum areas is assessed and part of assessing your comments will be to look at the spelling, grammar and overall expression. The teacher who gives you a grade for your Forum comments will also be looking for thoughtful and careful comments on the points related to the stories or films we are covering in that learning episode.
You can read a full description of the way your participation in the Forum will be assessed in a Word document to be found in your Files Area property for this theme area.
If you have any questions about this part of your assessment, please talk the matter over with your teacher or send an email.
Thank you and have a strong and valuable discussion of the points in the learning episodes in your Forum area.
We start this mySF unit of work with three SF short stories, from Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein.
Firstly, please read the Clarke story, 'Time's Arrow'. After that comes Bradbury's 'A Sound of Thunder', one of the most famous of all time travel short stories. You can jump to these stories as Word documents by clicking on them in this paragraph, or by scrolling down to the Links section at the bottom of this page where you will find them again, as well as additional background readings.
In later weeks we will also read and discuss the two Heinlein short stories and then the more challenging (and rewarding) story from Ursula Le Guin.
In learning episode four the entire novel of HG Wells' The Time Machine is made available through a link on the site and and we spend some time looking at that very important novel. In learning episode seven the final short story is brought in, 'Gregory Mobile', by David Rade.
The concept behind the Learning Episodes in the 'Fate and Predestination' theme area is that they become increasingly more complex, sophisticated and perhaps even difficult. That is not to say that the early short stories and films studied in the first few learning episode are simple and straight forward - in fact, they are powerful and very important, as you can see by the notes on Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury, below.
Arthur C Clarke is one of the most famous Science Fiction writers and you have probably read some of his stories or novels, or seen films based on his works, before. You can find a great bibliography page for Clarke at 'Arthur C Clarke: Bibliography' (Vandesteele, nd) and a great overall description of Clarke's work on Wikipedia, just called Arthur C. Clarke.
In 'Time's Arrow', originally written in 1952, we see what some Science Fiction (SF) critics call a Time Slip story, a type of time travel story. Without giving anything away, in this story a group of palaeontologists looking for dinosaur bones and tracks end up working next to a top secret research project. Amazingly, the two groups of scientists end up being completely interlinked in several dimensions.
The Time Slip story was used frequently in many different forms (Nicholls & Clute, 1995), as was a movement through time to the Age of the Dinosaurs, as seen in the second story.
The main questions to ask about 'Time's Arrow' might not relate to what actually happened in the story and why, but whether the writer thought the scientists in the secret research institute were doing the right thing. What was the story's attitude to playing with time? Did the writer condemn the scientific experiment, or was the time paradox (discussed in later learning episodes), used to juice up a pretty dull story?
Ray Bradbury is also a very well known SF writer and if you click on the Wikipedia link to the Ray Bradbury page here you will find a good deal written about him, as well as a list of many hundreds of works in SF and fantasy, including many made into films. There is also an official Ray Bradbury website made by his publishers if you would like to learn more.
First, do not be confused between the short story 'A Sound of Thunder' and the full-length movie that came out in 2005 of the same name. If you want to watch the film, or read reviews of this film (almost all of which rate the film poorly), you can compare it with the original story to see how much was lost and ruined - and made nonsense - by the film adaptation.
'A Sound of Thunder' the short story is focused on a dedicated and difficult time journey into the past, using a real time machine. The travel is to the Age of the Dinosaurs, like several other excellent stories like Sprague de Campe's 'A Gun for Dinosaur' and Aldiss' 'Poor Little Warrior!'
Bradbury's 'A Sound of Thunder' is clever and short and suggests, long before it become well known, the 'Butterffly Effect' in Chaos Theory. This was even discussed in a very different film about dinosaurs, Spielberg's Jurassic Park.
If we could use a time travel machine to travel backwards in time to change the past, what would happen to the present? Again, there is a time paradox used to great effect in this story.
In later weeks we look at the idea of an individual changing their own past, or even of avoiding an inevitable fate, through religious themes linked to predestination.
What exactly is fate, and can a time machine change it?
This Star Trek film uses the original cast from the original television series but it is much less adventurous than many other earlier and later Star Trek franchise stories and series. The film is "essentially a lighthearted adventure" (Star Trek IV, 2006)
The film was made in 1986 and many time-travel films had been popular just before its release, such as The Terminator (1984) and Back to the Future (1985). In this story the time machine itself is a stolen Klingon star ship that is accelerated and slung around the Sun to gain so much velocity that it travels backwards in time.
And why do the crew of the Enterprise have to travel back in time? To save the world of their present. They have no choice but to time travel because there is no solution to their present problem. The solution can only be found hundreds of years before, on an earlier Earth.
As Scheib (1990) notes, "The actual business of time-travel is conducted astonishingly casually" (Scheib, 1990) and the technical aspects of both the time travel process and the alien probe are said to be handled 'shabbily' (Scheib, 1990).
All the same, this film is useful in our first studies in the fate and predestination theme area because again the travel is backwards and on this occasion it is to save the world, to save the present from ecological blunders of the past. The time travel in Star Trek IV can be said to be a literary device, a trick or focal idea used by the writer to make a story more interesting and to introduce contrasts and comparisons. The contrasts (or juxtapositions) are between crew of the Enterprise from a future Earth where there is no money, no poverty and little violence, trying to deal with a contemporary America where money is vital, and there is violence and suspicion.
The literary device of the time machine (Nicholls & Clute, 1995) is pretty lame and thin (Star Trek IV, 2006) but this film does let us see how it can be used for comedy and drama. Star Trek IV was a successful film because of the juxtapositions and the commentaries on modern society by the Enterprise crew (one an alien Vulcan - also the director) as well as the juxtaposition of contemporary technologies with technologies three hundred years more advanced.
Lem (1974) argues that the use of the literary device of the time machine for its own sake is worthless, thoughtless and makes a poor story. He argues that stories like these show the decline of modern, American Science Fiction. We look further into Lem's ideas on time travel in later learning episodes.
But what does Star Trek IV tell us about what humankind might become? Do the future Enterprise crew represent a better model of humanity than the contemporary characters in the film? Does the film argue that humans create a better society in the future, using science and technology?
The idea of this great scientific utopia that is to come, a better time, is called 'euchronianism' (Alsford, 2000). We look at this more closely in the learning episode dealing with HG Wells and his The Time Machine.
A podcast discussing some views on the use of time travel in SF can also be downloaded from the property in myclasses and below. Students are advised to download this file and listen to it. This is part of your background 'reading' for the mySF Project.
Be warned! The podcast is about 5M in size so it may take some time to download and play. The podcast will launch Windows Media Player on a recent Windows computer and start to play the sound file after it has buffered for a while. Of course, you can also download the file to your iPod or other mp3 player and listen to it at home, at school, on the bus, everywhere! You can even subscribe to the RSS feed for the podcast section so that your notes for the unit are sent to you, fresh and ready!
The podcast covers some of the points for the first four or five learning episodes as well as giving a definition of time and time travel from several perspectives. The second podcast in learning episode eight will have more detail on all the stories, the scientific and religious aspects of time travel. These podcasts contain important information for the test in learning episode nine.
Alsford, M. (2000). What If?: Religious Themes in Science Fiction. Darton, Longman & Todd: London.
Arthur C Clarke (nd). 'Arthur C. Clarke'. Wikipedia. Retrieved 29 August, 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke
Bradbury, R. (2005). ‘A Sound of Thunder’. In Turtledove, H., & Greenberg, M. (Editors). (2005). The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century. Pages 75-86. New York: Ballantine Books.
Clarke, A. (2005). ‘Time’s Arrow’. In Turtledove, H., & Greenberg, M. (Editors). (2005). The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century. Pages 45-58. New York: Ballantine Books.
Honeycutt, K. (2005). 'External Reviews for "A Sound of Thunder"'. IMDb. Retrieved 29 August, 2006 from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081/externalreviews
Lem, S. (1974). 'The Time-Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring'. Science Fiction Studies. Number 3, Volume 1, Spring, 1974. Translated from the Polish by Thomas H. Hoisington and Darko Suvin. Retrieved 17 August, 2006 from http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/3/lem3art.htm
Nicholls, P., & Clute, J., (Eds.) (1995). Grolier Science Fiction: the multimedia encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Danbury, Danbury, CT: Grolier Electronic Publishing.
Nimoy, L. (Director). (1986). Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Written by Nimoy, L., Bennett, H., Meerson, S., Krikes, P. and Meyer, N. Paramount Pictures.
Ray Bradbury (n.d.). 'Ray Bradbury'. Wikipedia. Retrieved 29 August, 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury
Scheib, R. (1990). 'The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV aka Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home'. Retrieved 29 August, 2006 from http://www.moria.co.nz/sf/startrek4.htm
Star Trek IV (2006). 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home'. Wikipedia. Retrieved 29 August, 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_IV
Vandecasteele, P. (n.d.) 'Arthur C. Clarke: Bibliography'. Retrieved 29 August, 2006 from http://cage.rug.ac.be/~pvdecast/clarke.html
Further readings and links: |
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'Time's Arrow' by Arthur C Clarke |
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'A Sound of Thunder', by Ray Bradbury |
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ends
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| enemy within | brave new world | fate and predestination | the shape of things to come | ghost in the shell |
 mySF Project is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License. |
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