suspension of disbelief

[cellio]

It's funny the things that do and don't trigger suspension-of-disbelief problems for me. I enjoy speculative fiction -- science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, etc. This means accepting some basic premises -- faster-than-light travel, teleportation, magic, time travel, or whatever. I'm totally cool with all that.

I had two recent experiences with other factors in such stories.

First, last night I finally saw Looper (Netflix: last year's movies this year, which is fine with me). I enjoyed it in general (the ending moved it from "ok" to "I liked that"), but some of the implementation details gave me pause. (Everything I'm about to say is revealed in the first ten minutes of the movie.) The basic idea is that "the mob" in the future sends people they want to kill back in time 30 years to have hired assassins do the deed and dispose of the bodies in the past -- easier to get away with. That's fine. But the assassins know that they aren't going to be allowed to live past that point in the future -- you get 30 years of high pay and then at some point the guy sent back is going to be you and you "close the loop" by killing him. Ok, I can work with that.

So...why does the future mob need assassins in the past? Why not just send bodies back? Or if the time-travel device only works with live people, then -- given that we've seen them land very precisely in geo-space and time -- why not send them into a live volcano? And if they need assassins, why not go back 100 years and then not have to worry about them catching up?

As I said, I enjoyed the movie -- but I couldn't help wondering about such obvious questions, which could have been addressed with a few sentences of dialogue but weren't, while at the same time accepting the time-travel premise just fine. Maybe I'm weird.

In a similar vein, I recently finished reading The Domesday Book by Connie Willis, which coincidentally also involves time-travel. In this case they're sending a historian back to the middle ages for direct observation. She's got an implanted recording device, something like a universal translator (also implanted)... and neither a homing beacon (should they need to rescue her) nor a beacon she can drop at the rendezvous point (matched up to an implanted detector). The history department has budget for a time-travel net but not homing beacons? Bummer. (I realize that this would totally mess up the plot of the book.) Also, apparently in the future they only have land-lines. I enjoyed the book (which I read because of the song (YouTube, lyrics)), but I couldn't help noticing.

I guess it's the little things that catch my eye.

Comments

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Also, apparently in the future they only have land-lines.

What, you mean when Willis was writing The Domesday Book they didn't have foregazing time windows?

Oh, wait, we still don't have those.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

This seems perfectly reasonable to me, that the author gets to set the basic premise but must then implement it rationally.

[starmalachite.livejournal.com]

What unsuspended my disbelief during Domesday Book wasn't the Oxford had a time machine -- it was that they let a lowly undergrad anywhere near it.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

I had the same problems reading The Doomsday Book and then reminded myself of when it was written. It's like reading 50s science fiction where they have robots and use slide rules.

The book was written in 1992, apparently based on a universe she created earlier. Predicting more ubiquitous communication and tracking devices was certainly reasonable in the late 1980s and early 1990s based on technology then prevalent. But this is often a problem for science fiction writers -- the tendency to focus on the things necessary for the story but not envision the changes to broader culture.

Doomsday Book always felt like it was written about England in 1992, except for the time travel bit.

while(victimsIter.hasNext()) { getRifle().shoot(victimsIter.next().getHead()) }

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Everyone else commented on the book, so I'll comment on the movie!

The reason they couldn't kill people in the future and send the bodies back is actually mentioned in the movie—it's because past some point in the future everyone has a brainchip implanted that sends out a signal when they die. IIRC the main point of sending them to the past is so that the receivers for this signal do not yet exist; the body disposal is secondary.
But no, that doesn't explain the lack of using a live volcano.
It also doesn't explain not bothering with time travel at all and just killing them inside a Faraday cage.

30 years ago instead of 100 might have been because of the difficulty of setting up the arrangement in the first place with people who are culturally 100 years removed from you. If you make it only 30 years then the guy who first sets it up can just go back and meet with his past self (or his past self's friends). That isn't mentioned though so this is only speculation.

Closing the loop seems pointless in the first place. If they guy didn't blab about your operation in the 20 years between his retirement and his closing, what makes you think he'd do it later?

The whole thing with changes to the past self affecting the future self but not retroactively made not a lot of sense, but I suppose the alternative is paradoxtastic.

Palimpsest

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

Charles Stross wrote a short story called Palimpsest in 2009 that has a clever twist on the idea of killing your future self. In his version, it's an initiation ritual: you show a willingness to trust the "history fixing" organization by allowing yourself to be killed by an alternate version of your future self. Refusal indicates that you don't truly believe the premise of the organization.