The Batlord

Lol if TH ends up having to watch Sword Art Online for this journal I will be most pleased.

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Trollheart

Timeline: 1200 - 1500

During the age of chivalry, wherein knights served kings and the idea of fair play, rules and respect for one’s opponent in battle, as well as a sense of (among the knights at least) a duty of care for the common folk prevailed, romance and chivalric literature became very popular. Tales of knights-errant - probably sparked by the tales of the search for the Holy Grail - abounded, and also gave birth to the idea of a quest, which would and has become such a central theme in the larger part of fantasy literature. Quests would often be set to test a knight or other adventurer’s mettle, to allow him to prove something, to himself or others, or to help a patron recover or regain something that was important to them, perhaps to the kingdom. Quests were of course never easy, fraught with danger, sometimes confusing directions given, and always enemies waiting to thwart the efforts of he who quested.

Drawing on both mythology and fairy tales as well as real history, and since many, indeed most of the earliest ones were written in verse, this provided minstrels and balladeers with material for their songs, and also allowed the stories to be disseminated (through the minstrel’s art and via his wandering nature) to more than would have been able to read them, given that there was a large percentage of the common folk who could not read at all. These stories inevitably contained a moral, often to do with religion or love, or both, and reinforced the ideas of loyalty, bravery, steadfastness and dedication to one’s duty, particularly his quest. Invariably, the hero’s quest was successful, or if not, its failure served as a sort of epiphany to show him that what was more important than the object he sought was his own development and personal improvement. The quest might reveal some answer about life, or the quester, or his world, or God.

Romance tales were generally at this time broken up into three distinct forms or cycles, these being the Matter of Rome (Italian stories centring on Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar), the Matter of France (regarding Charlemagne) and the Matter of Britain (which mostly featured, as already mentioned, King Arthur and his knights). There were of course stories which fell outside of this format, as there are in almost every form of literature, but most of these chivalric romances seem to have served mostly as a sort of ongoing propaganda tool for the various kings about whom they were written, or in whose reign at any rate they were set. They would reinforce the king’s bravery, wisdom and cunning through the quests handed out, who they were given to and how they were rewarded when accomplished.

They also, of course, encouraged young boys reading them (or to whom they were read) to emulate the great knights and squires in the tales, thereby providing a free advertisement for the notions and practice of chivalry, and giving young boys a grounding in how they were expected to behave when grown. Almost a kind of fantasy training manual, in one way, I suppose you could say. At the same time, they showed the girls how to behave, what was expected of them and what they could look forward to when they grew up. Even if hardly any of them ever got carried away by a prince on a white charger, or rescued from a deep sleep by a handsome knight, the tales carried codes of conduct and instructions as to how the young were supposed to perceive the world, and how they should behave in it once they had attained what was accepted as adulthood. Naturally, none of this included any explicit knowledge of sex or even explored romance any deeper than the surface, but then, these were stories, after all, and their principle aim was to entertain.

Nevertheless, lessons were taught, and many of a moral nature, through these romances. One of the most important was the idea of monogamy, chastity until marrying age and respect for one’s elders, all pretty much enshrined in the ideas of chivalry anyway. Every knight, every princess, human or otherwise (as fairies and elves and goblins and other creatures began to slowly creep into the romances, blending in folklore to the story to make it more attractive and fantastical), every king and queen was expected to conduct themselves according to these tenets, which is probably why Lancelot’s pursuit of Guinevere is so shocking, or was, at the time. Not only did the bravest knight in Arthur’s court go after the King’s wife, but he, Lancelot, was also Arthur’s friend. So there’s a quadruple betrayal here: knight to king (no I’m not describing a chess move!) and friend to friend, and then from Guinevere’s side queen to king and wife to husband. Betrayed every way, that kind of treachery can bring down a kingdom.

And so it did, almost. Arthur’s being mystically and inextricably linked with the land meant that when things went badly for him, his realm reflected this, suffering as he did; crops would not grow, weather turned bad, the entire mood of Britain soured. Only through the recovery of Christ’s cup from the Last Supper could the king, and the land, be healed. And thus began the Quest for the Holy Grail, which kickstarted the imagination of many a fantasy writer, and while it wasn’t the very first quest, it did form the template for almost all of what came afterwards. In the chivalric romances, love was pure, unsullied and from God. It was not seen as a base, bestial thing but as an idealised, well, romantic sort of power that attracted men and women together, but nothing was mentioned of what happened after the knight won the lady, save perhaps a footnote about their offspring, the younger reader or listener left to work out for themselves how that came about!

Timeline: 1500 - 1600

As a time of rebirth and enlightenment across Europe, the Renaissance was an era in which fantasy literature began to flower. The first proper recorded work of fantasy to collect and transcribe fairy and folk tales was created, perhaps not surprisingly since the revolution in learning, art and literature began there, by an Italian, one Giambattista Basile, in his Pentamorone, whose Italian title translates to Tale of Tales and is rendered as, wait for it, lo cunto de li cunti! Titter, titter, chortle, chortle, dirty laughter. All right, got that out of our systems now, have we? Let’s move on.

This work would in fact form the basis of later translations and retellings of fairy tales, notably by two brothers who were both called Grimm, who heaped praise upon Basile for his work. The Pentamorone sort of reflects in style the far earlier 1001 Nights (or Arabian Nights, as it has become more popularly known) in that the basis is that someone has to tell stories to someone else in the narrative, and these become the fairy tales, of which many are known today.

Although a lot of his material were historical epics such as Richard III and Henry V, Julius Caesar and King Lear, Shakespeare brought a lot of fantasy into his own writings, especially the comic ones such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream but also more serious fare such as Hamlet and MacBeth, with ghosts in the former and witches in the latter, and audiences loved to see - and some more literate ones read about - such fantastic creatures and beings, leading to an interest in things that were not rooted in the real world, and a resurgence in the popularity of fairy tales and legends.

Timeline: 1600 - 1800

With the dawn of the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, when logic and hard-nosed reality ruled, such ideas were frowned upon as suitable only for children, and the Romantic Era blossomed as a direct reaction to the cold, scientific ideas of the seventeenth century. Having its beginnings in the final decades of the eighteenth century and carrying on, and gaining support in the nineteenth, the Romantic Era produced such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, James McPherson, Goethe and Walter Scott, and while the Brothers Grimm, as already mentioned, began collating and writing their fairy stories around this time, others such as Elias Lönnrot set about compiling the folk tales of their own country, in his case Finland and Karelia, an epic cycle entitled Kalevala, much of the incentive for such being his desire to preserve the mythology of his homeland. These, then, provided much fodder for later fantasy works.


Two important authors in this time were Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and Madame D’Aulnoy (1650-1705), the latter of whom actually coined the term “fairy tales” for her work. Perhaps there’s a case for considering these two, along with the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, as the progenitors or grandparents of the fairy tale in fantasy literature. Perrault rewrote and published such standards we know today as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Puss-in-Boots, and in the process created a whole new fantasy literature genre, fairy tales. Madame D’Aulnoy, who among other things wrote court memoirs and histories, seems to have concentrated on the more anthropomorphic aspect of fairy tales, perhaps inadvertently presaging the advent of cartoon animals over three hundred years later. Her tales were a lot more adult in nature, and definitely not for children. I’m not one hundred percent sure whether these were tales she transcribed, like Basile and later the Brothers Grimm, or if she made them up herself (I think it might be the latter) but at any rate, she worked on her material almost a century and a half before the Grimms were born.

Although many “serious” writers frowned on the whole idea of fairy tales and fantasy works, considering them only for children, and even then vulgar and common, figures like Voltaire himself embarked on writing fantasy stories, such as The Princess of Babylon and The White Bull. Nevertheless, in general as you would probably expect, the Age of Enlightenment was not good for the fantasy/fairy story genre, to say nothing of various Catholic Inquisitions who would have frowned on such material, calling it pagan, ungodly, blasphemous and heretical. So it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that fantasy began to fight back, in what has become known to history as the Age of Romance, or Romanticism. This in turn gave rise to a format of literature not only important to fantasy, but to horror too: the gothic novel or story.

Gothic literature can really be described in one word: dark. Everything about gothic writing hinges on the more macabre, scary and supernatural elements of storytelling, with mores that we are now very familiar with and can identify as belonging to this genre, such as haunted castles, ghosts, mysterious recluses, people living in attics and garrets, curses, bequests, funerals, wild weather, family secrets and romance, often doomed or cursed. The first novel accepted as being written in the Gothic style, the one that kicked the whole thing off, is Horatio Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, in 1764. Some of the more well-known ones of course are Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, along with the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Gothic literature really took hold in the Victorian era, giving rise to the “penny dreadful” stories that thrilled the lower classes, who could identify with much of what was written in them, and shocked the upper classes (though in truth, many a rich, well-bred lady probably hid a penny dreadful under her satin coverlet) who despised their vulgarity.

Timeline: 1800 - 1900

And with the dawn of Victoria’s long reign fantasy was back in vogue again, chiefly through the move away from the too-rigid reasoning of the last century and on the back of the rise of the penny dreadful and Gothic literature in general. This period would see the publication of some of what are now accepted as the world’s greatest authors, such as Shelley, Lewis Carroll, Dickens and William Morris. Perhaps it had to do with the “common” people becoming more literate and aware of their world than they might have been in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but more people were reading, and most of them didn’t want stuffy tracts about politics or history or battles or philosophy: they wanted to be entertained.

And fantasy was the great entertainer. You really didn’t have to “know” anything - that is, be educated about the subject, unlike in other types of literature, where you might be lost if you didn’t have at least a working knowledge and grasp of the subject - because everything was either explained or didn’t need to be. If a fairy flew, a fairy flew and there was no cause for explanation. If a castle floated in the clouds or resided at the bottom of the ocean, that was all accepted. Fantasy - and, to another extent, horror - all required and require a willing suspension of disbelief. We know these things can’t happen, but we don’t care. It’s a story, so it doesn’t have to be true.

Fantasy really gathered steam in the nineteenth century, classic works such as Alice in Wonderland, The Fall of the House of Usher and Frankenstein ensuring that it would never again have to retreat to the shadows (some of what was written was, technically, at home in the shadows, but you know what I mean) and was here to stay. People like H. Rider Haggard, George MacDonald and even Oscar Wilde did a lot to advance the art, while later writers such as H.P Lovecraft and Hans Christian Anderson would pull the genre in two diametrically opposed directions. Some authors, such as CS Lewis and Lewis Carroll, would concentrate on writing for, and about, children, while Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Shelley definitely had a more adult audience in mind.

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Trollheart

Timeline of Science-Fiction Literature

Timeline: 1100 BC - 1200 AD (approx)

Where fantasy gives birth, as it were, or diverges or splits into science-fiction is hard to definitively ascertain. I tend to be on the side of those who say that to look to The Epic of Gilgamesh (as noted above in the timeline of Fantasy Literature) is an error, as this is purely fantasy storytelling and does not use any recognisable type of science for its basis. The Indians and the Greeks, both early progenitors of fantasy, seem a safer bet. In the epic story Ramayana, half of the Hinsu Itihasa, written between the fourth and fifth centuries BC, there are accounts of craft that can fly into space or under water, and weapons that can destroy whole cities, while mechanical flying birds, as well as space craft, figure in the Rigveda, written around 1100 BC. Time travel as well as space travel is referenced in the Mahabharata, from the eighth to ninth century BC, where a king travels to meet the Creator deity, in Heaven. When he returns to Earth much time has passed. This could, then, be taken as the very first time travel story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramayana
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata

The Greeks contributing to early science-fiction also is no surprise: they were, generally, men of learning and knowledge, who prized education and the advancement of civilisation above all things, and many were scientists, if ancient ones with little real grasp of proper physics, chemistry or biology. Aristophanes’s play “The Birds” (414 BC) has a huge city constructed in the clouds, something that would be echoed in later works of science-fiction, including Cloud City in Star Wars and the city in the Star Trek episode “The Cloud Minders”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(play)

Then there’s Lucian of Samasota, whose play “A True Story” has everything from encounters with aliens to planetary warfare, including some very inventive depictions of space spiders who spin a web between the moon and the Morning Star.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Story

The Japanese Nihongi (720) contains the story of a fisherman called Urashima Taro, who travels to the future, while a work of two hundred years later, “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter” (10th century) has a Princess of the Moon fleeing an intergalactic war and taking refuge on Earth. Very interestingly, one of the illustrations seems to look very like the flying saucers of fifties and sixties pulp sf, and which were said to have been spotted over the USA during that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon_Shoki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ta..._Bamboo_Cutter

One Thousand and One Nights

As related in the timeline of Fantasy Literature, this text is responsible for some of our most enduring and loved heroes, including Sinbad and Aladdin, but there are apparently a lot of elements of science-fiction in it, too. Given that there are, in some texts, actually one thousand and one stories, perhaps that’s not too surprising. Robots, brass horsemen, underwater cities, ancient technologies, stellar journeys and flying mechanical horses all figure in some of the stories, making this, if taken as one work, surely then the first true example of science-fantasy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Th...ction_elements

There is also the “Theologicus Autodidactus”, whose final chapters deal with such concepts as futurology, resurrection and the afterlife, and the apocalypse. Most of these are explained by the author in scientific terms, using theories (at the time) relating to metabolism and pulmonary circulation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theologus_Autodidactus

News to me, I must admit, but early Chivalric literature of the Middle Ages tended to, if not be stuffed with, then certainly to contain an abundance of robots and automata, often guarding tombs and important places. Even Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales has a robotic horse given to one of the pilgrims as a gift. This horse can travel anywhere in the world at great speed and is made of brass. He also mentions a scrying device and a sword which can heal and deal extreme wounds, neither of which are purported to be magical but rather explained by science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales

In John Gower’s fictional stories concerning Alexander the Great, the legendary general constructs both a flying machine powered by griffins and an underwater sphere, perhaps a distant ancestor of the diving bell or bathosphere. In the Historica Destrucionis Troiae the body of the Trojan prince Hector is preserved in a state of basic suspended animation via tubes in his body filled with a substance called balsam.

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Trollheart

Worlds Apart: New Planets to Explore

While there’s plenty of SF I haven’t read or seen, one thing that recurs as a major theme in the genre is other worlds. Even the earliest versions of SF men travelling to other planets, and when the genre really gets going in the nineteenth century or so, there’s really only one planet that’s in the frame. It’s our nearest neighbour (no, the Moon is not a planet, dummy!) and has probably seen the most settings of stories upon its surface than just about any other planet, real or imaginary.

It’s hardly surprising that, back in the late 1800s, when emerging science-fiction writers wanted a different planet than Earth for their work they looked to Mars. Not only has it a cool name, it’s also known as the red planet - due to its surface being, well, red dust - and is, in the main, quite similar to Earth, at least for narrative purposes. It’s around the same size, is nearest and really, men from Mars rolls off the tongue so much better than men from Venus. Saturn looks great, of course, with all its rings, but since this was, at that time, pretty much out of the range of the telescopes available - nothing much would be known about the largest planet in our solar system until we developed the technology to send probes there - any SF writer worth his or her salt would shy from setting a story there, since this is Science-Fiction, after all, not Fantasy, and there needed to be some at least partway believable science involved.

Even the dumbest of readers would understand that, say, Mercury was too close to the sun and therefore too hot to be able to sustain any kind of life, while Pluto (at the time the furthest planet discovered, before it was heartlessly demoted in the twentieth century) was of course way too cold. Venus we didn’t know a lot about, but Mars! Lowell had already observed what he took to be canals on the red planet (which turned out of course to be nothing of the sort) and so the germ of the idea was planted in the fertile minds of SF writers: if there were, or had been, canals on Mars then surely there was, now or at some time, water? And if there was water there could be life.

So Mars became the popular destination for the science-fiction writer’s imagination to travel to, and the harbinger of all that was scary and threatening from space. Although his story post-dates Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon by thirty-odd years, and although there are a handful of stories set on or about Mars, it’s Herbert George Wells’s famous The War of the Worlds which we remember and which is regarded as the first true alien invasion story, and the first to be set on Mars. Technically, of course, it’s not. Set on Mars, that is. The aliens come from Mars, and apart from seeing through a powerful telescope the cylinders which carry the Martians to Earth, we don’t see the red planet, and have only Wells’s - through his narrator - thoughts and theories as to what it is like there.

But with the arrival of the Martians, the idea that Mars is or could be a staging post for invasion is set up, and others would later set their books and stories there. Notably the creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, set an entire series of novels there, as intrepid Civil war captain John Carter is inexplicably - and with the most stupid transition I have ever read in my life, and I’ve watched Family Guy! - transported to Mars, which he learns is called Barsoom by the inhabitants. He finds a whole civilisation there, and inevitably a war going on for control of the planet. Burroughs also set some of his stories on Venus, but more of that later. One of the very earliest SF books I read was his A Princess of Mars, and from the first I was hooked, reading all the others I could. I saw the movie John Carter of Mars recently, and have to admit I was not that impressed, nor do I remember much from the novels that was in the movie. That could of course be my poor memory, the fact that I was probably 12 or 13 when I read them, or the makers of the movie changing the story to fit their narrative. Nevertheless, I was disappointed.

Ray Bradbury used the planet for his own sagas The Martian Chronicles, while Kim Stanley Robinson took a more strictly scientific approach in his trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars, which follows the terraforming of the planet for human colonisation. Mars features in many movies, including of course fifties B-movies where it may just be mentioned as, or theorised as the origin of the alien attack that is plaguing mankind, but also in recent fare such as Red Planet, Total Recall, Mission to Mars and John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars. It’s the opening, dramatic and somewhat threatening theme that heralds Gustav Holst’s seminal suite The Planets, and “Mars, the Bringer of War” has gone on to be used in everything from War movies to ads for suppositories. Possibly. Suffice to say, it’s extremely unlikely, no matter your age or interest in classical music, that you’ve failed to hear that piece of music, even if you don’t know what it’s called.

Spoof films used Mars too. Mars Attacks! is a perhaps-not-that-funny take on pulp style movies of the fifties, Lobster Man from Mars is just, well, silly, while Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is touted, rightly, as “one of the worst films ever made.” As a colony of Earth fighting for its independence, Mars is used as the base for the feared and dreaded Psi Corps in the series Babylon 5. It’s referenced in music hits from Bowie to . By the 1940s Mars was the go-to place to set your alien invasion story, and among others, Robert A. Heinlein used it repeatedly, notably in The Green Hills of Earth (1947), Red Planet (1949) and Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), while Arthur C. Clarke set his 1951 novel The Sands of Mars there, as did Isaac Asimov a year later with The Martian Way (1952). Much of Philip K. Dick’s output centres on Mars, especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) which was of course made into the classic cult SF movie Blade Runner.

In fact, just about any SF author you can name has dipped his or her toe into the Martian landscape, or referenced it. Everyone from Larry Niven to Frederik Pohl and from Harry Turtledove to Michael Moorock and Lin Carter have paid homage to the red planet. Interest, which has never really flagged, was heightened in 2016 when underground ice was discovered on Mars, its volume capable of filling Lake Superior, and restarting the debate as to whether life could have existed on the planet. As preparations near completion for the Mission to Mars this coming year, it’s clear that, no matter what is discovered there, no matter what revelations Mars may have or not have to show us, the human fascination with our nearest planetary neighbour is unlikely to ever cease, nor is it expected that the imaginations of writers will ever tire of turning to its bleak, forbidding yet somehow irresistible presence for inspiration.

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Trollheart

Self-explanatory I hope. This will be a regular section in which I will look at the work and career of great (and perhaps not so great) authors in the field both of science fiction and fantasy. Maybe even horror.

John Wyndham (1903-1969)

Some of the first science-fiction I read - and some of the best - came from the pen and the mind of one John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, or John Wyndham, the name under which he usually (though not always) wrote. You’ll be familiar with two of his most famous works, 1951’s The Day of the Triffids, and 1957’s The Midwich Cuckoos, probably best known to the world as Village of the Damned. Born in Warwickshire in England’s West Midlands (the same county where another, little-known writer called Shakespeare first mewled his cries to the world) Wyndham was subjected to not only the traumatic and stigmatic separation of his parents in 1911, a time when such things just “did not happen” in strait-laced England, but also to his father’s then ultimately unsuccessful attempts to sue for the custody of his wife and family. Not quite sure what old Mr. Harris was thinking there, but he lost the case amid much embarrassment, necessitating his ex-wife’s move away from Birmingham with her children.

Having tried several paths to a career John settled on writing in 1927, and, presumably because it was the popular genre of the time, began writing detective stories, but he switched to science-fiction in 1931, his first story “Worlds to Barter” seeing publication under the name John B. Harris, soon changed to John Beynon Harris and then John Beynon (the Parkes part of his name was quickly jettisoned, possibly due to his animosity towards his father). At the end of the 1930s he met his future wife Grace, though as she worked as a teacher and the Marriage bar then in force would have meant that she would have had to give up her job, they did not marry until 1963.

When World War II began, Wyndham worked both as a cipher operator and in the Home Guard, and later took part in the Normandy Landings on D-Day. Much of what he saw during the war informed his later writing, which betrays a dark, bleak, despairing view of man and his future. His first novel after the war, published under the name he would use to the end of his life, John Wyndham, was his most successful and set him on a career path that led to him being later described as a “true English visionary”. The Day of the Triffids, published in 1951, concerns the arrival on Earth of alien plants, after almost all of the population has been blinded by weaponised dust dropped the night before their arrival. Like the Red Weed in Wells’s The War of the Worlds, the Triffids become the dominant plant form, and threaten to challenge even man’s place at the top of the tree. The novel was later filmed as a Hollywood movie and given a terrible pasted-on ending that completely ruins the dark, apocalyptic non-ending of the novel, while as mentioned earlier, The Midwich Cuckoos, published in 1953, was also turned into a movie and renamed Village of the Damned.

Wyndham somewhat set the bar for English science fiction writers, and is fondly remembered. Though In his life he wrote only seven novels, with two others published posthumously, he also wrote a lot of short stories, some of which were collected together in anthologies after his death. With Wyndham, however, it was definitely a case of quality over quantity. He died at the age of 65, having been married to the same woman all his life.

Novels
(Note: Although Wyndham did write crime fiction, I’m not interested in that and have therefore only included here his science fiction works. Anything published after his passing is indicated in bold).
As John Beynon:
The Secret People (1935)
Planet Plane/Stowaway to Mars (1936)

As John Wyndham
The Day of the Triffids (1951)
The Kraken Wakes (1953)
The Chrysalids (1955)
The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
The Outward Urge (1959)
Trouble with Lichen (1960)
Chocky (1968)
Web (1979)
Plan for Chaos (2009)

Short Story Collections
Jizzle (1954) (Is it hilarious that I had to get round the expletive block for that one?)
The Seeds of Time (1956)
Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter (1956)
Consider Her Ways and Others (1961)
The Infinite Moment (1961)
Sleepers of Mars (1973)
The Best of John Wyndham (1973)
Wanderers of Time (1973)
Exiles on Asperus (1979)
No Place Like Earth (2003)

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Trollheart

Far Beyond These Castle Walls: The Role of the Castle in Fantasy

Look at any fantasy-inspired poster or drawing, or the cover of any fantasy book - especially those in the sword-and-sorcery sub-genre - and the chances are you’ll see a castle, either in the background or right up front. It might be a knight rushing across a bridge on his horse to rescue a princess, or a unicorn prancing on the battlements, or something darker perhaps: a dark, dismal edifice high on a mountain, wreathed in black thunderclouds and eldritch fingers of lightning dancing around its turrets, while a shadowy figure with sharp, bright eyes peers out of the topmost window, watching the world below with malevolent intent.

From the earliest days of fantasy, from fairy tales on, castles, strongholds, fortresses and palaces have been the setting for drama, intrigue, power and magic. This isn’t at all surprising when you consider that many of the heroes of fantasy were, and still are to some degree, noblemen and women, knights or others of high breeding, and that kings, queens, princes and princesses figure highly in fairy tales and stories of fantastic adventure. Castles were always the symbol of a king’s power, or a knight’s status, and usually dominated the landscape, towering over the town or village or even city in or near which they were built, whether protectively or menacingly. A castle - especially a royal one - would be the focus of any settlement, and a concrete statement of where the power lay.

The great and the good lived in castles - or in some cases, the evil, but always the powerful. Ordinary folk were generally not invited, unless summoned there or allowed deliver goods or if they worked perhaps as pages or handmaidens. The castle was its own self-supporting ecosystem, drawing from the village or town only when supplies ran low, and rarely if ever interacting with the inhabitants of that town or village. It was where the balls were, where the jousts were held, where the celebrations and weddings and funerals and parties took place, and where, in times of war, strategy was plotted and troops billeted. It was, in short, the centre of the region.

Castles could be marvellous places. In fairy tales like Cinderella they were the height of society and the ambition to which everyone aspired, from the local lads working as pages or kitchen boys hoping to be chosen as some knight’s squire to the kitchen girls and scullery maids waiting to catch the eye of the handsome prince, and so change their lives forever. When foreign dignitaries visited the area, it was at the castle or palace that they were hosted, and in times of plague and famine it was often the safest place to be. But castles could also be nasty, dark, evil places; crumbling ruins, haunted by spectres or home to a solitary wizard who was known to be very unwelcoming to visitors! They could be the last place you wanted to go, or be taken, from where often nobody ever returned, and they could also be the stronghold of a tyrant who held sway over his people by fear and brutality.

Whichever way you look at it, whichever role the castle fulfilled in the story, they were almost always important, often the centrepiece of a story; the starting or ending point for a quest, the site of fabulous riches or powerful spells to be plundered, or the staging post for a war with the realm’s neighbours. They could be the sites of great joy, such as in The Princess and the Pea, where a woman’s royal heritage is established - and great despair, as in Sleeping Beauty, when the wicked queen, snubbed at the birth feast of the princess, curses her to sleep for a hundred years. Feckin’ women, huh?

If not the centrepiece they would certainly figure somewhere in the background, like the posters spoken of in the intro, if only as a mention of “the king’s great palace” or “the castle where we will find the wizard.” Often, the dark, unplumbed depths of the castle - its cells, dungeons and cellars - would be the setting for adventure, and this in its turn would give way to a huge interest in these things through classic role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, where players take on the persona of fantasy or medieval people and creatures, and travel through a castle, haunted wood, blasted plain or other dangerous location in search of treasures, battling monsters along the way. These pencil-and-paper games of course developed into computer games, the genesis of the MMORPG, Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Game, which became so popular with titles like Warcraft, Everquest and of course the networked version of Dungeons and Dragons itself.

Castles could be whole worlds unto themselves, so large and cavernous that one could enter one at the beginning of a story, or novel even, and not find a way out, if at all, till the end. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is set entirely within the walls of the eponymous castle, a sprawling, decrepit edifice that has seen better days, while for Jonathan Harker at least, most of the first part of Dracula takes place within the walls of the count’s lair. Other authors set their stories in or around castles - John Morressey’s Castle Perilous series revolves around, again, the title building, much fighting takes place in and around various castles in The Lord of the Rings, particularly The Two Towers, and of course there are castle aplenty in A Song of Ice and Fire, or Game of Thrones to you.

Why are castles so important to fantasy? I think because they are, or can be, as I noted earlier, all but self-contained worlds, often even cut off from the outside land, functioning as a separate entity and needing no reference to the realm beyond. They can host whole adventures, novels, films or even series, and the scope for what can happen in a castle is virtually limitless. Castles play a large part in Gothic fiction too, and on into horror; mostly ruined, crumbling or ill-maintained ones, which give off an air of despair and slow death, often reflecting the mind and soul of the one or ones who live there. A castle can be, and has been, a shining beacon in the distance or the epitome of fear and horror, a crouching spider waiting at the end of the road to take your life, and maybe more.

They’re a symbol of power, prestige and status. A region with a castle - at least, a well-maintained and occupied one - lets you know that there is law in this land, that there is someone who is watching, protecting (or in some cases, oppressing) the subjects of the realm, and from where assistance can be called if needed. They can be a place to find a wife or a husband, fame and glory and power, riches or magic or just a steady job peeling spuds in the royal kitchens. Castles can be a shelter from the storm when war breaks out over the land, or the leeching, filching, grasping hand that demands more and more for the war effort, raising taxes and punishing those who protest. Castles can also be, though perhaps at heart good places, places of fear when gates or battlements are decorated with the heads of traitors or criminals or enemies - a fate we saw befall Ned Stark in Game of Thrones, and a situation demonstrated with gleeful malevolence by Prince, then King Joffrey to Sansa Stark.

Castles have been known to fly, to go to or provide access to other worlds, other dimensions, to house horrors and dreaded fears as well as riches untold and beauty unthought of. They are frequently the last stand of the hero and his companions, the flag raised in defiance over the battlements as the dragons swoop down, and the site of the chance meeting of star-crossed lovers or long-estranged siblings. They have a power all of their own, their personal magic, and the attraction to castles in fantasy will go on for as long as people dream of all the things they could have, or all the things they fear, symbolised by that shining, or shadowy building perched just on the horizon.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

No Time Like the Present. Or Past. Or Future.

One theme that is prevalent throughout science fiction is the ability to travel through time. Whether it’s backwards to the past or forwards to the future, whether it’s by use of some machine or a particular location, or some other method, the idea of time travelling appeals to us because it allows us to see how the past was (and maybe change it) or how the future will be, how things were or how they might turn out to be. Inevitably, there’s some price for going where we’re not supposed to go, but that hasn’t stopped writers writing about it.

The paradox is simple, and yet complex: if you travel into the past and change something does it then change the future (your present) and if so, is it for the good? Often the answer to the former is yes, and usually to the latter, no. The basic accepted advice is not to change, or try to change, anything in the past, because you don’t know how that might affect the future. Even something that surely should be seen as improving the future - killing Hitler before he rises to power, stopping 9/11 etc - usually, almost invariably ends up making things worse. This is because, in theory, the future cannot be changed, and if the past is, then the future realigns itself along the basis of the “new” past to create a “new” future where the event you changed, which was so pivotal, no longer matters, or even exists. So Hitler may be dead, but someone else may threaten the world and start the Second World War. Or a worse disaster might befall humanity.

Of course, changing your own future is inadvisable, as you may in fact cease to exist, as seen in the movie Back to the Future, but then the inevitable paradox comes into play: if you went back to the past to, say, kill your father, and you did, then you could not have been born, and you (in the future, your present) would not have existed to go back to the past in the first place. Or, as Zoidberg puts it in Futurama, “that useless time machine! If only it worked, then you could go back to the past and prevent yourself working on it!” Indeed.

Another theory is that (assuming you could go back into the past) any change made in the past creates an alternate timeline, which exists in tandem with your own, but on returning to the present you are shunted into this new timeline, so that both outcomes - the original, which would have taken place had you not gone into the past, and the new one, which is as a result of your meddling - unfold; you haven’t changed the future, just added a timeline in which you now live. This is demonstrated with surprising insight on the time-travel spoof TV show Future Man, where each time he and his friends think they've changed the future, all they've done is created yet another timeline, and there are now hundreds of them!

We’ve already spoken of the Indian text The Mahabharata, written some time between the 8th and 9th centuries BC, and the Japanese Urashima Taro, both of which feature time travel, but proper stories involving the concept seem to have first appeared around the middle of the eighteenth century, the first written by (yay!) an Irishman. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, written by John Madden in 1733, is set in the years 1997 and 1998, and warns of the rise to power and influence of the Jesuits and the Catholics (Madden was an Anglican). Although the book is a series of letters from the future, no attempt is made to describe how this came to pass, and the book was largely forgotten, with the author himself destroying most of the copies soon after publication.

The only other work of the eighteenth century seems to be Jonathan Wessel’s Anno 7603, where for some reason a fairy sends the characters to the year, you guessed it, 7603. Here, gender roles are reversed and only women are allowed fight in the military. The first proper work, then, is Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, the story of the man who goes to sleep and, Sleeping Beautylike, wakes up twenty years later (hmm. Always thought it was 100 years. Oh well) to find the world around him has changed. I guess technically speaking that’s not really time travel, just being really lazy and sleeping through so many alarms, but there you go.

The idea of time travel brings with it many pitfalls and decisions, particularly if you go forward. Even if you don’t use your jaunt into the past to change things in your present, ie the past, should you carry knowledge from there to your own time? After all, if you could go forward to next week and read the lottery numbers, wouldn’t you come back and do the lottery? Make yourself rich? That’s what happens of course in Back to the Future II, sort of. Biff brings a sports almanac back from 1986 which allows his past self to “bet” on sporting events, already knowing their outcome, and so wager on the most outlandish and unlikely results, making himself into a millionaire.

It’s also a case of priorities. How do you use that knowledge you’ve acquired in the future? I always remember a story I read - think it was in 2000 AD - where this guy goes into the future, or finds himself in the future, can’t recall which - and reads the morning newspaper, turning to the back page to see what the sports results are, in order to be able to bet on the teams that win when he gets back to his own time. Unfortunately for him, he’s so engrossed in the articles that he walks out onto the road and is killed by a car. In the final frame, we see the FRONT headline of the paper he was reading, which runs the shocking story of the man who just walked out into traffic reading a paper and was killed. Priorities, see?

But who wouldn’t want to change their future? How can we resist such a pull? Few can, and for this reason some authors invented time police (with various names) who patrol the time lanes, checking on world events and going to “trouble spots” to undo the damage done by careless time travellers. In some - most - of the times these people come from it’s a crime to alter time, though you could argue it does at least keep these guys in a job. No? Have it your way, then.

The nineteenth century saw a glut of time-travel fiction, culminating of course in the most famous of them all, Wells’s 1858 classic The Time Machine. Interestingly, in his novel the protagonist does not interfere with time - much - and is really just there as an observer. Even when he has to interfere, he realises he will be stuck in the far future forever. In at least the original movie of the novel, the time machine looks something like a cross between a wheelchair and one of those air boats that they use in the Florida swamps! As time (sorry) went on, of course, the design of time machines became more streamlined and… what? It didn’t? A police telephone call box, you say? Well I never!

Truth to tell, time machines have never looked what you might call sexy. Possibly because they don’t need to: unlike spaceships they don’t need to carry a crew or orbit a sun or do all the other things spaceships do, and possibly because if you land a time machine it’s probably best that it looks as unobtrusive as you can make it. The original TARDIS in Doctor Who was supposed to have cloaking technology, which allowed it to blend in with its surroundings, but it got stuck as a police box and was never able to change back. Apparently. So now it’s rather conspicuous if it lands on an alien planet, under the sea or in on a space station. Oh, well.

As for time travel writing in the 19th century, well there’s another famous one which you may have heard of, and though it doesn’t utilise any kind of time machine, in fact uses more spiritual means, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol does take Ebenezer Scrooge to his past and to his future, though in his case changing his present, not his past, is what supposedly changes his dark future, which kind of turns the whole principle of non-interference on its head, but then Dickens, a wonderful writer though he was, was no science fiction author, and probably didn’t care too much about grandfather paradoxes or the Cassandra principle.

Mention however must be made of Edward Page Mitchell’s 1881 short story for boys, The Clock that Went Backwards, in which a clock is used as a time machine, and therefore makes this story the first recorded instance of time being navigated by the use of a device, and indeed, a device used for telling the time. Of course, only seven years later Wells would write The Chronic Argonauts (sounds like a story about a particularly inept crew of sailors!) which would also use a time machine, before unleashing his masterpiece on the world in a further seven. Before him Samuel Clemens would pen A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, under the name, of course, of Mark Twain, though the method of transportation of the main character into the past is left unexplained, and what we might call (and I will) time travel interference literature more or less seems to have begun with L. Sprague de Camp’s 1939 story Lest Darkness Fall, in which the protagonist, an archaeologist, is transported back to the time of the Roman Empire and tries to prevent its fall.

After this, other authors began to explore the idea of changing the future/present by altering the past, notably Ray Bradbury in A Sound of Thunder (1952), Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953) Robert A. Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer (1957) and Alfred Bester’s The Man Who Murdered Mohammed (1958) while other writers concentrated on keeping the past the past, with Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol series (1955-1995), Harry Harrison’s A Rebel in Time (1980), Simon Hawke’s Time Wars series (1984-1991) and some writers, it would appear, ignore the whole idea of changing time and just send their characters on trips to the past or future.

Of course, as science fiction became popular on the new medium of television it was inevitable that time-travel scenarios would enter into some of the programs geared towards exploring the concept, such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, but the first series to actually focus on it as its main or only premise was an American show which debuted in 1951 called Captain Z-ro, which followed the exploits of the eponymous scientist and his intrepid assistant Jet, the latter of which was sent each week back through time to correct some anomaly that would prevent our timeline from unfolding as it should. It ran for five years, though conveniently ignored the mechanics of time travel or the paradoxes involved.

The children’s animation show Rocky and Bulwinkle featured a recurring segment called Peabody’s Improbable History which basically took the piss out of history for kids; this ran for a year. The longest-running not only science fiction show but, I believe I am correct in saying, longest ever television show, is also the most famous time travel show. On November 23 1963, one day after the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, William Hartnell took the police box which would be forever after known as the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) for its maiden voyage, and the show has continued - with a hiatus of almost twenty years - since then, and is still going, even more popular now than it was back then. Allowing for the break from 1989, that still means the show has run concurrently for a total of, to date, forty years. I don’t believe any show of any type has survived that long. I could be wrong. But certainly no science fiction show, and I doubt any drama. Maybe soaps. Maybe? Yeah I checked: Coronation Street beats it. Boo. Still a massive legacy though.

Doctor Who follows the exploits and adventures of The Doctor, who has, to date, been played by a total of thirteen different actors, through a story device used whereby the Doctor can regenerate after a certain time, making him semi-immortal. He’s not human; he’s an alien, a Timelord from the planet of Gallifrey, and on the run to boot: a rebel, a maverick who refused to accept the future (hah!) mapped out for him, stole a TARDIS and off he went. Doctor Who tends to use, mostly, the idea that the past should not be messed with, though quite often arriving in the past (or the future) it’s clear that something is not right, not as it should be, and then he has to intervene to return things to the way they should have been. As well as being able to travel in time (the name of his time machine tells the tale) the Doctor can also travel in space, and this provides respite from the constant worry of changing the future, as often his adventures take place on distant planets in far-off galaxies rather than a different time.

Initially, Doctor Who was seen more or less as any time travel show before it, and a few after it, were: a glorified history lesson, but soon enough it became more of an adventure show, with the time travel aspect almost superfluous, and when reimagined in the twenty-first century became something of an amalgam of soap opera, sci-fi show and moral soapbox, tackling real-world issues in a way most sci-fi shows were now expected to. No longer a kids’ show, the new Doctor Who targeted an adult audience, with deeper, darker storylines and even the deaths of characters, including some of the Doctor’s famous (and almost always female) companions. A tradition for many years since its rebirth was the annual Christmas Doctor Who, an episode written exclusively for the festive season, and shown on Christmas Day.

Many shows from the sixties would focus merely on the educational value of time travel. The Time Tunnel, as I recall, never had its characters interfere, though they participated in past events. I believe this show only ever had its protagonists go backwards in time, never forwards. When Voyagers! hit in 1982 it was, I think, the first time travel series in which the past was deliberately altered by its characters - always to “restore the timeline” of course, and this idea continued in 1989 when another famous and popular series, Quantum Leap made its appearance. In this one, Dr. Sam Beckett was able to “leap” into the bodies/consciousnesses of people living in whatever time he arrived in, then solve the “glitch in time”, precipitating his expulsion from that body and time into the next, in the hope that somehow he would eventually “leap” home. He never did.

Up until the 1950s, the movies that dealt with time travel all tended to focus on trips to the past. This isn’t that surprising: it’s easier (and probably cheaper) to recreate what was than to speculate on what might be, and so you have about three versions of Twain’s story, comedy-musical romps through the past and a few temporal paradoxes, such as in 1933’s Turn Back the Clock, 1944’s Fiddlers Three and the film-noir Repeat Performance from 1947. 1956 saw the release of the somewhat troubled B-movie World Without End, which ran into legal problems with the estate of H.G. Wells claiming it ripped off his novel The Time Machine. Oddly enough, starring in a bit role in the movie was one Rod Taylor, who would only four years later star in a dramatisation of the Wells classic. It does, however, represent the first time that a movie about time travel chooses to show the future rather than the past.

Four years later, a similar movie, with a plot even closer to that of The Time Machine it seems to me - two races of people in the future, one living underground (though in this case it’s the humans who live beneath the earth while the mutants rule the surface but still…) - was released, but for whatever reason it seems Beyond the Time Barrier didn’t receive the same attention that our poor friend World Without End did, perhaps because the film adaptation of that story starring Rod Taylor had already been released two months earlier, and was of course much more successful.

The Time Machine movie follows the basic plot of the novel, but in typical Hollywood style adds in a romantic slant that was not in the book, and thereby softens the overall effect. The movie would however be praised for its pioneering use of camera effects and tricks to show the passage of time as the machine moves forwards in time (never backwards). This movie established firmly the idea of time travel, and it’s notable that three years before the film hit the big screen, adventures were already being had in time on the small screen by Captain Z-Ro and, indeed, Peabody and Sherman, and would soon explode into British living rooms as Doctor Who made its debut, changing the face of TV almost as much as Star Trek would a few years later.

1964’s The Time Travelers was in fact the inspiration behind the TV series The Time Tunnel, which premiered two years later, while the success of Doctor Who had already resulted in two movies, Doctor Who and the Daleks in 1965 and Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 the following year, establishing the series as a box-office draw as well as a television sensation, though the series remained - and has mostly remained, even to very recently - a British and European phenomenon, largely unrecognised in the USA at all. 1968 - 1971 saw the emergence of the Planet of the Apes series, which went on to spawn a TV series (reversing the order in which Doctor Who had come into being) and Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five came to the screen in 1972.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

After this, it was full speed ahead, with movies like Somewhere in Time (1979) allowing both Jack the Ripper and H.G. Wells himself to travel to the present, Terry Gilliam’s hugely entertaining Time Bandits (1981) featuring a boy in the company of a crew of robber dwarfs capering across time, pursued by God, from whom they had stolen a precious map, and the inevitable transition of The Twilight Zone to movie screens in 1983, until finally, the eighties became the golden age of time travel, with movies like Terminator (1984) following a serious premise of the grandfather paradox and the Back to the Future series taking a much lighter-hearted look at the process. From then on, it’s a mixed bag - some good, some bad, some awful - with the likes of Bill and Ted looking back to the original ideas proposed by Captain Z-Ro but with a teenage fun twist, Star Trek movies and even fucking baseball getting in on the act, and this trend continued into the 1990s, with Godzilla, Frankenstein and Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness all paling and bowing before the time-travelling magnificence that was the sequel to James Cameron’s original Terminator movie, and which rewrote the rules on special effects.

There’s little argument that Terminator 2 occupies the rarefied heights of the very best in time-travel/action sci-fi movies, and made an even bigger star - even a legend - out of an Austrian bodybuilder, and with time travel now firmly in the spotlight (and let’s be honest, few of the audiences questioning or caring how it was done) the movies and TV series just rolled on. Some were satirical, such as Austin Powers: the Spy that Shagged Me, Groundhog Day and, um, Back to the 50s, starring (puke) S Club 7. Others were more serious and thought-provoking. Timecop gave the lead character a temporal and indeed moral dilemma to face, 12 Monkeys explored the Cassandra syndrome, while both Star Trek and Doctor Who were back at it as the millennium drew to a close.

90s TV saw a spin-off from the two successful Bill and Ted movies, the simpering comedy Goodnight Sweetheart, which transported its lead character back to the Second World War, Seven Days, which involved the NSA and which famously had to edit out its opening sequence in which an airliner crashes into the White House, and the universally panned and slated Crime Traveller, a poor copy of Doctor Who which was cancelled after one season.

The new millennium it seems, would concentrate on time travellers interfering with time to correct errors and mistakes that upset what we think of as our timeline. Series like Tru Calling, Do Over, Odyssey 5 and That Was Then were all concerned with either preventing catastrophe (in the case of Odyssey 5, the biggest of all: the destruction of the Earth) or changing events in history, though a Doctor Who spinoff did come to the rescue, flying the flag for temporal normality in the shape of Torchwood. 2006’s Life on Mars (and later spinoff Ashes to Ashes) had its principal character travel back through time - though it was later established that both were in fact dead - while in the short-lived Paradox, messages from an unknown source warn of events to take place which must be avoided if possible. An attempt was made in 2008 to turn the Terminator franchise into a series, but though it was very well made it ended up being cancelled after two seasons, right on a damn cliffhanger. Arrgh!

The next year saw the debut of FlashForward, an innovative show which handled the premise of the entire Earth blacking out for two minutes, and everyone is able to see some glimpse of their future. This, too, was cancelled before being resolved sadly, while the terrible Terra Nova, despite being run by movie legend Steven Spielberg, was also cancelled after one lacklustre season. It looked at the idea of families travelling back to the time of dinosaurs in an overly-populated future, in order to start again. Once Upon a Time brought characters from fairytales to our world via a time-travelling spell, while in Primeval it wasn’t cute fairies and goblins that came through, but strange monsters. Some of the better series in the latter years have been, in my opinion, 12 Monkeys, which is of course a spin-off from the movie already mentioned, and Timeless, another fix-the-past-to-fix-the-present idea, which somehow just really engaged me. Stephen King’s 11.22.63 is supposed to be good too, even if the plot, concerning a man given the chance to travel back in time and try to prevent the assassination of JFK isn’t so much hackneyed as banal.

In the movie theatres, a preference seemed to be emerging for the linkage of time travel with romance, as the emphasis on science fiction faded and the time travelling was used merely as a device to bring two people together. Kate and Leopold, Frequency, The Lake House, For All Time all use this premise, while there were a few older-becomes-younger efforts too, with Bruce Willis meeting his ten-year-old self in The Kid, 13 Going on 30 surely needs no explanation. Terminator was back with the third instalment, and yet another version of Dickens’s classic got the Disney treatment, while The Time Machine was remade for the twenty-first century, and Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder made it to the big screen.

Again further watering down the idea of time travel and separating it from science fiction like the forced separation of conjoined twins, comedy movies began to rely on time travel, or a variation of it. Click gave Adam Sandler (sigh) a remote control with which he could pause, fast forward or rewind his life (sadly it had no delete key on it!) and Austin Powers stuck his nose in again with Goldmember, Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel and Hot Tub Time Machine both royally took the piss out of time travel, and the less said about The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time and Naked, probably the better. But there were serious efforts too in the 21st century, and not just from returning franchises such as Star Trek and Terminator: 2011’s Source Code has a man trying to undo the past to save the present, Triangle from 2009 is a murderous suspense story, the same year’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, though at heart a romantic drama, does explore the problem created when someone travels through time against their will and with no control over their passage, and The Butterfly Effect reminds us that the past is best left unchanged, or who knows what the future might turn out to be?

It’s interesting, and I’ve only kind of realised it as I’ve been writing this, but it’s true, that over the years and decades it’s almost as if, as I mentioned above, time travel has been surgically removed from science fiction, allowed to make its own way through every other kind of fiction - romantic, crime, comic, horror - and I don’t know any other aspect of sci-fi that has been treated in that way, and is still able to be taken semi-seriously. You couldn’t, for instance, have robots or spaceships or interstellar travel or laser guns without referencing science fiction, yet for a vast majority of the movies - and some TV series - in the latter half of the 2000s, science fiction plays little or no part in their premise. Let’s check some out, for the crack.

How far back does this go, I wonder? Let’s start off with movies. Since they’re usually only a single entity, unless they have sequels, and even if they do, the premise is by then already established and accepted, the separation from sci-fi has only to happen once, whereas in TV shows it might have to be constantly justified. So, films then. 1980s. Well, with the exception of Field of Dreams, maybe Peggy Sue Got Married, Warlock, we’re talking films that mostly utilise, adhere to the principles of or at least acknowledge a nod to science, if not always science fiction. Travel to the next decade, and, meh, apart from Christmas Every Day and Groundhog Day, maybe that awful S Club 7 movie, again, mostly rooted in sci-fi. So, up to the end of the millennium, we’re good.

Pretty much okay then up to about 2003, when the Bottom team get in on things. Now, it’s hilarious, no doubt - I laughed my arse off at Weapons Grade Y-Fronts - but no way in hell is is science fiction. So, for the 2000s, that’s the starting point of the divergence. But how soon does it all begin to unravel? Let’s go on. The very next year we have 13 Going on 30, which involves a wish, so that can’t be considered science fiction. Then we have The Lake House, Click, Christmas Do-Over, all in 2006, none really containing any element of what I would consider science fiction, and it’s more or less okay up to 2011, when the romance starts to supercede the time travel/sci-fi/adventure motif, as 12 Dates of Christmas begins to merge the two and this continues on into 2013 where, in About Time, the protagonist’s family has “always been able to move through time”, 2018 has When We First Met and Time Freak, but overall, not quite as bad as I had thought.

Balancing off these “soft”, if you will, time travel movies we have, in 2000 Frequency, in 2002 Clockstoppers, Time Changer, Timequest and the remake of The Time Machine, 2003 gives us Timeline and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, The Butterfly Effect in 2004, A Sound of Thunder in 2005, the Star Trek reboot, The Time Traveller’s Wife and Triangle in 2009, and then the likes of Source Code, Looper, Hyper Futura and Mine Games, Interstellar and another Terminator movie filling out the second decade. In addition to these we have several “time loop” movies such as 12.01 pm, Salvage, The Last Day of Summer, Repeaters, already mentioned Source Code and Mine Games, also Haunter, Edge of Tomorrow, The Infinite Man, Before I Fall, Happy Death Day and The Endless.

Increasingly, it seems, time travel over the years seems to leave sci-fi behind and gets used in crime, romance, horror and comic genres, and in the process what was originally an interesting and innovative concept starts to become tired and stale, overused, lampooned (as in Futurama’s DVD-only full-length episode Bender’s Big Score) and reduced almost to a backdrop for something else, as in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, X-Men: Days of Future Passed and Avengers: Endgame. By now, it seems that not only can anyone time-travel, but the audience no longer care how, or if it’s even possible.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018