I Remember the Future: A Review

Michael Burstein's great strength as a writer always was his talent for combing classic science fiction themes with modern settings and real heart. This was apparent in the first of his stories I read back in the 1990s, "TeleAbsence," in the July 1995 issue of Analog (published just a few months after my first story in Analog, "The Way of Flesh").   And it shines in what may be his masterwork, "I Remember the Future," a story published in 2008 in an anthology of the same name brought out by Apex.   The short film directed by Klay Stainer and produced by Zané Pyper, under 30 minutes, does this story evocative justice.

In one sense, the story/movie is an anthology of attractive science fiction tropes - New Earth visited by some future anthropologists, cryogenic awakenings, a human family decamping Earth to live on Mars, time travel, all of those goodies and more.   But the narrative that ties these together is the real payoff: Abe, the pulp science fiction writer who wrote all of these stories, is old and may be slipping into dementia.  His daughter is worried about him, and he's worried about himself.  He repeatedly lapses into the science fiction scenarios that he wrote.   And ... [here's the big spoiler, don't read any further, if you'd like to be surprised in the movie] ... it turns out that these aliens and people from the future are real, because Abe's mind, connected to some sort of cosmic flux, quantum mechanically thought them into being.   The movie is thus not only an ultimate celebration of science fiction and the science fiction writer - how could I not love it, for that reason alone - but a happy ending pulled out of a fantastical hat for a protagonist who literally seems to be losing his mind.   The last line of the story and the movie - "I remember the future, and the future remembers me" - should be remembered for the ages.

The music by Ben Coe is beautiful.  Technically, I could complain about most of the accents in the movie - attempts at New York speak by Australian actors - but that's a minor quibble about a little movie that tells a soaring, triumphant story of the irrepressible human spirit.

The movie's currently on the science fiction convention circuit - next due to be shown at Arisia in Boston this coming Saturday (January 17) at 8pm.   More details about the movie are here - and check out the trailer here.   If you love science fiction, you owe it to yourself to see "I Remember the Future".



#SFWApro

Michael Burstein's review of "Loose Ends"

This is what happened the last time "Loose Ends" went on special sale, in December 2014.   As indicated in this little screenshot, the novella did quite well, and I thank everyone who downloaded it.




It's back on sale again, on the following schedule -

March 1, 12:00am - March 3, 8:00am  $0.99
March 3, 8:00am - March 5, 4:00pm $1.99
March 5, 4:00pm - March 8, 12:00am  $2.99

You can get it here.  And I thought, for those who might be interested, I would post Michael Burstein's Summer 1997 review of "Loose Ends" that appeared in Tangent magazine's SF by Starlight column.   Michael and I hadn't known each other all that long back then, but we went on to become good friends, and admirers of each other's writing, and Michael served as Secretary when I was President of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1999.   The review was never posted anywhere online, and Michael was good enough to send it to me just yesterday for its posting here.

SF by Starlight: Michael A. Burstein

"Loose Ends" by Paul Levinson (ANALOG, May 1997)

For my generation, the event is not the assasination of 

John F. Kennedy but the explosion of the *Challenger*; and the 

date is not November 22, 1963, but January 28, 1986.  I can 

remember exactly where I was when I heard the news: in my high 

school library, near the end of lunch.  I can still see my 

classmate Tina Sormani (now a professor of mathematics at Johns 

Hopkins) tell me the news; and I can still remember my face 

dripping with tears.

Paul Levinson has taken the brilliant step of combining the 

emotional impact of these two tragic American events into his 

excellent novella "Loose Ends."  Time traveler Jeff Harris comes 

from a miserable future, one in which the *Challenger* explosion 

has been identified as the pivotal event that made things go 

from bad to worse.  Sent back in time to prevent it, he finds 

himself instead in 1963, a day before the Kennedy assassination, 

too early to prevent the later tragedy and effectively too late 

to prevent the earlier one.  Trapped in the past, he carves out 

a life for himself as a professor of philosophy, wondering all 

the while how he can manage to complete his original mission.

Throughout the story, Levinson creates a nostalgic mood, 

one that even those of us born after the end of the sixties can 

appreciate.  Historical themes are developed through parallelism 

with the music of the time, especially that of the Beatles.  

Levinson answers the question of why the sixties were such a 

turbulent time by postulating that that time period became 

polluted with freethinkers from the future, who ended up 

affecting history in ways they never intended.  It all ties in 

with the Kennedy assassination.  It may be true that preventing 

the assassination of JFK has become a cliche' for time travel 

stories, but Levinson manages to make it fresh again, with an 

explanation that could almost be used to explain why so many 

people write time travel stories about Kennedy in the first 

place.

But Levinson does much more.  He creates a love story set 

against an evocative portrait of New York City, all the while 

never losing track of the main themes of his novella.  Harris 

continues to regret his missed opportunity in Dallas, and 

wonders how he can complete his original mission while almost a 

quarter-century before the disaster he needs to avert.  His 

explorations of the past are wistful and charming, even when the 

story must face up to some of the horrors of the time.

Finally, Levinson ends the story with a logical surprise, 

and one that leaves the reader hopeful for the future.  The 

message for the reader is that one person can, in fact, make a 

difference.

The Richard-Locke Compass Time Travel Loop in Lost

This arose in a question my friend science-fiction author Michael Burstein asked about where the compass that (the slightly) older Richard gave to Locke last week, and Locke gave back to the younger Richard last night in Lost 5.3 - where that compass come from in the first place?

The topic is so interesting and so much fun - if you love time travel, as many of us do - that I thought I'd provide a more detailed response here.

First, here's a complete statement of the impressively paradoxical Loop: (a) Older Richard has a compass, which he recalls receiving when he was younger, from older Locke (older = Locke has the compass). (Or, we can start when Richard receives the compass from Locke - it doesn't matter where/when in the Loop we start). (b) Older Richard also knows that he must give the compass to younger Locke (or, Locke before he received the compass), and Richard even knows where and when, in the jungle, because older Locke presumably told Richard. (c) Older Richard indeed gives the compass to younger Locke in the jungle last week. Locke has now been transformed to older Locke (with the compass). If he succeeds in giving the compass to younger Richard - which of course he does - the Loop is established.

But - back to the question - where did the compass come from in the first place?

One possible way we can explain how the compass got into the Loop is to hypothesize an earlier version of the universe (Compass 1), in which Richard gets the compass from someone other than Locke. When Richard sees Locke in the jungle last week, he gives Locke the compass, not because Richard remembers actually getting the compass from Locke when Richard was younger, but because Richard sees this as a good plan (including giving Locke the impression that Richard already knew about all of this). The instant Locke takes the compass, we're now in Compass 2, and the Loop (which of course also is predicated on Locke surviving long enough to give the compass back to the younger Richard)...

We can tweak with the details, and say, for example, that younger Richard finds himself in possession of a compass at some point, and doesn't how he came to have it (just as we occasionally all find something in our desks that we may not quite recall receiving). We could also hypothesis that, at some point prior to the meeting in jungle, older Richard suddenly remembers older Locke giving him the compass, etc - just as Desmond does Faraday's visit. But the key in all of these explanations about where the compass comes from - other than the vortex of paradox - is that younger Richard gets the compass, at first, from someone other than older Locke, but quickly knows what he must do and say to younger Locke when they meet in the jungle last week...

Any questions? :)

See also: Lost 5.3: The Loops, the Bomb!

---

The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book
"a thinking person's time travel story" - SF Signal


Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

1st Anniversary Party for LightonLightThrough now live! win free copy of novel!

Come listen in on our celebration ... our guest lists includes....

# James Harris ... singing Looking for Sunsets
# Shaun Farrell ... from Adventures in SciFi Publishing
# Jason Rennie ... from the Sci Phi Show
# Jake Cordova ... from Just Not Right
# Dave Worley ... blog, soundcast, more
# Norman the Movie Guy ... from That Movie Critic Show
# Scott Sandridge ... from Everyday Fiction
# Michael Burstein ... award-winning short fiction
# Diana Liwen ... from Fire of Spring
# Mike James ... from MikeThinks
# Gabriel Llanas ... from the Punk Horror Podcast
# Nathan Rivera ... from Podcast Pendulum
# Tina ... my wife ... from home

and much more ...

Plus ... a chance to win a free, autographed copy of my current novel, The Plot to Save Socrates...

->And listen for debut play of promo for Diane Kreinbring's RonPaulFanCast podcast at end....


hey, you can listen to the podcast right here!