Sunday, August 31, 2014

Outlander and Time Travel

I saw a preview for the new "Outlander" TV series ahead of "Guardians of the Galaxy" at my local theater, and my initial impression was that it was an interesting idea: having someone from the past travel back in time further into the past.

Upon thinking about it for another moment, though, I realized that's how most time-travel-to-the-past stories are, and how all of them become that in time. I love "Back to the Future," and even though I was scarcely two years old in 1985, I still think of it as a kid from "the present" going back to the past, when we're now nearly as far removed from 1985 as 1985 was from 1955. One of my favorite TV series of all time is "Quantum Leap," and while I still think of Sam's home time as the future, 1995 is twenty years behind us.

It's an interesting wrinkle to the time travel motif, that such stories require the reader to do so much time traveling of their own.