BBC Northern Ireland is currently developing the five-hour series, which stars Tamzin Outhwaite as Detective Inspector Rebecca Flint and Emun Elliott as Dr. Christian King. After a series of images are sent to King's laboratory from space, he realizes that they hint at a devastating incident — one that has not happened yet. He teams up with Detective Flint to solve the mystery behind the images and try to prevent the catastrophe from occurring.

"We knew there was an appetite for a big, bold, fresh take on the cop show," explains Murray Ferguson, chief executive of Clerkenwell Films. "Something that might be different from the traditional formula of investigating a crime that has already taken place.

"So, we began to consider what if we could find a means of telling that story in reverse? Is there an original and credible way of a police team finding themselves with the knowledge of crimes or disasters happening in the future? We wanted the show to feel like it really could happen in the world we all know."

But the writers claim that we'll get some actual science mixed with our cop drama, and they've hired astrophysicist Margaret Aderin to consult on the theories behind the show's titular paradox. There's no date yet for Paradox, but the series will air as five individual episodes.

Behind the scenes of BBC's upcoming sci-fi series Paradox [The Geek Files]

The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider's streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn't bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage them. In papers like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," they put forth the notion that observing the Higgs boson would be such an abhorrent event that the future is actually trying to prevent it from happening.

"It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck," Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, "Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God." It is their guess, he went on, "that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."

Nielsen and Ninomiya recognize that the theory sounds pretty crazy and that other projects involving a lot of delicate technology — such as the Hubble Telescope — have gone through their own periods of apparent bad luck. But their theory — wild as it is — is situated in current research in theoretical physics and time travel. If the observation of the Higgs boson would result in calamity, they claim it isn't outside the realm of possibility that someone from our future might exert influence on our time to stop it:

While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn't be trying to make one.

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate [NY Times — Thanks to Boas_MC]

After talking to Quaid earlier today, we couldn't help watching him as the 1960s Queens everyman in Frequency, where his grown-up son starts babbling at him over the radio about baseball scores and who's going to die when. The son (played by Jim "Outlander" Caviezel) manages to save Quaid from dying in a warehouse fire, but through a kind of twisty movie logic, this leads to Quaid's wife being killed by a serial killer the following week. It never fails: You mess with the timelines, you get serial killers. It's all worth it for the above clip, where Caviezel has to explain the situation to Quaid. Who just takes it on board, because he's a mensch.

David McCandless created this visualization as part of his upcoming book of chart porn, The Visual Miscellaneum. Here, he charts the temporal paths of different TV and movie time travelers (Doctor Who was omitted for the sake of sanity, though he hasn't ruled out making a separate chart for the Time Lord), and, just for fun, imagines what might happen if time travelers who landed in the same year happened to meet up (I suspect that, despite his ingenuity, Marty McFly would not fare well against the Terminator). McCandless did feel that his research revealed one key deficiency in time travel stories: nearly all time travel journeys he mapped originate and land between the years 1900-2100.

[Information is Beautiful via Reddit]

As with the fantastic posters we showed you before, these helpful warnings are the work of Amy Kate Martin, whose Flickr stream includes bumper stickers for two dueling brands of clones. ("The You You Always Wanted" is one slogan.) This time around, the posters are warning against loose robots, careless changes to the time stream, and burning the whole prehistoric world down. The 826 Los Angeles store sells time travel goodies, and also teaches literacy and writing skills, since temponauts may actually need to be able to read the instructions on their time-capsules. Just maybe.

These new posters are available for just $19.99 each, or $69.99 for all four. [826 L.A.]

ABC claims it has been working with Kauffman for years on a possible small-screen adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's novel. The plan is for the romance between Clare and the time-traveling (and, incidentally, television-allergic) Henry to unfold over the course of several seasons, with individual episodes having their own story lines.

Normally, I'm all for adapting novels for television and giving them more room to breathe than they get in a feature film, but with The Time Traveler's Wife, I'm much more hesitant. The novel is such a self-contained animal, constantly folding in on itself and exploring the predestination paradox created by Henry's time travel and the tragic consequences of his condition, making it much more suited to a miniseries or feature film than a long-form television epic. And Journeyman, Fox's now-defunct series that also focused on involuntary time travel, worked because it was an adventure and mystery story, and its time-traveling protagonist was able to alter the timeline with his actions. Henry is, by comparison, leading a fairly ordinary life, and can alter nothing. But I suspect that, in a full-length series, Henry's time travel would be an incidental part of his character, and we would be seeing more of a How I Met Your Mother where the romantic lead occasionally happens to visit younger and older versions of his wife.

'Time Traveler's Wife' Series Travels to ABC [The Wrap via /Film]

Goldberg, a physics professor at Drexel University, and co-author of the upcoming book A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes and Quantum Uncertainty, says that amidst the current glut of more fantastical time travel dramas — in which he includes Lost, Star Trek, and Heroes — The Time Traveler's Wife is a breath of relatively accurate air.

Looking at the theories developed by Albert Einstein, Hugh Everett, Igor Novikov, and Kip Thorne, Goldberg creates a checklist for accurate time travel rules ("You can't visit any time before your time machine was built." "You can't kill your own grandfather."), and explains how well The Time Traveler's Wife fits within those rules. The verdict: the story bends the rules a bit, but in a somewhat justifiable way, and comes out leagues ahead of most popular time travel tales.

One point I wish Goldberg had addressed is whether nudity is a prerequisite for time travel, because personally when they build the time machine, I'd prefer to arrive fully clothed.

Time-Traveling for Dummies [Slate]

Criminal Activity

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: Involuntary time travel comes with plenty of disadvantages, not the least of which is finding yourself suddenly and unexpectedly naked without any money. Fortunately, the predestination paradox can be a handy survival tool. Time traveler Henry often finds himself sent to the same points in time and space as his younger self, and teaches him how to find clothing, pick locks, and steal wallets. It's sort of like illicit father-son bonding, just with himself.

The Joy of Sex

The Time Traveler's Wife: Another unexpected side effect of time travel is that a horny, adolescent Henry is every now and then confronted with a nearly equally young, equally horny duplicate of himself. This makes for some rather spectacular instances of masturbation, but it's really awkward when his father walks in on him.

—All You Zombies— by Robert Heinlein: The Unmarried Mother was an intersex, though apparently female, teenager who was seduced by a mysterious older man. Many years and a sex change later, she, now he, is sent back in time, where he meets and makes love to a very familiar girl.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold: Daniel Eakins is the sort of time traveler who throws caution to the wind, sampling all that time travel has to offer: foiling assassinations, visiting great moments in history, and using his knowledge of the future to bet on the ponies. So it's no wonder that when he meets up with the same- and opposite-sex versions of himself, he tends to get it on with them.

Futurama: Bender's Big Score: When the alien nudists get a hold of the time travel code tattooed on Fry's rear end, they're mostly interested in stealing artifacts from 20th Century Earth, although they do at one point take a time out for Nudar-on-Nudar nookie.

How to Win a Fight

The Kid: Russel Dritz's dirtbag ways may go back to his childhood, when he was picked on by bullies and lost his mother to illness. When Rusty, his younger self, ambles into Russel's life, he finds there are some subtle ways that he can change the past. First on the agenda: Getting the kid into a boxing ring so he can learn how to throw a punch.

How to Become Rich and Powerful

Back to the Future, Part II: The 2015 version of Biff decides that all of his troubles would be solved his he had been extremely wealthy in the past. So he steals Doc Brown's time-traveling DeLorean and, with a 2015 sports almanac in hand, travels to 1955, when he gives the almanac to his younger self. And it seems to work: Biff is rich beyond his wildest dreams, he's quietly had his rival George McFly murdered, and he's married to George's now artificially-endowed widow Lorraine. Of course, it all goes to hell when that pesky Marty McFly appears on the scene.
Gargoyles "Vows:" In move that revealed the entire series as one big predestination paradox, David Xanatos travels back in time on his wedding day to give his younger self a collection of priceless gold coins, along with instructions on how to invest the proceeds from their sale. Is it cheating? Probably, but in Xanatos's mind, it makes him the very definition of a self-made man.

By His Bootstraps by Robert Heinlein: When Bob is pulled thirty thousand years into the future by a slightly older, though no wiser version of himself, he discovers that humans have become a primitive, compliant people. Diktor, a fellow native of the 20th Century, explains that a technologically advanced person could easily become king of these sheep-like folks, and gives Bob a list of 20th Century items to bring to the future. Bob complies, but travels to a point ten years before he meets Diktor. It takes Bob a shockingly long time to realize that he's in a Heinlein story and that he is himself Diktor.

How to Win the Girl of Your Dreams

Futurama: Bender's Big Score: Fry is distraught when Leela, the love of his life, is won over by an older and more mature stranger named Lars. When Lars is revealed to be Fry's older (and this time wiser) duplicate, Fry should probably recognize that he could woo Leela if only he'd successfully reign in his adolescent nature. But it being Fry, he fails to take the lesson to heart, and quickly moves on to another girl.

How to Travel Through Time

The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter: In Baxter's sequel to H.G. Wells The Time Machine, we learn that the Time Traveller didn't build his device completely unaided. A mysterious benefactor gave the Traveller a sample of a radioactive substance to study, a substance that ultimately makes time travel possible. Of course, like all mysterious strangers in time travel stories, the Time Traveller's benefactor is, in fact, an older version of himself.

How to Save the World

Heroes "Five Years Gone:" One of the great things about the power to travel through time is that if you get that whole "save the world" business wrong the first time, you can just keep trying. And Hiro Nakamura has the added benefit of traveling through time to change events himself, and leaving instructions for his much less bad-ass past self.

Doctor Who "Time Crash:" The Doctor meets up with himself a great deal, if for no other reason than two or three or five Doctors are better than one. But sometimes it's just to ensure a little predestination paradox magic. The Fifth Doctor watches the Tenth Doctor create an artificial supernova that cancels out a giant hole in fabric of reality. Naturally, the Tenth Doctor only knows how to do this because he watched himself do it when he was the Fifth Doctor.

Doctor Who "The Parting of the Ways:" Rose Tyler gets her own predestination paradox going when she looks into the heart of the TARDIS. The TARDIS gives her the power to transcend time and space, letting her leave the message "Bad Wolf" to herself in the past that ultimately lead Rose and the Doctor back to this time and place.

Teen Titans "Titans Tomorrow:" When the Teen Titans travel to the future, they're eager to see what they're like as adult superheroes. But the future is unexpectedly bleak, with many of the Titans turned to violence and destruction, tearing the United States in two and turning the Western half into a police state. Fortunately, the Titans are able to learn from their future selves what set these events in motion, and are able to prevent their dystopic future.

Babylon 5: To add another wrinkle in the predestination paradox, Jeffrey Sinclair finds that his entire life is being guided by his future self from the past. Sinclair eventually learns that he is the great Minbari historical figure Valen, and Sinclair must eventually travel back in time, become Valen, and write the prophesies that will guide Sinclair's life in the future. Fate, or proof that his talents transcend time and space?

The Time Traveler's Wife opens August 14. And hopefully we'll get a bigger version of that poster soon. For now, you can watch the trailer in high definition over at Yahoo. [via RopeOfSilicon]

The time-travel episodes of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego are pure win, especially the idea of Carmen impersonating Marcus Aurelius without anybody noticing. And I love that Ivy, the detective sent to track down Carmen along with her snot-nosed brother, manages to pwn this massive dude in the Arena. "Goddess of strength," indeed. Why don't more time-traveling villains come up with such amazingly byzantine schemes?

First of all, before I get hate mail/comments about the Doctor Who thing, here's what I mean. Yes that show's hero travels around in a time machine, so in a sense every episode is about time travel. And yet, most Who stories use the TARDIS to set up the story and then we're done with it. Doctor Who has done relatively few shows where time travel is fundamental to the story - "Day Of The Daleks" comes to mind, and so does "The Girl In The Fireplace" - whereas Trek has dipped into the time-travel-story well on a super regular basis.

1) Time-travel can change history - but only if you mess with someone "important." The very first Trek time-travel story is "Tomorrow Is Yesterday": the Enterprise accidentally kidnaps Air Force captain John Christopher, and he gains knowledge of the future that could change the present. (Kirk and Spock almost just remove Captain Christopher altogether, but they discover that his son heads a mission to Saturn. Christopher, himself, is totally worthless and wouldn't be missed.)

And in "City On The Edge Of Forever," a drug-crazed McCoy accidentally changes history so the Nazis win World War II, and as a result in the present, the Enterprise no longer exists. (This also seems to be the theory of time travel the new movie espouses, without getting too spoilery.) And of course, in the movie First Contact, the Borg temporarily succeed in going back and changing history, so that the 24th century Earth turns into a Borg hive — until the Enterprise goes back in time and stops them. Also in Deep Space Nine's "Past Tense," Sisko travels back to 2024 San Francisco, where he accidentally causes the death of civil-rights leader Gabriel Bell. Sisko winds up taking Bell's place, and Bell's picture in all the history books changes into Sisko's. Similarly, Sisko goes back in time to prevent a Klingon spy from assassinating Kirk in "Trials and Tribble-ations."

Also, people in alternate futures are able to go back and prevent their futures from ever "happening" in the DS9 episode "The Visitor" and the Voyager episodes "Timeless" and "End Game."

2) If you travel back in time, your mind will revert to its past state. Also in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," the Enterprise drops off Christopher at the exact moment they originally kidnapped him, and somehow this leaves him with no memory of the intervening events. (Even though days have passed for him, he sometimes loses all memory of them.) And in the episode "All Our Yesterdays," Spock travels back in time thousands of years to a barbaric ice age on another planet. And even though it's still the same Spock, he suddenly starts reverting to barbarism and acting like a crazay old-school Vulcan, with the heated desires and unbridled rage.

3) You can travel back in time, but you'll just become part of established events. In the episode "Assignment Earth," the Enterprise once again travels back to 1968 Earth, and this time Kirk and Spock try to stop the mysterious Gary Seven from launching, and detonating, a missile to stop the Cold-War arms race. Kirk and Spock nearly stop Gary Seven, but in the end, it turns out the missile blows up exactly 104 miles above Earth - just where it "always" did. So Kirk and Spock's time-traveling interference was "always" part of events. Also, in the TNG epsiode "Captain's Holiday," Picard destroys the super-magical device, the Uthat, that aliens from the future have stolen and brought back in time. And then the aliens say that Picard's decision to destroy the Uthat was already in their "historical records." Also, I'm guessing the Voyager episode "Future's End" belongs to this rule as well, because Henry Starling "invents" a whole bunch of technology that we always had in the 1990s, thanks to his exposure to 29th century tech.

4) Sometimes you have to travel in time just to make things happen the way they're "supposed" to. In the Next Generation episode "Time's Arrow," the Enterprise crew finds Data's severed head in the ground, dating back to the 19th century. As a result of this, Data goes back in time. Later, Guinan tells Picard that he needs to be part of the away team that goes back to 19th century San Francisco, because she remembers meeting Picard back then. Later, Data is decapitated, and his head winds up in the ground. Picard remarks that history is "fulfilling itelf." But at the same time, FutureGuinan won't tell Riker how to save Picard, for fear of changing history. So which is it?

5) Past, present and future are one. This seems to be the message of "All Good Things," the Next Generation finale. Picard's mind starts to "slip" from his present-day self to his "Encounter At Farpoint" self, and himself 25 years in the future. In all three eras, Picard journeys to the same point in space, where he orders a tachyon scan... which inadvertently creates a time/space anomaly that grows bigger the further back in time you go, so that billions of years in the past, it destroys the whole Alpha Quadrant. It seems as though Picard is seeing all three time periods as the same, with a unified causality, so that if he changes something in one era, it affects both other eras automatically. Ditto in "Tapestry," where Picard is able to make changes to his youthful mistakes from Starfleet Academy, and they instantly alter his life in the present. (This version is probably pretty similar to #1.)

6) If you blow up a time-travel device, all of the changes that a time-traveler has already made to history will be undone. This is the operating principle in Voyager's "Year Of Hell Part 2," where Janeway blows up the Krenim time machine and suddenly everything is returned to the way it was before the Krenim started meddling with time-travel. Also, Enterprise had a long-running storyline about the Temporal Cold War, in which four different groups from the future, including a future Federation, compete to change history. Eventually, the temporal shenanigans get crazier and crazier, with people going back and killing Lenin, and one alien engineering a timeline where the Nazis win World War II (it's always the Nazis winning World War II.) And at last, Captain Archer and his crew face Vosk, the biggest time-violator, in the alternate Nazi-dominated past, and succeed in destroying his temporal conduit. As soon as the device is destroyed, everything returns to normal.

Note: I realize there are at least a dozen or so other Star Trek episodes that involve time travel, which I haven't referenced in this article. You'll have to take my word for it that I considered all of them, and decided they fit in with one of the theories of time travel I mention here.

All screencaps are from TrekCore.

Tennant already filmed a scene, from his final episode, where he says goodbye to 1970s traveling companion Sarah Jane Smith and her adopted son Luke. But now Tennant is back in Penarth, where Sarah Jane's house is, and so is his time machine, the TARDIS. This could just be another pick-up scene from his Doctor Who episode, except that Tennant is wearing a different outfit. Also, rumor has it he was at the script read-through for the third season of Sarah Jane's spin-off show, the Sarah Jane Adventures.

Here's hoping he will turn up in at least one episode of Sarah Jane's show — it's his last chance, after all. I have no clue when her next season will air, or whether it'll be before his own final episodes. It would be terribly, terribly naughty of Tennant's Doctor to say his final goodbyes to Sarah Jane, regenerate into Matt Smith and then have an earlier version of himself pop up to have one last adventure with her. (Or maybe it's the other way around. He would have an adventure with her, then go back to say goodbye — accidentally arriving at an earlier point in her timeline? Either way, confusing!) Set pics by Mali. [Planet Gallifrey]

Talking to Film Journal, McG explained what he thinks will happen in his second Terminator film:

I strongly suspect the next movie is going to take place in a [pre-Judgment Day] 2011. John Connor is going to travel back in time and he's going to have to galvanize the militaries of the world for an impending Skynet invasion. They've figured out time travel to the degree where they can send more than [just] one naked entity. So you're going to have hunter killers and transports and harvesters and everything arriving in our time and Connor fighting back with conventional military warfare, which I think is going to be fucking awesome. I also think he's going to meet a scientist that's going to look a lot like present-day Robert Patrick [who famously played the T-1000 in Terminator 2], talking about stem-cell research and how we can all live as idealized, younger versions of ourselves

All I can say, is whoa. I don't even know where to start.

Actually, I do know where to start: throwing out the Terminator series' most iconic rule for time travel — that only living tissue can travel, and anything covering it gets shredded — seems like a really weird notion. If you can send a Hunter-Killer back in time, what can't you send back? At what point do you shred the space-time continuum so much that nothing makes sense any more? Also, according to Terminator 3, Judgment Day happens in 2004. So what moves it forward seven years?

I'm also wondering what happens to make Skynet so desperate, it's willing to invade the past in such a dramatic fashion. I could be wrong, but isn't one of the cornerstones of the series that Skynet treads somewhat carefully about tampering with the past, lest it undo its own rise to power? There could be a clue to the ending of Terminator Salvation in there somewhere — maybe John Connor does something that puts Skynet in a no-win situation?

Or maybe McG's just yanking our chains?

Meanwhile, here are some pics from Yahoo that I don't think we've posted before:

1. Your mother falls for you.
When Marty McFly heads back to the Fifties in Back to the Future, I'm fairly certain winning his mother's affections wasn't on his to-do list, especially since he needs her to fall in love with his father in order to be, you know, born in the first place. Also because it's his own mother. It's bad enough as a teenager to have to contemplate your parent's love life; the last thing you really want is to become a participant. And Marty McFly might be a lot of things, but he isn't the guy from Reason #2, who . . .

2. You fall for your own mother.
Sure, Oedipus did it, but we all know how well that went. So when Lazarus Long, the protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, finds himself doing just that, he should have an inkling it's a bad move. Long accidentally jumps into 1916 when he'd been aiming for the Twenties, and he falls in love with his own mother. In order to avoid the object of his affections, Long enlists in the army and ends up a combat soldier in World War One. (Un)fortunately, he survives and returns to consummate his love. Awkward. (Basically, he manages to end up fighting in war that he didn't really want to and still manages to do his own mother. This makes a strong case against time travel right here.)

(2B. You are your own mother: Heinlein also wrote the short story titled "—All You Zombies—" in which the protagonist somehow manages to be both his own mother and his own father due to a lot of relatively convoluted circumstances, including emergency sex changes and baby-stealing. Thus convincing me that sexual relations and time travel do not mix.)

3. Your mother thinks you're having an affair with your father.
Actually, "Father's Day" (Series 1, Episode 8 of Doctor Who) gives out a whole laundry list of reasons you should never voluntarily go back in time to meet your parents. Rose wants to be there for her father, Pete, on the day he dies, but when she saves him, she seriously messes up time and Reapers (flying creature who eat temporal paradoxes for lunch—literally) descend. When she and her father meet up with her mother, her mother, Jackie, assumes Rose to be her husband's hot young mistress. Rose's father explains that, no, Rose is his daughter, and Jackie reads it as one of those "Surprise! I have a secret lovechild from my dark secret past" things, à la an episode of As the World Turns. Pete hands Rose her baby self, but Rose having physical contact with another her causes further paradoxing. (Perhaps an addendum to the rules of time travel should be, "Don't touch yourself.") Actually, this whole situation is starting to sound like a soap opera. But with paradox-eating monsters.

4. You disappoint your mother and she doesn't even know who you are.
In Episode 4 of Life on Mars (UK), Sam Tyler, still stuck back in 1973, runs into his own mother, Ruth, while trying to take down a gangster named Stephen Warren that has half the police force in his pocket. Warren even tried to pay off Sam, who takes the money very, very reluctantly. When he learns that his mother's having money trouble, he tries to alleviate his guilt by offering her the money. She is, of course, offended, additionally reading him as one of those dirty bribe-taking cops. Lucky for Sam, she has no idea he's her son, so her opinion of Sam Tyler hasn't been lowered any. Just her opinion of a cop she thinks is named Bolan. (Who knew that Sam was a glam rock fan? Additional note: In the equivalent episode of the US remake, Sam's mother is named Rose. That's right. Rose Tyler.)

5. Dramatic Irony
In "In the Beginning" (Supernatural, Season 4, Episode 3), the angel Castiel (who I notice dresses exactly like Loomis from the original Halloween film) sends Dean Winchester back in time to 1973, telling him to "stop it." Stop what? He really doesn't say. And I'm noticing that 1973 seems a popular year to meet your parents. Anyway, Dean meets his father, John, and basically tells him which car to buy, before running in to his mother and learning that (Surprise!) she comes from a family of hunters, and (Surprise! Irony!) it's a lifestyle she would never wish on her own future children. Which is, of course, part of the appeal of John: he's not a hunter, just a nice, normal guy. Again with the dramatic irony. Anyway, by the end of the episode, she's made a deal with the Yellow-Eyed Demon that seals Sam's demon baby fate (and her own doom) in exchange for John's (nice, normal, non-hunter) life. After which, Castiel shows up and tells Dean he couldn't have stopped that from happening anyway. He just told Dean to try in order to prove that you can't. Methinks Castiel needs to find less jerktastic ways of proving his points. But, hey, at least Dean got an experience that O. Henry probably couldn't have written better.

6. Your mother-daughter meet-up becomes a bad after-school special. Literally.
In 1977, Francine Pascal of Sweet Valley fame wrote Hangin' Out with Cici, a Young Adult novel that tells the tale of an adolescent girl named Victoria who thinks that her mother is too strict and doesn't understand her. Clearly, her mother has no idea what it's like being thirteen. One day, however, she finds herself suddenly in the past, where she meets a cool girl named Cici, who's apparently the most awesome new friend Victoria could have asked for. It's no surprise, then, that Cici is Victoria's mother, who does in fact know what being thirteen is like. Touching, right? So touching, in fact, that in 1981, it was made into an ABC Afterschool Special, entitled My Mother Was Never a Kid. I figure the lesson was supposed to be something touching about parental relationships, but what it really teaches you is that time travel can happen anytime, anywhere, without warning or reason.

The Writing Has Improved
No, really. It's very tempting to give most of the credit for this to the return of Bryan Fuller, now acting as "consulting producer" on the show - After all, the turn-around coincided with his first episode back, which also happened to be the best episode they'd had in years - but it's not as if he's the only person who's been delivering recently. Perhaps he just made everyone else step up their game, or maybe he's been reminding everyone what the show is really about, but the show is once again becoming fast-moving, popcorn-smart, funny entertainment again... and the characters are no longer seeming to shift personalities every couple of episodes depending on who the plot needs them to be in order to move forward or shock the viewers (Well, except Sylar, but that's intentional... I think). Also, they titled an episode "Turn And Face The Strange." That's got to be worth something, right?

No More Time Travel
The best thing about "Fugitives," the current arc? There's absolutely no time travel in it at all. For a show that had continually gone back to the same idea of "Character X Has Seen The Future And Must Prevent It" for its last three "volumes," this is nothing short of stunning... and, more than that, very welcome indeed. Instead, the show is slowly coming to terms with the idea that conflict can come less from predestination and more from the characters just doing what they do. Yes, they may still be ripping off the X-Men, but at least they're not still ripping off the one same storyline over and over again. Baby steps, people.

(Also something that seems to be finally being abandoned: The Daddy Issues. Now that we've dealt with Papa Parkman, Papa Petrelli and Papa Sylar, here's hoping that the show can finally move away from basing so much of the drama around characters' unhappy relationships with their fathers. If nothing else, they'll always have the Nathan/Claire/HRG triangle for cheap therapy.)

The Cast Is Shrinking. Ish.
Whether it's essentially sidelining characters (Mohinder keeps disappearing to "find himself" or "find the truth about his father" or something similar, and that's just fine with me), killing them off (Bye, Elle! Bye, Daphne! Bye, Tracy, even though I totally don't believe that you're dead!), or even just forgetting about them altogether (Are we ever going to see Monica again? What about Maya? Actually, no, I don't want to see her again), it's as if the writers had suddenly realized that the series was massively overpopulated, and mostly with characters that no-one cared about. Even though the show has only really started to improve in the last few episodes, a small cull has been underway since the start of this season, and it's something that I hope continues next year. One suggestion, though: Let's start killing off main characters who aren't serving any purpose anymore. Yes, Mohinder, I mean you. You too, Matt Parkman.

(Actually, another suggestion: Can you stop only getting rid of the female characters? It's kind of creepy, the weird gender bias when it comes to the characters who've been disappearing.)

Someone Has Started Thinking About The Powers
More signs of intelligence from the writers room: The Deus Ex Machina characters? Suddenly depowered in a move so welcome that I won't even complain too loudly about how awkwardly it was achieved. One of the show's constant problems has always been "The Flash Dilemma" - that is, the fact that if all of the characters were thinking, the stories would be over before they'd started because everyone involved was so powerful (So named because, if the Flash is really the fastest man alive, if he actually stopped to think, he could run around at superspeed and deal with all the bad guys before they'd had a chance to boast about how unstoppable they were), but now Peter Petrelli has to touch someone to gain their power, and even then, he can only mimic one power at a time, and Hiro can only stop time, not travel in it, nor teleport out of trouble with an overly-squinty blink. Only Sylar remains all-powerful, and that's as it should be; the bad guy should always be the one with all the power, otherwise he's no threat - and, even then, his power comes with a price (Not to mention a cameo from Ellen Greene in last week's episode). The result? Tension that you can believe in, without thinking that your favorite character is stupid.

Less Episodes Means Less Filler
Perhaps most importantly, NBC just announced that there'll be less Heroes next year; they plan on making somewhere between 18-20 episodes in total, compared with the 25 of this season. This is definitely a good thing, because it'll cut down on the random, go-nowhere shenanigans that the show has used to stretch out stories past their desired length so many times in the past (Case in point: Claire helping comic store geek escape the authorities). Hopefully, it'll also make the show's PTB think more about what needs to be said, as opposed to following their desires down creative dead-end alleys (Almost all of the recent "1961" episode) in order to fulfill the season's episode order.

Don't get me wrong; the show's nowhere near perfect, still; there are still moments that you want to throw things at your television and scream that everyone involved just may be retarded, and Nathan's hair continues to get more out of control with each and every episode. But Heroes has, rather remarkably, turned itself around from the carcrash it used to be to become something that, once again, has the potential to fulfill its own potential. It's also, thankfully, become more entertaining in doing so, and is worth your attention for an hour every week again. Tune into Monday's big season finale to see the fireworks and over the top plot resolutions to see if you can fall in love with the show again... and stick around for the final scene that'll show what we have in store for us when the show returns in the fall. You know you want to.

"A Little Something For Us Tempunauts" by Philip K. Dick features the classic time-loop storyline. A time-travel program is supposed to send some time-travelers forward 100 years, but instead only sends them a few days forward... where they learn that they died on their return from the future. But it gets worse, when one of them realize they're actually living the same few days over and over again, and so is the rest of humanity:

It felt like a deja vu thing, and then it hit him. We're in a closed time loop, he thought, we keep going through this again and again, trying to solve the reentry problem, each time imagining it's the first time, the only time... and never succeding. Which attempt is this? Maybe the millionth; we have sat here a million times, raking the same facts over and over again and getting nowhere. He felt bone-weary, thinking that. And he felt a sort of vast philosophical hate toward all other men, who did not have this enigma to deal with.

How do you break out? You don't. You're basically screwed. On the other hand, it's a kind of immortality.

Replay by Ken Grimwood. Jeff Winston dies of a heart attack at age 43, in 1988. Then he wakes up in 1963, when he's eighteen years old. He keeps reliving the years between 1963 and 1988 over and over again, making different choices each time, but nothing changes the stability of the loop, even committing suicide. Each time, he remembers his previous trips through the loop. Eventually, his loops get shorter and shorter, and meanwhile he tracks down another looper, Pamela. They finally go public, and the government forces them to provide intelligence on foreign developments.
How do you break out? It's not clear. The novel ends with Jeff and Pamela still looping, not sure if this will be their last time around.

"Time And Again" by David James won Science Fiction Magazine's short-story contest in the 1970s, with a classic time-loop story, but I haven't been able to find out much else about it.

The Twilight Zone, "Death Ship." Three astronauts discover a crashed spaceship that is an exact replica of their own. Eventually, they figure out they're actually dead, and then they snap back to the moment they discovered that crashed ship, in an endless loop. (This episode is supposedly becoming a big-screen movie.)
How do you break out? There's no way.

Groundhog Day is still the all-time classic, to the point where people now describe time loops as "Groundhog Day events." Bill Murray spends either about ten years, or millennia looping through the same day. (Director Harold Ramis has said both.) Each iteration of that one day, he learns a bit more and masters all of the variables a bit better.
How do you break out? Once he manages to have the absolute perfect day, he's free of the loop. That includes saving people's lives, fixing a flat tire, putting on a piano show, and getting Andie McDowell to fall for him.

12:01 (1990 Oscar-nominated short film): Myron Castleman (Kurtwood Smith) is trapped for all eternity, reliving the same hour of his life. (Even suicide doesn't help, which is a common theme in these stories. It would be hilarious to find a time loop that you can break by killing yourself.) This half-hour film aired as part of Showtime's 30-Minute Movie series.
How do you break out? You try to sue the makers of Groundhog Day, only to get trapped in endless lawyers' conferences.

12:01 (1993 TV movie): I actually saw this when it was on originally, and enjoyed it a lot. The same day repeats over and over, due to a "time bounce" caused by a particle accelerator gone wrong. Only lowly H.R. employee Barry is aware of the time trap, and he has to get close to a lovely scientist, Lisa (who keeps dying) to discover the truth. Finally, it turns out that the main scientist behind the project (Martin Landau) is ebil.
How do you break out? By disposing of Landau, basically.

"Endless Eight" in The Rampage of Haruhi Suzumiya: In this Japanese novel series, schoolgirl Haruhi Suzumiya can change reality. In one installment, she makes her friends, known as the SOS Brigade, relive the same two weeks over again because they were so perfect.
How do you break out? After 15,498 repetitions (or about 600 years) Haruhi finally has enough.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Cause and Effect": The U.S.S. Enterprise gets caught in a loop where roughly the same day repeats over and over again – always ending with the ship blowing up. For the Enterprise, the loop lasts 17 days. For the USS Bozeman, the other ship in the loop, it lasts 80 years.
How do you break out? Finally, Data is able to "remember" enough to know that Riker isn't always a total moron. Just usually.

X-Files, "Monday": It's one of those days when everything goes wrong - and worst of all, it keeps repeating. Only one woman is aware the entire world is stuck in a time loop.
How do you break out? Mulder pulls a Data, and finds a way to send a reminder to himself, so he'll do things differently the next time around.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Life Serial": Buffy's working at the Magic Box, where a customer orders a live mummy hand. Her attempts to retrieve the hand invariably end with her killing it, which means the sale can't go through. How do you break out? She finally solves the puzzle by ordering a hand be delivered.

Stargate SG-1, "Window of Opportunity": O'Neill and Teal'c get stuck in a time loop for three months, and the only way they can get out is to translate the Ancient writing on an altar so that they have the necessary information to break out of the time loop. In the meantime, O'Neill and Teal'c enjoy their freedom from consequences by biking through the base, playing golf through a Stargate, and, in O'Neill's case, resigning from the Air Force so he can kiss Major Carter.
How do you break out? They finally translate the writing, which explains how the Ancients tried to prevent a disaster by building a time machine.

Day Break: This short-lived series starring Taye Diggs had him framed for murder and reliving the same day over and over until he could solve everything. At least one other person appears to be experiencing the same repetition. Digg's character, Detective Brett Hopper, seems to be able to cause some slight changes to the next loop, such as making people wake up with a strange sense of foreboding that something is about to happen.
How do you break out? The show got canceled before we saw it happen.

Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, "Twas the Night before Mxymas": Mr. Mxyzptlk makes Christmas Eve repeat endlessly, each time around making things worse and worse until, before long, Clark and Lois (the only two aware of what's going on) are staring at nuclear annihilation as Mr. Mxyzptlk slowly removes all hope from humanity.
How do you break out? Lois and Clark finally manage to banish Mxy back to the fifth dimension, restoring hope.

Supernatural, "Mystery Spot": Such a classic example of the Groundhog Day trope that Dean actually references Groundhog Day several times. Sam keeps reliving the same day over and over again, and it always ends with Dean dying. At first he thinks it's due to their visit to a Mystery Spot, where the laws of physics don't apply, but as Dean's deaths get more and more demented, Sam starts to suspect otherwise.
How do you break out? Sam eventually figures out the reality-warping Trickster is behind it all.

Blood Ties, "5:55": This Canadian series about a cop with failing eyesight who becomes a P.I. (and teams up with the illegitimate vampire son of Henry VIII) featured an episode where the cop in question, Vicki Nelson, keeps reliving the same day over and over, in search of an antique.
How do you break out? Vicki finally opens a box that releases her from the time loop.

Outer Limits, "Déjà vu": A teleportation experiment goes wrong and sends a bunch of scientists back to the day before, with only Dr. Mark Crest remembering what happened. Trying to figure out what went wrong and created the loop, he ultimately discovers his friend Lt. Colonel Lester Glade altered the experiment by turning it into a bomb in the hopes of saving his career.
How do you break out? Crest finally traps Glade in a time-loop of his final second of life.

Doctor Who, "Meglos": The British time-travel comedy soap featured a lot of time loops, but none quite as ridiculous as Meglos, where the Doctor and Romana relive the same five minutes or so over and over again, at the hands (??) of an evil cactus, who wants to impersonate the Doctor.
How do you break out? It makes almost no sense. They start reenacting the events of the time loop a minute early, so the space/time vortex gets confused. Or something. I know!

Torchwood: Captains Jack and John spent five years in a two-week timeloop.
How do you break out? Probably by having so much sex, they broke time and space.

Sealab 2021, "Lost in Time": In a parody of the TNG episode, Quinn and Stormy keep getting blown back 15 minutes by an explosion that destroys Sealab. And when they try to warn Captain Murphy, they keep getting mistaken for doppelgangers and thrown in the brig.
How do you break out? They finally contact their other selves and abort the mission (to steal cable TV) that led to Sealab blowing up. And then all the duplicate Stormies and Quinns have to fight each other, gladiator style.

Justice League Unlimited, "The Once and Future Thing": Batman defeats the time-traveling Chronos by forcing him to trap himself in a time loop of the very second where he first started time-traveling, forcing Chronos and his wife to bicker for all eternity.
How do you break out? If Batman traps you, you stay trapped.

The Twilight Zone – "Shadow Play": Criminal Adam Grant is stuck in an eternal time loop, as he prepares for his execution. He desperately tries to convince people that none of this is real and that it will all fade to nothing once they execute him, but to no avail: he's killed before the governor's stay of execution can come through. It all restarts with a new itineration of the loop, although this time different people pay different roles in Grant's nightmare.
How do you break out? He doesn't.

Eureka, "I Do Over": It's Allison and Nathan's wedding day, and due to some kind of wibbly wobbly timey whimey thing, Carter ends up reliving the day over and over and over again.
How do you break out? Nathan Stark finally sacrifices his own life.

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut: The entire world is forced to relive 1991-2001, and nobody has any free will to change events, despite remembering everything they did last time. Thus, everyone has to watch all the sadness and mistakes all over again.
How do you break out? The loop only goes around once.

Seven Days, "Come Again?": A glitch makes our time-jumping hero, Frank Parker, loop back to his arrival time.
How do you break out? Eventually, Parker figures out the glitch and prevents it from recurring.

More lists of time loops are at Wikipedia, Me Loops, and TVTropes.

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

We had an exclusive interview with Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg, producers of the U.S. version of Mars. And they promised that not only will the finale wrap up everything satisfactorily, but science fiction lovers will be thrilled.

The most amazing scene in last Wednesday's episode was the one where Sam gets up on the roof and prepares to jump, thinking it'll take him back to the present day. That's in the original BBC pilot, complete with the guy who's read Sam's psych file and is egging him on. And it was in the unaired David E. Kelley version of the pilot. But you didn't include it in the actual first episode. Why wait until the 16th episode to do that scene? Does it gain more weight because you waited so long?

Josh: You know what's funny, is that, we absolutely borrowed from the BBC, from the beginning to the end of this series. [But] that was a scene that actually kind of evolved naturally. I think the script had actually been written, and they were like, "Oh wait. This is just like that scene from the pilot." There have definitely been things that were conscious decisions to steal, as it were, from the BBC, but that wasn't one of them. [In fact, that scene came out of] our belief that you want the second to last episode of the season to feel like a season finale. And it's all about just trying to top that. The audience feels like it's cumulative, and it's crescendoing in the second-to-last episode, so how the fuck are they going to top themselves next week? And then we'll try to top ourselves, which we hope we did.

Scott: I really believe the back half of the season has been so much about Sam and Annie. The first half was about his mother and father, and those issues, [and] What am I doing here? In the back half, every episode just brought them closer and closer together, so I thought [that rooftop scene] was such a great moment. In fact I just wrote to Gretchen about that, because she does that thing she does in the pilot, where she puts his hand on her heart. And I was like, "Wow, Annie has come so far as a character in 16 episodes, from when she first put his hand on her heart, to that girl on the roof."

And also, we love and revere and have been cannibalizing the BBC all along, [but] we never considered putting that in the pilot - that thing on the roof. I actually think that was one of the rare missteps they made, in the [original BBC] pilot, was that thing on the roof. You hadn't earned it yet. Why is he jumping? Why would he even think? He just got there. He doesn't know anything about anything. Why would he think that jumping off the roof is going to take him home? Whereas by this point, with all the track that we laid, it kind of does make sense in episode 16.

It feels like Sam has been going to some really dark places in the past few episodes, what with going undercover and then believing that he might have committed murder. Is that continuing into the final episode?

Josh: Very much so, the finale if nothing else — I'm not even talking about the end moments of it, which reveal everything — but the finale is very much Sam, on a journey to recapture his humanity or lose it forever... The last few episodes play, and were conceived as, a three-parter in some ways, and they all sort of tie together...

Sam started to feel like it was liberating to be in the 1970s, like he could reinvent himself. In the midseason premiere, that Russian guy even tells him that being in a foreign country is a fresh start, and he takes that on board. But then it turns into him becoming more of a monster.

Scott: Absolutely. The whole fun of this is: Every time Sam sort of gets comfortable, it kind of bites him in the ass. The truth is he's living in a darker time, in many ways, the 1970s. One of the things we like is, that in order to embrace the people around him and the world he's in, it means embracing darkness. And then there's Annie who represents sort of the hope and light. The good news is, when you see Wednesday's episode, one wy or another, whether you love the ending or you hate the ending, I really believe it'll all make sense at least in terms of the emotional journey.

In the British version, it seems like Sam kind of loved it in the 1970s. In some ways, it was a happier, more fun time for him. You kind of have some of that, but at the same time it feels darker.

Josh: We'd hoped to be on the air for seven years, we wanted him to embrace this place as he did in the BBC, and for it to be a fun place he'd be okay living in. In wrapping up the series, we wanted to delve into the dark dimension of the story.

So you decided to go darker when you knew you weren't coming back?

Scott: No, basically, when our ratings started to suck we were all in really bad moods, so we naturally got darker and darker, as we were writing it. (Laughs.) We wanted to be in 1973.

So in the finale, we get more of an explanation for what's been going on? Including the little robots? How science fictional is it going to be?

Josh: Without saying too much, I don't think scifi fans will be disappointed.

Scott: That's for sure.

One thing that really blew us away in last week's episode was Sam's chemistry with Michael Imperioli. Especially where the two of them team up.

Josh: The Michael Imperioli of it all might be one of the great tragedies of the show not being able to move forward. You see those two guys partnered up for a beat or two in that episode, It was so much fun. Having that as a primary element, we could have gotten seven more years. We could have been writing those scenes happily.

Scott: Even the episode where [Ray] and Annie sort of partner up. I just remember, after watching that first cut, thinking "We've got to do more episodes featuring the two of them. They were amazing together."

What are some other things you would have done if you'd gotten a season two?

Scott: As with any first season, you learn what works and what doesn't work. I think it's not a mystery that this last run of episodes has been so strong. We figured out the sweet spot. We don't have to put so much weight on the crime of the week. It's striking so much balance between the mythology and the 1973 and the cases and the cops. I think some of my favorite stuff at the end of the day has just been two characters talking.

I loved this low budget mindbender, even though Event 16 has some of the usual problems of time-travel movies, with a convoluted plot and a lot of "actually I'm this guy from the past, but in the future, in a present-day disguise!" But there's so much good stuff in it, like this scene between two agents from the future, meeting in a present-day Wellington restaurant.

One guy is there representing what amounts to temporal law enforcement, trying to make sure events in the past happen they way they are supposed to. The other is a woman who sells black market devices that reveal who you really are under whatever weird physical cover assigned you by the authorities. It seems as if she's selling these armbands to people from the future who are agents in the present, unable to connect with their real, future selves. Actually to be honest I have no idea what she's doing other than being a black market dealer in cool identity tech, and I love it.

The rest of the movie is just as weird, focusing on a serial killer from the past who needs to go into the future to get neurological treatments that can cure his madness . . . or not. The low-budget effects are used to great and creative effect, and a lot of the performances are pretty damn good. If you want a good time travel brainteaser, or just want to see all the futuristic-looking places in Wellington, definitely check out Event 16.

Event 16 via IMDB

In Kindred, a present-day African American woman in California, Dana, keeps getting drawn back in time to the antebellum South. She saves the white plantation owner, Rufus, from drowning, but every time Dana travels back in time her stays grow longer and more arduous.

Beacon, which has been publishing editions of Kindred since 2004, is seeking an artist to put images to Butler's ideas: contact Alison Trzop by March 16. [Tor.com, Racialicious and SF Scope]

If you looked at those set photos we ran last week, you saw David Tennant and costar Ryan sitting in a double-decker London bus. According to Den Of Geek, that bus, or one like it, was meant to be transported to Dubai for filming there. (If it's true that Dubai is standing for an alien planet, then maybe the London bus gets whisked off to another planet?)

Sadly that London bus — which is essential for the plot — was damaged in shipping, so badly that it can't be used at all. This has forced writers Russell T. Davies and Gareth Roberts to rush back to the drawing board, rewriting the episode to suit the newly trashed state of the bus. (Or write the bus out altogether?)

Meanwhile, I couldn't help perusing those images a bit more closely, and noticing a few things. Like, what's Tennant holding in this picture (and a few others)? It looks like some kind of timey-whimey detector:

And notice an ad over Tennant's head for a book called Ocean Of Noise by E.R. Butler. There's no such book — I checked — but "Ocean Of Noise" is a song by Arcade Fire, a group which includes Win Butler. In-joke? Or does the book Ocean Of Noise figure in the plot somehow?

Who's this woman standing next to Michelle Ryan? She's not wearing a reflective vest like the rest of the crew, so is she another actor? Or is she a producer and I'm just not recognizing her?

And finally, are these horseback police officers — who looked like pumpkin-headed monsters in the thumbnail version — part of the story? Or just local color? (Please let there be horses. Tennant on horseback is always a major plus.)


Images by WENN.

According to the BBC, Ryan is playing Lady Christina de Souza, "a woman with a mysterious past who's going to have a huge impact on the Doctor." Her one-off appearance doesn't mean she can't return in 2010 as a regular companion, since Donna Noble already achieved a similar feat. (And those of you who saw Ryan's cringe-making Bionic performance should bear in mind, she's a better actor when she doesn't have to fake an American accent.)

Last night, fans observed the filming of a scene where Tennant and Ryan were riding the bus to Victoria. Also, there was a scene of Ryan in an alleyway, where she burst from a doorway and ran into a crowded city street. And policemen seemed to be arresting a businessman in a pink shirt.

Meanwhile, comedian Lee Evans will play Malcolm, "whose life becomes connected to the Doctor's in unusual circumstances." [BBC and Doctor Who Forum]

Images by WENN, except for top image by BBC.

What Happened To The Island At The End Of Last Season?
Well, we saw it disappear, but did it move in time or space? Or both? We know from season 4 that Ben went from the Island in 2004 to late 2005, after all, so perhaps the Island never actually physically moved at all... it just jumped somewhere else in time.

Has FutureSun Gone Bad?
In the "future" of the fourth season's final episode, "There's No Place Like Home," Sun told Charles Widmore that they have common interests and reminded him that the Oceanic Six "are not the only ones who left the island." Has she gone bad, is this a double bluff, or is Charles Widmore actually the good guy in this after all? Okay, maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch.

Is Ben Working Against The Island?
Here's some more evidence to support the "Maybe things aren't as we seem" theory: Ben said, at the end of last season, that the Island wants all of the Oceanic 6 to return, but when Claire appeared in Kate's dream, she said that Aaron shouldn't go back. Assuming that that Claire was the "real" Claire, does that mean that the Island doesn't want Aaron to return? If that's the case, then why did Ben say the opposite? Unless, for some reason, he's working against the Island... or the visions that have been appearing to the Oceanic 6 aren't the work of the Island at all.

What Happened To Locke?
This one, admittedly, is many questions in one: How did Locke get off the Island? Why did he get off the Island (We have a partial answer to this: To get the Oceanic 6 to return. But, again, why?)? Why was he calling himself Jeremy Bentham back in the outside world? How did he die? And much, much less importantly, why am I convinced that he'll come back to life when he gets back to the Island?

Why Does The Island Want Everyone Back? And What Does Back Mean, Anyway?
Remember, this is now a show about time travel. Does the Island want everyone to return to the Island now, or does the Island want everyone to return to some particular point in time - and if it's the latter, when, and why? Are they supposed to prevent something from happening? Tied in with this, of course, is the basic question "What is the Island, anyway?" I think it's safe to assume at this point that it's not actually an Island - or, at least, not only an Island.

What Are "The Rules"?
If Charles Widmore "broke the rules" in telling mercenaries to kill Ben's daughter (as Ben claimed in "The Shape Of Things To Come" last season), what rules are we talking about? And the rules of what, exactly? Apparently the competition between the two men had some kind of gentlemen's agreement quality to it previously, so what was going on between the two of them before Alex died? Remember: Widmore not only knows about the Island, he calls it "his" Island. But why?

Is Desmond The Only Character Unstuck In Time?
Ben, as I said above, has already been shown to have jumped ahead in time, and at the end of "The Constant," we saw in Daniel Farraday's notebook that Daniel's constant was Desmond... does that mean that he is also lost in time? And if so, when did that happen? Or did it happen when Daniel's raft also disappeared in the white light that the Island disappeared in (And, again, if so, does that mean that everyone caught in that blast is lost in time? Told you the show was good at raising questions)?

What's Charlotte's Secret?
Snarky Miles told fellow newcomer Charlotte last season that he knew that she'd been trying to "return" to the Island for some time, right before Charlotte herself told Daniel that she was looking for where she was born... Was she born on the Island? And what importance would that fact have, on an Island where mothers have traditionally died in the third trimester under mysterious circumstances?

Is Miles A Clue About Hurley?
Talking of Miles, it's worth pointing out that he can hear dead people. Is the introduction of Miles meant to clue us in to some latent psychic ability in Hurley that allows him to see Charlie and Mr. Eko off the Island that has less to do with the mystical powers of the Island and more to do with Hurley himself? He was the one who found the numbers, after all. Is Hurley the series' third psychic (After Miles and Walt)?

What Is The DHARMA Initiative?
Yeah, yeah; this is the one that we most likely won't get an answer to for some time to come, but it's still one of the most important questions from the show to me. Yes, we know a lot of facts about the DHARMA Initiative, but I'm not buying that whole "70s commune of hippies out to save the world" thing... The experiments we know that they were engaged in - Teleportation? Time travel? - seem a little too ambitious for a collection of freethinkers engaged in social experiments, and I'm sure shadowy secrets remain to be uncovered. Did DHARMA create the Island altogether? Or did the Island create the DHARMA Initiative?

You might remember Gondry for his mind-bending, surrealist movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; its script won an Academy Award, which Gondry shared with Charlie Kaufman and Pierre Bismuth. Gondry, an artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 and 2006, recently visited the school to screen his short film Tokyo! (also a collaboration). While there, he confessed to Boston.com that his two years at MIT had influenced a new project:

The former MIT artist-in-residence said he was happy to be back in Cambridge, despite the excruciating cold. "It's a perfect environment for me, because it's where art meets science," he said, of MIT. "In France, art is much more associated with literature, and more political. I like the spirit here." Gondry also revealed that he's working on a new film, set at MIT, about time travel. "I'm rewriting the screenplay, so we're not shooting yet," he said, laughing.

It may be a long wait for this story to hit the screen, but when it does, I'm sure we'll all feel that it was a relatively short travel through time. Let's just hope it turns out better than MIT's 2005 Time Traveler Party, which, according to Tina Fey, was a bust because "people from the future already know the party sucked."

According to those who have seen the first episode of the show's fifth season, the full scope of the show's time-travel conceit is finally revealed. Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Jensen put it best:

Remember the non-linear structure of Pulp Fiction, which toggled between a number of storylines whose chronological relationship to each other is practically a puzzle for the audience to solve? Well, the season premiere is kinda like that. The first two episodes will have the audience — and the show’s characters — trying to make sense of shifts in time. They demand active engagement, and I found it to be a lot of fun. Especially the first hour.

But what exactly does that mean? The New York Post, of all places, is willing to spill the beans:

Time travel this season appears to have replaced flashbacks and flash-forwards. Instead, while watching memories of the past or events in the future, chunks of the entire cast are sent skipping through time, like a needle on a vinyl record.

Suddenly, "The Constant" feels like more than just an astonishingly sweet interlude in a series of ongoing mysteries... and we may have our answer as to how Desmond got lost in time in the first place, as well. Hopefully this means that we'll see much more of Daniel Faraday in the remaining seasons - and perhaps someone managing to go back in time and save little hobbit Charlie from his watery grave, as well.

Back From The Dead [New York Post], 'Lost' season premiere: We've seen it! [EW]

Filling out Michael J. Fox's puffy vest is actor Akshay Kumar, according to rumors. The lovely Aishwarya Rai may also be taking on the role Lea Thompson once played. Rai is so gorgeous, I could easily be talked into seeing this film, but again why make it a remake? Why not just a funny, Bollywood time traveling movie?

The director, Vipul Shah won't be forcing the actors to play teenagers, but I wonder how they will deal with the whole teen angst issues, and of course Biff the bully. Let's hope that it isn't a direct remake of the film because I just can't see how you could have a Back To The Future without "Calvin Klein" showing up to the school sock hop. Many other sites seem to be questioning whether it'll be a page for page translation as well.

The movie production is set to begin this February.

[Real Bollywood]

Perhaps the only precursor to today's arty time-leaping flicks is Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, a tough story about a man adrift between the decades, attempting to stop a terrible virus from destroying the world. After staying in the present day (the 1990s) for a while, he's put in a mental institution where he begins to believe that the post-apocalyptic future is just a crazy hallucination.

The new wave of time travel flicks represented by Timecrimes and Primer use the idea of time travel to explore madness in the same way Gilliam did. In both movies, our time travelers are clearly going mad - in Primer, madness seems to be one of the side-effects of time travel. We see a similar trend on FOX series Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, where all the characters who have traveled through time struggle with madness and traumatic flashbacks. With madness-loving director David Cronenberg working on a remake of Timecrimes, and a new Terminator movie in the works, we're not likely to see an end to this trend soon.

Madness makes almost any story more literary*, of course, if only because it takes a certain degree of art to represent reality through the eyes of somebody unsure of what's real. Even healthy minds are time travelers: In our imaginations, we jump around in time constantly, comparing what's happening right now to an event ten years ago, or recalling vividly a person who is long dead. So perhaps the idea of time travel is particularly suited to complicated, literary stories. It's a simple way to translate mental states into plot devices.

But why is time travel the plot device that arty types want to steal from scifi right now? Why not create indie flicks about aliens or space travel? Possibly because it's hard to create non-laughable aliens on an indie budget - so don't expect lit writer Jeanette Winterson's recent alien novel The Stone Gods to get the arthouse treatment any time soon.

I think there might be something else going on here, though, something connected to many people's realization that humans won't be traveling to space en masse in the near future. That dream died in the 1980s, when the moon landing honeymoon was finally over. These days, we don't all share a dream that one day we'll go to the stars, the way kids watching the first moon landing did. Instead, perhaps the most widely-shared scifi-flavored dream is of escaping to the past or future, instead of to the stars.

Certainly the fantasy of escape is at the heart of Timecrimes, where a man called Hector strays from his wife by idly watching another woman undress through his binoculars. This small act of betrayal sets in motion a psychotic adventure with time machines, self-tripling, and unbearable guilt. Is the movie really about time travel, or just the consequences of sexual anxiety?

Anyone who has seen an ordinary time travel film like Back to the Future would hardly recognize Timecrimes as part of the genre. Hector is not trying to change the past in order to make the present better, or even just to revisit a beloved lost time. His travels back to the recent past are clearly surreal representations of his own knotty psychology where sexual desire somehow always leads to murder. Not exactly the typical stuff of science fiction.

Still, it is science fiction - at least, a version of what SF would be if completely unleashed from the idea of genre. What's intriguing about the new wave of time travel indies is that they are unafraid to turn the conventions of hard SF into metaphors. There is no effort here to be "scientific," or to create a plausible time loop scenario. Instead, we are treated to a genuinely startling exploration of unknown territory in the human mind. And we get a glimpse of what science fiction might look like in years to come.

* You can see metaphorical time travel cropping up in non-SF literary work too: Joseph Heller's famous war novel Catch-22 is about a man whose madness causes his very narrative to become unstuck in time. (Unlike a similar work, Slaughterhouse Five, where the narrator is literally, not metaphorically, unstuck in time.) And both Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ have written literary SF novels (Woman on the Edge of Time and The Female Man respectively) that mix time travel with possible madness.

He’s an Alien

Star Trek “Wolf in the Fold”: Psycho author Robert Bloch reinterprets one of his favorite subjects as an alien force. Redjac is a parasite that bonds to humanoid organisms, compelling them to commit crimes so it could feed on fear and pain. Redjac was responsible for the Ripper murders as well as serial killings in Shanghai, Kiev, and the Martian colonies.

Doctor Who “Matrix”: The Time Lord known as the Valeyard travels to 1888 London and takes on the identity of Jack the Ripper. He uses the Ripper murders to power the Dark Matrix, the computer that harbors all the Time Lords’ evil impulses. He plans to unleash the Dark Matrix on the universe and transform it into an unimaginable nightmare. (Jack the Ripper also showed up in an unfilmed script for the 1996 Who TV movie.)

The Outer Limits “Ripper”: When prostitutes start turning up dead, the police suspect John York, a drug-addicted daughter whose misdiagnosis lead to the death of the duke’s daughter. But Dr. York realizes the truth is more horrifying than the police could possibly imagine: an alien force is taking possession of prostitute’s bodies, killing them each time it jumps to a new host.

He Escaped into the Future

Time After Time by Karl Alexander: Around the time he unveils his time machine, HG Wells begins to suspect (correctly) that his friend, John Leslie Stevenson, is Jack the Ripper. Stevenson steals the time machine and Wells follows him to the year 1979. The murderous Stevenson fits into modern life far better than Wells does, and continues his bloody crimes.

“A Toy for Juliette” by Robert Bloch: Rather than escape, Jack is pulled into a hedonistic future against his will by Juliette, a woman named for the character invented by the Marquis de Sade. Juliette kidnaps historical figures and then gleefully murders them, but Jack isn’t having any of it. In Harlan Ellison’s follow-up, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” the serial killer is driven mad by a populace no longer shocked by his sexuality and violence.

Babylon 5 “Comes the Inquisitor”: Harlan Ellison contributed to this episode, in which it is revealed that the Vorlons employ an inquisitor, a human male named Sebastian who is especially capable of inflicting violence without remorse. Sheridan learns that Sebastian, known to history only as “Jack,” was abducted from London in 1888 on the very day after the Ripper committed his final murder.

He Escaped to America

Batman “Gotham by Gaslight”: When murders mirroring the Ripper killings start happening in 1888 Gotham City, everyone suspects Bruce Wayne, who has just returned from Europe and cannot account for his nocturnal whereabouts. (The graphic novel is an "Elseworlds," putting Batman in an unfamiliar context.) Strangely, no one suspects Jacob Packer, Wayne’s misogynistic lawyer who also took a recent European vacation. In a different "Elseworlds" book, the Joker takes the place of Jack the Ripper, cutting smiles into the faces of his victims.

“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” by Robert Bloch: In Bloch’s earliest Jack the Ripper story, the Ripper doesn’t commit violence for its own sake; his murders function as a sacrifice to dark, Lovecraftian gods, who grant him eternal youth for his blood offerings. After using the five London prostitutes to work his ritual, he travels to America to enjoy his immortality.

Cloak and Dagger “Predator and Prey”: Jack the Ripper slips off to America to quietly continue his crimes. He dies when a church collapses on his head, but his soul continues on in the Darkforce Dimension, ready to be unleashed on the world at the Predator’s will.

He was Driven Insane by Supernatural Forces

Sanctuary: John Druitt is part of a circle of scientists in Victorian London who inject themselves with vampire blood. The injection gives him the ability to travel through space and time, but each jump comes with sanity-crippling brain damage. Soon the maddened Druitt is beyond help, murdering prostitutes in Whitechapel.

Anno Dracula by Kim Newman: In an alternate England in which Count Dracula has married Queen Victoria and turned London into a vampire society, Jack the Ripper is murdering vampire prostitutes. And this Jack is none other than Dr. John Steward of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, driven mad by the turning of Lucy Westenra and driven to kill the vampire women who remind him of her.

He Wanted to Keep Women Down

From Hell by Alan Moore: Queen Victoria’s royal physician William Gull saw the Masonic God Jahbulon during a stroke. As a result, when the queen asks him to deal with a group of blackmailing prostitutes, Gull believes that he is making sacrifices on the alter of Victorian London that will shape a male-dominated 20th Century. And his forays into mental time travel only strengthen that belief.

Wonder Woman “Amazonia”: In another "Elseworlds," Jack Planters is an American cousin to the members of England’s royal family. He follows up his murder of five prostitutes with the decimation of the royal family, making himself the king of England and making female subservience the height of proper etiquette.

He’s a Monster of a Different Kind

Amazon Women on the Moon: In one segment of the channel-surfing sketch comedy film, an Unsolved Mysteries-style show explores the possibility that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, a certain elusive sea monster:

Justice League of America “The Island of Dr. Moreau”: In anohter "Elseworlds," Dr. Moreau’s experiments create a team of superpowered human/animal hybrids: a cheetah Flash, wolf Wonder Woman, and porcupine “Black” Arrow. When the group succeeds in tracking down Jack the Ripper, they are horrified to discover that he is the first of Moreau’s experiments, an uplifted orangutan who seeks to use Moreau’s technique to transform men into beasts.

X-Men: The Animated Series “Descent”: Mad scientist Nathaniel Essex created for himself a minion, Jack, to procure mutant organs for him. Essex would use the mutant DNA of Jack’s victims to transform himself into Mr. Sinister.

Special Unit 2 “The Beast”: The serial killer known as Jack the Ripper was actually a “Link,” one of the evolutionary gaps between humans and apes. This Link in particular is an ogre, who uses injections to become human and control his murderous instincts. But when the serum wears off, the Ripper resurfaces in modern day Chicago.

He’s the Good Guy

A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny: Accompanied by his faithful familiar, Snuff, the sorcerer Jack must commit grisly acts in the service of his magic. But his ultimate goal is to protect the world from the Elder Gods, who threaten to burst through the gateway into our world on Halloween.

Magnolia Pictures is running a free screening of Timecrimes at the Embarcadero Center Cinema next Tuesday, Dec. 16, at 7:30. You can RSVP by writing to timecrimessf@gmail.com, and we hope to see you there!

[via Metafilter]

Of course, the non-stop time-hopping by snowsuit-clad nerd vigilantes causes a deadly hole in space-time, but more importantly it upsets the school's social order. The nerds start pushing the jocks around, and the popular girl dates a nerd. In the end, everybody has to learn their proper place in the pecking order, and nerds learn that being abused and degraded brings them together as friends. Or something.

His Life is a Fixed Event in Time

“No Time Like the Past” (The Twilight Zone): Paul Driscoll is a well-meaning but ineffectual time traveler. Not only does he fail to kill Hitler (thanks to the intervention of a suspicious maid), he also fails to warn the Hiroshima police about the atomic bomb and fails to keep the Lusitania from being torpedoed. It turns out that he is unable to change past events, and, when he does effect events in the past, it is only as part of a predestination paradox.

He’s More Clever Than You'd Think

I Killed Adolph Hitler by Jason: When a depressed hitman is contracted to go back in time and kill Hitler, the Fuhrer gets the better of him, stealing his time machine and leaving the hitman in the past to wait and plan his revenge.

You’re Actually Part of a Predestination Paradox

“The Primal Solution” by Eric Norden: An elderly Holocaust survivor discovers a method of mental time travel and seeks to undo the horrors he witnessed in his youth by possessing the body of the young Hitler. He humiliates the young Austrian, then tries to goad Hitler into suicide, but Hitler regains control of his body before the deed can be accomplished. The young Hitler is so haunted by the encounter with the Jewish man’s mind that he resolves that he can only find peace by exterminating the entire Jewish people.

Cradle of Darkness (The Twilight Zone): Katherine Heigl travels to 1889 Austria in order to kill the infant Hitler. She succeeds in killing the baby by jumping into a river with it, but Adolph’s mother buys another baby and raises it as her own. And that baby grows into the Adolph Hitler that Heigl’s character set out to kill.

His Guards Are Used to Dealing with Time Traveling Assassins

Subnormality: In this strip of the webcomic Subnormality, we learn that Hitler’s guards are actually quite adept at killing time travelers before they get to Hitler. And all those attempts have got to make them wonder…

You’ll Be Thwarted By Other Time Travelers

“The Savage Time” (Justice League of America): The supervillain Vandal Savage travels back in time and places Hitler in cryogenic storage not to prevent the horrors of the Holocaust, but to assume control over the Nazi party and continue its regime into the present day. To reset the timeline, the Justice League travels back in time to remove Savage from power and have Hitler reinstated.

Midnighter: In the first arc of the Midnighter solo series, a man named Paulus claims to have replaced Midnighter’s secondary heard with a bomb, which he will detonate unless Midnighter goes back in time and kills Hitler. Midnighter does try to kill Hitler as a young German soldier, but he is stopped by time police from the 95th Century.

Days of Cain by JR Dunn: A group of rebel time agents seek to undo one of humanity’s greatest atrocities by killing Hitler, or, barring that, dismantling the death camps from within. But a society of time agents known as the Moiety is determined to preserve a certain version of the timeline of any cost, giving their agent Gasper James the unenviable task of ensuring the Holocaust goes forward.

“Wikihistory” by Desmond Warzel: One of the bylaws of the International Association of Time Travelers states that you can’t kill Hitler. The problem is, everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. This leaves more experienced time travelers the onerous task of undoing the historical edits of n00bs.

Killing Him Just Brings About a Potentially Worse Future

Making History by Stephen Fry: A history student and a physics professor manage to send a permanent male contraceptive pill back in time where Hitler’s father will consume it, ensuring Hitler will never be born. But without Hitler, the Nazi party is ripe for the leadership of Rudolph Gloder, who shares Hitler’s genocidal agenda, but is far more efficient, stable, patient, and charismatic. Free from Hitler’s personality flaws, Gloder was able to take over all of Europe, so that, in the alternate present day, an extremely conservative US is in a cold war with the Nazis.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert: In the video game, Albert Einstein invents a time machine, which he uses to go back in time and deleted Hitler from time before he could rise to power. But, without a strong Germany, Stalin’s Russia invades Europe, and eventually the United States.

It’s All Just a Dream

“The Man Who Dreamed the World” (The Fantastic Four): When She Hulk, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and Nick Fury mysteriously find themselves in the year 1936, Fury decides he may as well kill Hitler and slips off to Germany. Although the other three attempt to stop him, but just as the Invisible Woman seems to have talked him out of it, Fury shoots Hitler, killing him. But, it turns out that they had been in the dream of a coma victim, who snapped back to reality when Fury altered his dream timeline by killing Hitler. The actual timeline remains intact, leaving Fury in a less than happy mood.

Kring was originally supposed to appear at the Expo with recently-removed writer/producers Jeph Loeb and Jason Alexander; following their dismissal by NBC, Kring originally pulled out of the appearance before returning at the last minute, replacing Loeb and Alexander. After talking about how he got started in the business, Kring went into some detail about the origin of Heroes - and the way that the show very quickly changed from its original conception as a series that would change its main cast every season:

The problem is you run into a whole series of issues, where show and business run into each other. The network falls in love with characters, the audience falls in love with characters, the press falls in love with characters. And it's contractually hard to get people onboard for a brief period... You find yourself writing for characters you thought would be gone.

But in the future, the changing ways in which audiences watch television will have an effect on the way that the show is structured; this season's move to two "volumes" will continue, as shorter storyarcs tell new viewers "every couple of months, 'come on in, the water's fine.' You can hop on the train and you won't have missed too much."
Well, except for continuity-heavy flashback episodes like last week's, of course. But never fear; the show will also be cutting back on time travel in its future, according to the report on Comic Book Resources:

Kring says the show will take a hiatus from time travel stories. Asked about time travel as a story device, Kring said “avoid it at all cost.”

Finally. Between that, depowering Peter and getting rid of some cast members recently, it's almost as if the show is beginning to fix itself after all. Maybe Kring reads us, after all.

Images from Greg Beeman's blog.

Could Heroes Move Away From Serialization? [IGN], Tim Kring Talks "Heroes" History [CBR]

Here you can see the three stages of the elevated train tracks. At top, the train as it was in the 1930s, chugging along on its elevated track with the Empire State Building in the distance. In the middle, you can see what happened to the tracks after the train stopped running in the 1980s. It did exactly what the New York disease apocalypse movie I Am Legend predicted for the city: The giant industrial creation slowly grew a layer of grass and flowers. Today, the track is in the process of being reclaimed as a public park. In five years, as you can see in the bottom image, the tracks will be covered over by wooden walkways, flowers will be planted, and people will stroll along a mile and a half of elevated parkway through lower west side Manhattan. The project to turn the tracks into a park was managed by Friends of the High Line.

New York's Historic Elevated Train Line [via UK Guardian]

Images of the Highline today via Joel Sternfield/Friends of the High Line.

Who could be more impressive than Tom Baker? Try Prince Charles. According to Reuters, a spokesperson says it's possible that the Prince could put in an appearance on Doctor Who next year. Outgoing showrunner Russell T. Davies had asked for the Prince to appear, but he originally turned down the offer, prompting RTD to call HRH "a miserable swine." But now a Palace official says the Prince never even saw the request, which was rejected by an underling along with thousands of others. And if the BBC resubmits the request, the Prince's staff wouldn't rule out his saying yes. (But it's probably a good idea to leave out the "miserable swine" stuff on the invite.)

Meanwhile, I have a few thoughts about the rumored multi-Doctor special:

1) First, it's weird to think that Davison will be the only Doctor at this gathering who appeared in the last several-Doctors story, 1983's "The Five Doctors." Davison's predecessor, the manic Tom Baker, skipped "Five Doctors" and was only represented by some footage from an unaired episode. The other Doctors from that story are sadly no longer with us. Actually, I've just realized this isn't true: the surviving Doctors all came back for another Children In Need special, the horrendous 1993 story "Dimensions In Time."

2) Hopefully this means the return of old Doctors to the show will be confined to one-off charity night events like this one. "Time Crash" was cute and charming, but the show in general has gotten a bit too self-referential. From listening to new showrunner Steven Moffat at Comic-Con, I'm mildly optimistic that he agrees with me. He told the crowd at the Who panel that he wants to create tomorrow's fan favorite characters instead of bringing back old ones, and he thinks the return of a past Doctor can't really justify more than a few minutes of story in any case. (He did leave in an escape clause, saying it was always possible he would think of a cool idea.

3) It still makes me sad that the past Doctors couldn't have gotten back together properly in 1993, when the BBC came close to making a special one-off story called "The Dark Dimension." The story sounded halfway interesting: it's an alternate universe where Tom Baker's Doctor failed to regenerate after his final story, "Logopolis," which explains why he's now so old-looking. And because of this, all the Doctors who came after him are in danger of being erased or something. Supposedly the story was killed by internecine warfare, plus the other Doctors were annoyed that Tom Baker got such a central role. So we got "Dimensions In Time" instead.

(And yes, I know point 3 contradicts point 2. Now that the show's actually back on the air and successful, I'd rather not see it turn into a nostalgia-fest. But the 1993 reunion special, if it had happened, could have been great, especially with the past Doctors closer to their primes.) [Telegraph via Wired and Reuters]

Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove: At some point in the Earth’s geological history, the region from Florida to Nova Scotia has broken off from the rest of North America, forming a separate continent. The paradisial continent, named Atlantis, is discovered by English explorers in 1453 and subsequently settled. Atlantis proves a focal point in the English, French, and Spanish struggles for power. The rest of North America, called Terranova, is subsequently discovered, but Atlantis is an impediment for Europeans trying to reach it.

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson: In world where 99% of Medievel Europe’s population was wiped out by the bubonic plague, Islamic and Buddhist societies emerge as the world’s dominant powers by the 15th century. Chinese explorers discover North America, which they name Yingzhou. And after the Chinese armies conquer Japan, many Japanese flee to Yingzhou, joining their power with that of the native Hodenosaunee federation.

Conquistador by S.M. Stirling: In 1946, an infantry captain accidentally creates a gate to an alternate universe in which Europeans have not yet journeyed to the New World. North America remains untouched by outside forces, but the Aztec Empire has run its course and is crumbling. The captain takes the opportunity to colonize the alternate California, bringing with him modern technology, disease, and an antebellum mindset.

Lion’s Blood by Steven Barnes: Thanks to the Carthaginian destruction of Rome, an Islamic Africa becomes the dominant political and technological power in the West. Africa develops steam power by the year 1000, allowing it to easily reach and colonize the New World. But, by the 19th century, North America, named Bilalistan, resembles a racially inverted version of the United States we know. Mexico remains the province of the Aztecs, but expansion West by Bilalistanis has led to clashes with the indigenous peoples. The lower class is comprised largely of those of European descent, and African- and Arab-descended Bilalistanis can keep European slaves.

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card: Instead of seeking out the New World, Columbus led an army to Constantinople in the Crusades. This act would, many centuries later, lead to the destruction of the human race. So a group of time travelers diverted him to America, altering the timeline. Unfortunately, Columbus’ discovery of America similarly dooms our own timeline, so another group of time travelers is again sent back to alter the political structure of the Europe’s first dealings with the native peoples of the West.