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.Time travel is a constant subtext.Science fiction invents the future to explain the past.There are paradoxical consequences in explaining the past and thereby altering our perception of the present and disturbing our sense of who we are.From Terminators I and II and the Back to the Future movie trilogy to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and its numerous sequels, popular fictions like to incorporate tantalising riffs on the theme of exploring the universe across time and space that include journeying back in time.The journey motif has its own lexicon of cliché and stereotype.In plots of the Terminator genre, the visitor arrives from the future on a mission to protect the present.A recurrent motif is the circular paradox of traveling into the past, doing away with one’s own grandfather, altering history and eliminating oneself, thereby releasing grandfather, history, and self to begin the process all over again in an endless loop amounting to the science fiction equivalent of the classic “All Cretans are liars” self-canceling paradox attributed to Epimenides, a native of Crete, circa 600 BC.Such logical twists and time-traveling plots are Hollywood’s way of conceding that stories about space travel in the imminent future are in reality about stuff that has already happened in the distant past.We all know the Empire under orders to strike back in Episode V of George Lucas’s Star Wars series is the British Empire of King George III plotting revenge on the American colonies after the Boston tea party episode.In Back to the Future III the complicated futility of time travel fiction is laid bare in a storyline in which America’s rural past is suddenly a happier place, the mission is to undo earlier attempts at altering history, and the hi-tech transport or cliché of futuristic technology has morphed into a gull-wing DeLorean time machine, in 1990 a product without a future.So if Avatar and Star Trek are actually movies about events and issues that happened long ago, it follows that the time traveling is taking place now, in the minds of the movie audience, and has the potential to rewrite an audience’s understanding of past history, and thus to alter irrevocably a viewer’s sense of national and personal identity.Both Shatner’s Captain Kirk and Conrad’s Lord Jim are characters of fiction based on the same historical figure, Captain James Cook of the barque Endeavour.Their tales of exploration are grounded in the reality of Cook’s scientific voyages to the relatively uncharted Pacific ocean in search of a lost southern continent rich in raw materials and home to a civilization untouched by developments in western history.When their fictional characteristics are taken into account, the species of humankind idealized in movie fictions as the Klingons, and in more recent times as Na’vi, are identifiable as generically Polynesian and specifically Maori.Body armor and facial decoration identify the Klingon archetype with the tall, tattooed Maori king Hongi Hika, who spoke English, visited Britain in 1820, was received at the court of King George IV, and received royal gifts of armor and firearms.At their meeting Hongi introduced himself in English with the speech “How do, Mr King George?” to which the amused monarch responded with a hint of a German accent “And how do you do, Mr King Khongi?” Having received, as he saw it, license and arms from the British monarch, King Hongi and his companions returned to the southern ocean where the chief proceeded to wreak havoc and destruction among neighboring tribes.The King Kong story speaks of a noble specimen of alien humanity transported back to western civilization to become the innocent trigger of a deadly conflict of nature and culture.In movie mythology, animations in particular, representing people as animals or robots is a routine and entirely legitimate device for making a point about human nature and character.Are foreign people like us? Are dolphins intelligent? If so, what are they saying and how should they be treated? The controversial and politically highly incorrect idea that alien peoples can be identified with alien animal species (and that urban civilization can get along with them) is addressed with candor and engaging humor in the movie series Men in Black, in which the Men in Black duo constitute a roving secret service priesthood without dog collars, their alien clients unashamed caricatures of immigrant workers.And what about Frankenstein? For readers in the nineteenth century, the message of Mary Shelley’s ghoulish creation is equally relevant and just as fascinating.Here goes.A dead person is history, but can continue to exist as a person in the written record.But this is not about bringing a real dead individual back to life, but the more complicated fiction of bringing history to life by assembling the best parts from a multiplicity of corpses.So Frankenstein is really about famed eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon, who assembled a body of evidence from a variety of classic sources in order to bring the Roman Empire back to life for readers in his long-running series The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.In the grand tradition of science fiction, Gibbons’s history is also an experiment in time travel, transporting readers back into the past so that they might be better able to face the future.But it was not about the Roman Empire.It was about the present crisis facing the British Empire.From Gibbon, his contemporary Hegel learned the force and acquired the art of extracting body parts from a library of sources to construct his own ersatz model of world history out of which Germany would emerge as an inevitable and dominant force for progress [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]