{"id":2818,"date":"2007-12-09T14:01:58","date_gmt":"2007-12-09T22:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2007\/12\/09\/14\/01\/future-past\/"},"modified":"2007-12-09T14:01:58","modified_gmt":"2007-12-09T22:01:58","slug":"future-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2007\/12\/09\/14\/01\/future-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Future Past"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sending signals through time is a popular science fiction idea. Carpenter&#8217;s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0093777\/\">Prince of Darkness<\/a><\/em> movie combines the tachyon pulse signal idea from Benford&#8217;s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/185798935X\/ref=nosim\/meehawl-20\">Timescape<\/a><\/em> with some green-vomit+zombies horrorism.<\/p>\n<p>Wilson&#8217;s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0812545249\/ref=nosim\/meehawl-20\" title=\"Wilson firmly grasps one of the most fundamental concepts in sociology - the concept of reification. As the chronoliths appear, marking sites where Kuin is victorious in battles 20 years into the future, the idea of reification emerges as the backdrop of the novel. Though Kuin is unknown, posses no army or resources, he comes to be recognized as the unstoppable conqueror in the minds of people who begin seeking to join him - it is the monuments that created Kuin. The central question becomes, \">Chronoliths<\/a><\/em> has an interesting approach to the subjective perception of temporal paradoxes. In this case, the &#8220;message&#8221; is engraved in huge stone obelisks that are quite destructive. Like many sensawunda SF books, the ending is flat but some of the psychology is good.<\/p>\n<p>Asimov also wrote some good ancient SF that played with retro-temporal signalling using <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Thiotimoline\">thiotimoline<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Kind of the reverse of retro-temporality, Irish SF writer <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bob_Shaw\">Bob Shaw<\/a> used a magical substance called &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.scifi.com\/scifiction\/classics\/classics_archive\/shaw\/shaw1.html\">slow glass<\/a>&#8221; to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/B000OPFK5Q\/ref=nosim\/meehawl-20\" target=\"_blank\">send signals from the present into the future<\/a> at dramatically altered rates. He teased out the implications of trans-temporal signalling combined with nanotech into some quite evocative speculations, including a vision of a rather maudlin, thoroughly mediated, panopticonised surveillance society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sending signals through time is a popular science fiction idea. Carpenter&#8217;s Prince of Darkness movie combines the tachyon pulse signal idea from Benford&#8217;s Timescape with some green-vomit+zombies horrorism. Wilson&#8217;s Chronoliths has an interesting approach&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[408,415,412,416,413,410,414,409,417,411],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bob-shaw","category-chronoliths","category-gregory-benford","category-isaac-asimov","category-john-carpenter","category-prince-of-darkness","category-robert-charles-wilson","category-slow-glass","category-thiotimoline","category-timescape"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2818\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}