The Sword and Laser discussion

This is spoilers so move on if you haven't read the book yet.

(view spoiler)[I am disappointed by the science. It's nice to bring in physics and Einstein but then to have everything's happen in the mind unnecessarily privileges the mind over the body. Somehow the kind is able to transport the body and all Si's furniture to the past? Through hypnosis? Bah (hide spoiler)]

Really do love the book as I'm a sucker for recreating the past, but I'm hard pressed to call it science fiction.

Way to post in the wrong place Tom! And without the proper subject abreviation.

Lucky you have an OCD moderator to fix it. :-P

I look forward to this thread turning into a similar one in the TTBC section. ;)

So in successive months we have had a Fantasy pick that isn't Fantasy and a Sci-Fi pick that isn't SciFi. :-?

That's the problem with the fringes of the genre. Sometimes it falls too far off the edge. More Sword and more Laser I say :-)

I am enjoying this months pick though (25% in). It is at least 2 stars better than TTBC, possibly 3. Still, I'd like a bit more sci-fi in it.

(view spoiler)[ Even if we don't get into the genre question, the whole Everyone's-Brain-Is-A-Magical-Macguffin-of-SCIENCE trope is just tired, worn out, ridiculous, boring, etc etc (hide spoiler)]

(view spoiler)[I don't think he's transporting anything anywhere...he slips into a the alternate time by removing all his conscience ties to the current one and hypnotizing himself to believe the ones he's studied about that time are the current ones. Though I'm a little uncertain as to why he can then "remember" he's in the past and still stay there. (hide spoiler)] I am loving the history though. We have some historical villages around here from the 1830's. You can visit the original buildings and people dress in period clothes and tell you about what life was like. Really fascinating.

At first the I thought the concept a bit silly, but then I thought about the time the book was written in. (1970)
(view spoiler)[ people in suits fom 1970 talking about self hypnosis somehow made more sense than some people fom 2015 doing the same. I am in my mid-thirtys, so 1970 is a reallly long time ago. Yes, 1882 is "more" historic, but 1970 is history for me nontheless. (hide spoiler)]

No year that I was in school is a "really long time ago" ;-)

(view spoiler)[40% in I am still unsure how he is experiencing the past. Is he just there in his mind while his body is immobile or is he actually physically moving around the world with his mind acting like augmented reality. Which raises the problem of how is he not being affected by 1970's reality in his 1882 hypnosis state. He has to be really in the past mentally, because he is experiencing things he hasn't pre-learned. (hide spoiler)]

Tassie Dave wrote: "No year that I was in school is a "really long time ago" ;-)

[spoilers removed]"

(view spoiler)[I feel like they must phyically be there.. because he goes with Kate at one point and they experience the same things. (hide spoiler)]

Tom wrote: "This is spoilers so move on if you haven't read the book yet.

[spoilers removed]

Really do love the book as I'm a sucker for recreating the past, but I'm hard pressed to call it science fiction."

I haven't even started reading it, but it is part of the Fantasy Masterworks series, so...I wasn't expecting much sci-fi at all. :P

(view spoiler)[I felt like he had to be in the past physically as well. When he and Kate go back together, they both momentarily have a dizzy spell at the same time where I think their bodies are adjusting to being in a new dimension of time. But it does seem like a bit of a cheat that the way to access the past is to hypnotize yourself into believing you actually are in the past. Even with what they say about Einstein, that didn't seem like enough science to justify the time travel. And it means you can only travel to the past, right? (hide spoiler)]

Tom wrote: "This is spoilers so move on if you haven't read the book yet.

[spoilers removed]

Really do love the book as I'm a sucker for recreating the past, but I'm hard pressed to call it science fiction."

I ranted at my fiance about the science in this one.

(view spoiler)[It really bothered me that it was all through hypnosis so how could I know for sure that he really was in the past? I think the author could have added some parts from the point of view of Rube or the other staff. I can't imagine that they wouldn't check on the Dakota place while Si was "gone". I mean, how hard could it have been to just take a peek? (hide spoiler)]

After about half way through when they stop talking about the process and focus more on the story, it bothered me less. Probably because that's when the drama really started and what was happening in 1882 was the focus.

Overall though, I really liked this book. I liked all of the detail of New York in 1882.

Maria wrote: "Tom wrote: "This is spoilers so move on if you haven't read the book yet.

[spoilers removed]

Really do love the book as I'm a sucker for recreating the past, but I'm hard pressed to call it scien..."
What really bugged me was the whole scene (view spoiler)[when Si and Julia escaped to his present by traveling through space and time in the Statue of Liberty arm (hide spoiler)]

Shad

That thought never occurred to me. Now that bothers me. I think by the time that happened I was just so caught up in the story that it just made sense.

I was immediately reminded of the movie Somewhere in time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour when I started reading this. (And it was only now when I went looking for the name of that movie that i realised it was based on a book by Richard Matheson that won the World Fantasy Award in 1976.)

Louise wrote: "I was immediately reminded of the movie Somewhere in time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour when I started reading this. (And it was only now when I went looking for the name of that movie th..."

Do you know which book? Cause I need to read that.

Maria wrote: "Louise wrote: "I was immediately reminded of the movie Somewhere in time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour when I started reading this. (And it was only now when I went looking for the name o..."

Somewhere In Time.

While I enjoyed the story, the mechanics of the time travel don't really make sense. How many times have we all woken up convinced that it was actually a different day of the week, or at least been confused about what day it was? In Mr Finney's fictional world, people would be vanishing back into the middle of last week all the time. That could cause significant
embarrassment as you'd already be there!

I had a couple problems with this story. The pacing was odd. (view spoiler)[There was precious little conflict in the book and when there was, it initially minor and added little color to the story. The real conflict didn't happen until around page 300. To me, it felt like a lot of the first 200 pages were the literary equivalent of this scene from ST:TMP which is a 5:30 meander in an action movie. (hide spoiler)]

The basis for time travel was weak. (view spoiler)[This one I can almost forgive. The 70's saw a resurgence of hypnosis as a tool to sell snake oil (oddly enough in Wikipedia, the 1880's were also a big time for hypnosis): weight loss, quitting smoking, etc. From the current day, it's a very flimsy basis for time travel. The big missed opportunity that @tassie dave brought up is whether or not anyone actually did time travel. Is Si a reliable narrator? Was this all in his head? What if this hadn't been about time travel but about susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion? (hide spoiler)]

Maybe I misread, but I thought the elements of time travel were inconsistent. (view spoiler)[It was claimed that it took a great deal of training, but Si seemed to manage it fairly easily and in short order, although to be fair, he was described as extraordinary towards the end. If that's the case, how did both Kate and Julia manage with little or no training at all? Oh the loose ends! (hide spoiler)]

I did like the police technique...(view spoiler)[for forcing a trumped up fleeing arrest charge. The whole, "hey - you can go...STOP THEM NOW!" would've gotten me. Beautiful Gilded Age dirty dealing. I had briefly wondered how Pickering knew how to manage Byrnes, but through his blackmail collection, he probably knew everyone important who was getting payola from Carmody or was filled in by his wife. (hide spoiler)]

Not my favorite, but when the action picked up, it felt much like Keith Laumer in style.

I can't really hold the science against them. I like Star Trek and Star Wars, so I had to break my mind of caring about science a long time ago. This falls into that generic pool of "soft sf" to me. I might be influenced by being raised by a bit of a hippy in the 70s, so the book resonates with my childhood quite a bit.

I agree with Steve's inconsistencies, however. I was puzzled by one of them quite a bit.

I actually like the time travel method. It reminds me of quantum theory and the need for an observer to collapse a reality wave (Schrodinger's Cat). If the observer can 'unattach' themselves from a reality wave, then multiple possibilities will exist again and a new reality wave could then be propagated. That was how I guessed it worked, but I'm no theoretical physicist....oh, boy.

I associated the time travel method not with quantum theory, but to Kant's idea of Time described in Critique of Pure Reason.

I apologize in advance for philosophes in the audience. I'm not one, and I've read the book a long time ago.

“Time is nothing else than the form of the internal sense, that is, of the intuitions of self of our internal state. For time can not be any determination of outward phenomena. It has to do neither with shape nor position on the contrary, it determines the relation of representations in our internal state.”

If time would exist only as one's ability to perceive the world, it would theoretically be possible to "change time" if one's perceptions of the world would be totally altered.

(I'm not saying that WOULD work, I'm just trying my best to defend the author here) :)

The only part I liked about the book, is that is the first time I'v seen any author doing any kind of postoperational impact analysis of the time travel.

Every time I click into this thread I think "there was no science in Time and Again."

John (Taloni) wrote: "Every time I click into this thread I think "there was no science in Time and Again.""

And what science was there was wrong!

As A.C. Clarke put it: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

Louise wrote: "I was immediately reminded of the movie Somewhere in time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour when I started reading this. (And it was only now when I went looking for the name of that movie th..."

Me too! I love that movie, Christopher Reeve is just soooo dreamy in it :) I haven't read the book though.

And yes, I thought of it too, as soon as I figured out what the time travel method was.

Despite there being no "real science" in this book - at least the time travel is being worked out in a scientific manner. I mean, they are using all sorts of psychology to figure out who might be capable, and setting up all sorts of training and planning for the would-be travelers. They seem to have argued out all the various problems it could cause and have done their best to prepare Si to observe in a neutral, scientific way. They immediately question him to try and determine if he messed up the timeline, aware that his travelling might cause a split in the timeline that only one side would be aware of.

Yes the science is dodgy, and there is some serious "handwavium" or "don't look at that too hard" about stuff like his furniture travelling with him, the Dakota doorman of the 1880s letting him into the building, etc. But I like all the various types of SF and fantasy and historical novels, so I don't give a damn how this is classified. But it's definitely speculative, IMO.

Tom wrote: "This is spoilers so move on if you haven't read the book yet.

[spoilers removed]

Really do love the book as I'm a sucker for recreating the past, but I'm hard pressed to call it science fiction."

I suppose it depends how you look at Science Fiction. Is the genre only about machines? Remember "The Traveller" from Star Trek: The Next Generation? He travelled through time and space, not with a machine, but using his mind. That particular storyline indicated that this was a rare ability of very few highly gifted individuals, who could see the fabric of spacetime. Is that science fiction? It seems very similar to this story, to me, if you think of this story in terms of brain evolution and physics. Is that less Sci-Fi than if the protagonist used a gadgety time machine? I suppose I thought of it as a tesseract, but with time instead of space.

Andres wrote: "The only part I liked about the book, is that is the first time I'v seen any author doing any kind of postoperational impact analysis of the time travel."
Eh, true. As a fantasy book, however, it is so far (27% in, it took a bit to get here) quite enjoyable. I just read it as "magical realism" with a bit of pseudoscience thrown in there because... 70s, I guess.

yep, I thought this was a lot more sword than laser