"I went to a place to eat. It said 'breakfast at any time.' So I ordered french toast during the Renaissance". --Steven Wright ... If you are a devotee of time travel, check out this song...

Friday, December 2, 2011

Terra Nova as Good Biological Science Fiction

As Terra Nova chugs along to its season conclusion - perhaps series conclusion as well - it seems like a good time to assess what went wrong and right with the show.

Time travel is the central foundation of the series - people traveling from the future back to the prehistoric past.   But as a continuing time travel story, replete with the paradoxes of time travel - if I travel to the past to make my current world better, and I make the change in the past which does make my current world better, then why in my better current world, where I was growing up, would I have wanted to travel back to the past in the first place - Terra Nova offered little.   That general scenario was never Terra Nova's - the travel to the past is just to find a better life - but Terra Nova so far has not picked up on any other paradoxes, which are like fruit for the picking in time travel stories.

Dinosaurs ala Jurrasic Park are also an obvious mainstay of the series, and Terra Nova did pretty well on that score, though no great shakes.  The smaller screens of even today's big screen television sets are just no match for dinosaurs on the big movie screen, and dinosaurs do even worse on iPads.

But one area in which Terra Nova has excelled is in its thoughtful treatment of the natural world in the past - not just special effected dinosaurs - or what is otherwise known as biological science fiction.  A recent episode featured big insects outfitted with spy devices, an earlier episode had memories lost because of micro-organisms, and with Elisabeth's high tech medical knowledge playing a role in just about every show, the organic has really flourished in this series.

I admit to having a soft spot for biological science fiction - three of my novels pictured below delved into these themes (The Consciousness Plague about the loss of memory, and The Pixel Eye about squirrels outfitted with spying chips).  And I indicated in a piece on the History Channel about the evolution of science fiction a few years ago that I expected biological science fiction to be the next wave (replacing physics as the leading science-fiction science).

If Terra Nova does get a chance to continue - which I hope it does - it would do well to more prominetly mine this rich vein of stories.






See also Terra Nova Debuts

3 comments:

Jeff said...

I like the show, too, but I could do without time travel paradoxes. The time fault that vaults them into the past is simply a double-talk device to put them among dinosaurs. What the series should explore is "then what?"

How much longer, if all goes well, will humanity occupy this planet before we pull up stakes and move on? 1,000 years? 10,000? Regardless of which, our total time on Earth will amount to ~2 million years. Had our race existed 100 million years ago, whoever replaced us now would not know of it. So there is lots of room for the Terra Novans to do as they will in the distant past without even bothering with mined-out time travel tropes.

Like you, I hope they do pursue biological SF story lines, as well as others possible in a hazardous environment complete with dinosaurs.

Anonymous said...

I really love this show and I really appreciate your review. But Mr Levinson if I'm understanding what you are saying then I must correct you about your assumption on the time paradox issue. I believe it was the first episode where they mention the parallel universe theory and that is the reason there are no time paradoxes. I would imagine as a science fiction writer that you are well aware of parallel universe theories. Brian Greene, the physicist, writes about it in a book called "The Fabric of the Cosmos" and PBS did a special recently with Brain Greene about this book.
When there are infinite parallel universes there are no time paradoxes.

Paul Levinson said...

Thanks for your comment, Anon.

Something about parallel universes was mentioned in the first episode, but there was no follow-up, explanation, or development of this point, and, instead, all we had after that was talking about traveling to the past and then back to the future.

Further, if Terra Nova was in a parallel universe, the show would have had to indicate in what ways its future was different from ours, or the original. And not only did the show not do that, but it went out its way to emphasize how the future was the same for all the characters (for example, the Commander and his son), regardless of when they made the pilgrimage.

So, I'll stick to my interpretation :)

InfiniteRegress.tv