![]() ![]() Stephenson is the author of some of SF’s modern classics, from Snow Crash to Anathem and Seveneves. ![]() ![]() Which brings us to The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O, a collaboration by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. So I propose the following rule of thumb: stories that involve going into the future will tend to be more tragic, running as they do along the vector of our own mortality whereas stories that involve going into the past will tend to be more comic, powered by the levity and liberation we feel as we put distance between ourselves and our own deaths. Wells is wiser than Who in this regard: no matter what technological marvels we deploy, we cannot escape death. The original time travel tale, HG Wells’s The Time Machine, takes a gloriously gloomy turn as its hero travels to the far future, where the monstrous crab-like descendants of humanity occupy the terminal beach beneath a dying sun. The most obvious current example is Doctor Who, with a hero who evades death by the magic of “regeneration”. It follows from this that stories about overcoming time tend towards the comic, because at root they are fantasies of escape from mortality. A s the vector of time is deathward, time as such is tragic, at least for mortal beings like you and me. ![]()
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