Thursday, February 19, 2015

Twelve papers I haven't written about time travel



I've been talking and thinking a lot about time travel, and whenever something takes up this much space in my brain, I like to come up with papers I could write, if I were still being actively academic. Here's twelve papers about time travel:


  1. Closed-loop family trees: The time traveler and the threat of becoming your own ancestor
  2. The Terminator Syndrome: Why time travel to stop events innevitably leads to the events you want to stop
  3. We'll be here again fifteen minutes ago: Time-traveler tense and grammatical imperfection
  4. Is this all for nothing?: Time as a river, changing time as swimming against the current
  5. I'm supposed to be gone: James Cole, time-travel as ultimate suicide, and rebellion against the Fantastic Deathwish
  6. We've seen this all before: Time travel as catalyst for the Moving PreApocalypse in Terminator and 12 Monkeys
  7. The future isn't set: Five ways fictional works take on temporal paradox
  8. The temporal prime directive: How the existence of such a rule proves time is malleable and how it somehow never matters
  9. Time traveler's guide to reality: How to tell if you're in a single-stream reality or a branched multiverse, and what you can do about it
  10. I had to kill him, he was dead already: The complex moral ambiguity of the active time traveler
  11. But when did this start: Three ways to avoid the First Cause paradox
  12. Our fates are entwined: Time travel as romantic meet-cute

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