Good men through the ages, trying to find the sun

[austin_dern]

My parents are away for the weekend, which is fine by me as I like the quiet and being able to leave lights on even when I'm in the living room. (My father blames any night he's unable to sleep on everything except his apnea.) The thing is they're visiting friends in Rhode Island, with one of the plans for the weekend taking a boat out. I do know my aunt said they were moving the sailing expedition from Friday to Sunday, although my mother said the sailing was never scheduled for Friday. My mother thinks there's been some leg-pulling in this regard.

My aunt in this regard is the rain goddess one, so the advance of the hurricane saw her getting so many jokes about ``isn't this just giving in to stereotype?'' (my version of it; others in the family have had less convoluted constructions) that she's ready to stop talking about it. I haven't heard of any catastrophe on their part and reports seem to be that the hurricane hasn't been as bad as feared for that corner of the world, so I assume that all is well and that they're satisfied with the workings of Providence's storm barriers.

Trivia: An editorial for the Galveston Tribune, asserting that the city was essentially safe against ``serious loss of life'' in case of a hurricane, thanks to the geography of the bay, was never printed due to flooding from the Hurricane of 1900. Source: Isaac's Storm: A Man, A Time, And The Deadliest Hurricane In History, Erik Larson.

Currently Reading: Killing Time, Della Van Hise. In this 1985 novel never ripped off by anyone or anything, time-travelling Romulan idiots kill key figures in the Federation's past, altering the Enterprise almost beyond recognition and scrambling the places and life-histories of all the Enterprise crew, most notably in changing James T Kirk from confident young super-competent command-track superstar into pathetic loser-body trouble-bait (who gets his Real History infodump through applied mind-melding) and putting an overwhelmed Spock in command while a vengeance-seeking Romulan from the original history seeks a Spock who, in this timeline, hasn't done anything objectionable anyway. What an imagination!

And, ooh, it's the first edition, with the least removal of slash stuff. I'd also forgotten the furry stuff. (One of the author's characters is a quadruped-passing-as-biped canine, and one of the author's regular-model human characters has a pretty heavy crush that plays into plot-convenient mind-melding stuff her species brings to the table.)

Comments

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

If nothing else it certainly rained here.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

We didn't even get rain, really. There was light rain on Thursday, but just the sort of rain that's enough to make you close the windows lest the furniture get wet or the cats offended, not the sort which (say) does something useful with the dead lawn. And Friday through Sunday were the most un-rainy days you can imagine. Strikingly cool, too.

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

::: Currently Reading: Killing Time, Della Van Hise. In this 1985 novel never ripped off by anyone or anything, time-travelling Romulan idiots ...

In fact, because it's a time-travel plot, stories written before 1985 were able to rip it off! In TOS that would be "City on the Edge of Forever," but not "All Our Yesterdays," "Assignment: Earth," "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" or "Star Trek IV."

Subsequently, every twentieth TNG and DS9 ep, every tenth VGR, and every other ENT, would use the plot. And for Doctor Who -- well, it's impossible to tell if the Whoniverse is supposed to have a consistent timeline anyway, and if the Doctor doesn't care, why should we?

See also Back to the Future, Bill and Ted, their respective cartoons, Futurama, Warehouse 13 (which did it by mental transfer, like a Lovecraftian Yith) and Eureka (where the changes affected the entire season).

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The greatest possible moment for Doctor Who canonicity has to have been the saying of ``wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey''; suddenly, even if people were bothered by the estimated nine Sinkings Of Atlantis on record there was an explicitly acknowledgement that yeah, well, we can't reconcile everything, please don't worry about it too much. And fans seem to accept it, all the more wonderfully!

Didn't ... ah ... was it Primeval that did the humans-battling-monsters in what was totally not a Torchwood ripoff ... have some time-travel accidents retcon their first series?

Della Van Hise's novel has some of that fresh energy of not just fanfic that the author really believed in, but of a story not done unto death in the Trek setting at that point. That still leaves the core ``didn't think this through, did you?'' moments to disturb folks, though. The big one is the Romulan plan to rewrite Federation History ignores the possibility that undermining the Federation will also reshape the Romulan empire to the point that the ship which goes off doing the time-diddling doesn't have their homes to return to. And worse: you'd think they'd have known that because earlier time-diddling on their own timeline accidentally wiped out half the Romulan population. Yes, if time-diddling were as easy as the slingshot method [1] suggests it probably would be tried again-and-again until it was done right, but the experimental protocol here seems surprisingly weak.

[1] Only demonstrated around Earth's sun, I notice, and the black star which dropped them into ``Tomorrow Is Yesterday'' in the first place; and it's the Sun's magnetic field which is credited for the time slingshot effect. I have to wonder if other suns work at all.