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I fear for the future of time travel. Not the real thing: That seems to be coming along swimmingly, according to a handful of renegade physicists (more on that in The Future! of this column). No, I'm more worried about that venerable pop institution fictional time travel. It's getting airier, subtler, distressingly less Rube Goldbergian: No fewer than four extant network shows — Heroes, the soon-to-return Lost, and two newcomers, Life on Mars and Fringe — involve some form of time travel minus any obvious chronos-crunching machine. The new time travelers epoch-hop on pure longing, head injury, or strength of will alone — sizzling portals and sparking gizmos are now rendered beside the point. Sure, some might see this as the genre maturing, but to me it looks an awful lot like downsizing. Hello? McFly? Whither the DeLoreans of yesteryear? Outta time, it seems.
Which says something about The Present. Time-travel stories are wonderfully dated, pristine core samples of the ages that birthed them. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), an early instance, Mark Twain was essentially refighting the Civil War in satire. His mode of transport? A bump on the head. Twain was in the machine age but not of it. But just a few years later in 1895, H. G. Wells embraced the industrial: The Time Machine was an au courant postcolonial parable, but more to the point, it described time travel via device in detail — and became a timeless source of inspiration for future generations of geeks. One of these is Ronald Mallett, a University of Connecticut physics professor who is, in all seriousness, working on a time machine. As you might expect, his tastes fall along the gizmo end of the spectrum: "I'm into the realm of technology and control. My leaning is definitely toward science fiction based on some sort of instrumentality." Mallet's design involves a circulating ring laser that could hypothetically twist spacetime the way a spoon swirls coffee.
Time machines stayed in fashion through the atomic age, undergoing both design and thematic updates that often cast them as vehicles for cautionary tales of science gone awry: See Ray Bradbury's seminal short story A Sound of Thunder (the "butterfly effect" urtext) and the BBC's Doctor Who. The sober political retrenchments of the '70s gave rise to Time and Again and Somewhere in Time, in which time travel is a form of reflective meditation, accomplished via hypnosis. In the '80s, heavy metal resurged with Back to the Future and The Terminator, two films that differed radically in theory and tone (BTTF's zippy Freudian destiny-defiance versus T1's grim, apocalyptic determinism) but shared the muscular, plutonium-fueled ethos of the Reagan era. Quantum Leap may have been light on tech, but it was almost neoconservative in its morality: Sam Beckett traveled the timeline, righting wrongs — the continuum's beat cop. And Bill and Ted's phone booth? A thing of naive, idiotic, self-congratulatory excellence, much like triumphal glasnost America itself. For these time travel shows, history was like other world problems — ornery but correctable. By 1991, Terminator 2's happy ending seemed to be telling us that the timeline was finally fixed. And then, for the rest of the '90s, the time machines were scrapped. We didn't need them anymore.
That's been the case even as, in the last couple of years, time travel has returned to the cultural forebrain — sans the machines. Lost's Desmond has seizures of chronology fueled not by plutonium but by romantic longing and the drive for redemption; for Heroes' Hiro, era swapping is a personal test of will; and the time traveler in Life on Mars may either be trapped in the '70s or a coma victim dying of guilty nostalgia. (Talk about a parable for our times!) Methodology-wise, though, we're practically back to King Arthur's Court. This is time travel in the cloud era: The DeLorean would never even pass emissions, and classical Wellsian futurism has given way to pure wish fulfillment.
But in the next yet-to-be-writ age of time-travel fantasy, I say we re-commit to the machine. Be it Mallett's circulating ring laser (Spike Lee has already bought the film rights to the prof's life story — really) or a mylar-sided Prius (Mr. Spielberg, that one's on the house), let's mechanize something, not just squint hard and wish. Let's get ambitious again. Let's shoot sparks. Let's burn rubber. Heck, maybe just once, for old time's sake, let's go back and father ourselves.
Email scott_brown@wired.com.
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