long time ago (we're already using the word "time") there was a popular, slick-paper magazine called Liberty, which published a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction.
One of Liberty's hallmarks was to rate each of its offerings by the amount of time it took to read. Each piece was slugged with a line of print saying, "Reading time, 45 seconds" or "3 minutes, 10 seconds."
I don't know what the optimum reading rate was. Obviously, individual reading mileage might vary.
Which is what makes time so attractive to a sci-fi writer. It's the creative equivalent of silly putty—you can stretch it or squash it.
To make a slight shift in metaphor, it's the best pair of tools in the writer's box.
Just as a subject, time travel is one of the great subjects of sci-fi film and television. The two most memorable stories of the original Star Trek were "City on the Edge of Forever" and the fourth feature film, The Voyage Home. Whole arcs and seasons of Voyager and Enterprise hinged on paradoxical loops in time. There have been series devoted to the subject, from Time Tunnel to Voyagers to Time Cop to Seven Days.
Done well, it's Back to the Future, the Robert Zemeckis trilogy about a slacker from the 1980s who changes his and his family's destiny in the 1950s. Done less well, it's Frequency, an otherwise charming movie that unfortunately treats the immense challenge of communicating across 30 years as about as difficult as making a long-distance phone call.
Dozens—hundreds—of sci-fi stories have explored the subject, all the way back to Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, through H.G. Wells to Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" and Asimov's "The Ugly Little Boy," Heinlein's The Door into Summer, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson, Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, Dennis Danver's unjustly overlooked The Watch, right down to John Varley's wonderful new novel, Mammoth.
There's a well-loved, classic novel by Jack Finney—best known for The Body Snatchers—called Time and Again. Published in 1971, it has been optioned, developed, re-optioned, re-developed, turned into a Broadway musical in 2001 and made the subject of a sequel (From Time to Time), but never managed to reach the screen as it should have. Oh, well ... in time.
These stories—and movies—explore the effects of time travel on relationships, wringing every possible variation out of the famous what-if-I-went-back-in-time-and-shot-my-grandfather paradox.
But there's another use for the tools of time ... with them, a screenwriter can manipulate the flow of time itself.
Today dissolves into tomorrow
A novelist can skip ahead in time by leaving a few lines of white space on a page, or crafting a paragraph of prose that carries the reader across years or decades.
How do you show the passage of time on the screen? The classic way of showing a short leap—from today to later tonight—is a dissolve. The bad old way of showing greater leaps is filming hands of a clock turning ... pages of a calendar flipping.
In a time-travel story, of course, the pages flip backward ...
More to the point, a time-travel story allows a writer to change the rate at which time flows.
I first noticed this tool when watching—what else?—George Pal's 1960 film of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. The Time Traveler escapes from the Morlocks by running into the cave where he's stashed the device. Killing his last pursuer, he jumps back onto his time machine and pushes the control lever forward, and we see the dead Morlock decay right before our eyes, going from bloat to worms to bone to dust in a matter of seconds.
This is actually the second example of manipulation of the time flow (which sounds like something out of sci-fi) in the film: The first is when the Time Traveler fires up his machine and watches the changes of fashion in a London shop window—styles evolve from Victorian to mod, skirts rise and fall, all in seconds. As this happens, the buildings in the neighborhood change, too ... and the sky shifts from peaceful summer days to nighttime barrage balloons under the Blitz, culminating in a devastating explosion as a result of a strike from "the atomic satellite."
I first saw The Time Machine when I was 10 years old. I have seen it a dozen times since then, and I still get chills.
Frame by frame to the future
The second tool of time is stretching a moment, making the tick of a heartbeat feel like an entire minute.
Time stretches in real life, of course: Anyone who's been in a car crash—or an IRS audit—has experienced it.
My most recent encounter with stretching time was in Batman Begins, in the spectacular chase involving the Batmobile and half a dozen police cars across downtown Gotham City. The Batmobile rips along the highway, swerves, slides, reverses course, screams into parking ramps, flies across rooftops (that was a new one) as the cop cars try to keep up.
I live in Los Angeles, where car chases are a twice-weekly staple of the daily news. They take hours, though the fascination never seems to lag (a case of time compression, perhaps?).
This Batmobile chase simultaneously compresses time—a chase that would take hours takes five minutes on screen—and stretches moments—events that would last seconds are milked for every ounce of emotion.
Stretching a moment is a classic filmmaker's trick. Look at Hitchcock's work, for example. But working in sci-fi or fantasy, with video editing, which makes it easy to slow down motion, or stop it altogether, gives you the justification to use all the tools of time.
And, for a stretched moment, makes writing fun.
(Total reading time, seven minutes.)
Michael Cassutt is the author of 11 books, two dozen SF stories and 60 television scripts, he is currently working on a time-related project for the SCI FI Channel. He wrote this column in six hours.
