I saw Blade II in the theaters with a large group of people. One of my enduring memories from that film is from the drive home, when a member of the group insisted on criticizing the film because its vampires failed to honor the rules of Vampire: The Masquerade. I thought it was bizarre that someone felt that one piece of speculative fiction should be bound by the rules of another.

I mention this because I’ve noticed that fiction featuring time travel seems to bring this behavior out in people who would otherwise find it ridiculous to, say, hold Short Circuit to the Three Laws of Robotics (or whatever). It seems that a lot of people have very firm ideas about how time travel is “supposed” to work and they’re very unhappy whenever a film violates those “rules”.

SPOILERS AHEAD

This is something I’ve mentioned previously while talking about the handling of causality in Looper. That made sense to me because the Looper’s version of time travel was so unorthodox and unique. But I was really kind of taken aback when Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar prompted similar outrage for its use of a pretty bog-standard bootstrap paradox.

For those unfamiliar with bootstrap paradoxes, they involve any situation where an event appears to cause itself. This most often occurs with information. For example, you send a message back in time to yourself and then, when the time comes, you know what message you have to send because you already received it. But… who wrote the original message?

It hurts your brain because you’ve spent your entire life living a temporally linear life, but it’s widely used in time travel stories. (In fact, sometimes it can seem as if it’s almost impossible to find a time travel story that doesn’t feature a bootstrap paradox.)

RESOLVING THE BOOTSTRAP

How can the 5-dimensional creatures in Interstellar create a wormhole that’s required for their own existence?

There are a couple of ways to resolve (or, perhaps, understand) bootstrap paradoxes and maybe relieve your headache.

First, assume that the linearity of time is an illusion. Interstellar talks about this in the form of time being a “canyon” that the 5-dimensional beings can climb into and out of: All of time exists simultaneously. This radically changes the concept of causality (possibly eliminating it entirely.) In this scenario the question, “How can they create a wormhole if they need the wormhole to create wormhole?” is like asking, “How can you drop a rock into the canyon if the rock will land at the bottom?”

Second, and perhaps slightly easier to grok, is the “hidden iterations” theory of establishing stable timelines with time travel. Take the scenario in Terminator, for example. We can imagine a first iteration of events in which causality proceeded normally: Sarah Connor had sex with some random dude from the 20th century and gave birth to a son who later led a rebellion. Then SkyNet tries to use time travel to kill her son, so her son sends Kyle Reese back in time. This creates a second iteration in which Sarah Connor has sex with Kyle Reese and gives birth to a different son who also grows up to lead a rebellion. The timeline is now a stable loop and no longer changes (until James Cameron gets a really cool idea for a sequel).

Similarly, one can imagine an “original” version of history where humanity’s space program never found a wormhole and decided to do something like colonize Mars instead: Most of the human race dies off, but our civilization survives and eventually evolves into the 5-dimensional beings. And then the 5-dimensional beings look back and say, “It still sucks that billions of people died on the planet of our birth. I think we can fix it, though.” And then they send the wormhole back through time and rewrite the history of their own creation (but this time without the mass extinction event).

Third, in the specific case of Interstellar, you can assume that there is no bootstrap paradox: Cooper is simply wrong about the 5-dimensional aliens being a future version of humanity. (One of the really great things about the film, actually, is that it features a lot of people being wrong about a lot of things…. or maybe being right about them, but in ways that the film is not interested in proving one way or the other.)

Common misconception: It’s not accurate to say “roll the dice” when you’re only rolling a single die. It would also be inappropriate to say that you’re rolling a single dice.

Actually, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, this isn’t true: First, the singular use of “dice” is recognized as correct.

Second, The singular “die” dates to 1393. The singular use of “dice” dates to 1388. So, technically, the singular use of “dice” is actually older than the singular use of “die”.

Furthermore, the plural use of “dice” only dates back to 1330. So, essentially, both “die” and “dice” have been used interchangeably as the singular form of the plural “dice” since Day One.

While I’ve got you thinking about dice, though, you might as well check out the “Dice of Destiny” article I wrote back in 1999.

“Futurese: The American Language in 3000 AD” is an interesting extrapolation of where linguistic trends will take the language over the next 1,000 years. It’s a useful reminder that the English we speak is in a state of constant change.

One thing I will note, however, is that “Futurese” seems to be postulating a shift in English over the next 1,000 years that’s fairly equivalent to the shift in the language over the last 1,000 years. In doing so, I think it’s ignoring two vital factors:

First, the advent of print and widespread literacy had a significant effect in slowing vocabulary shifts.

Second, film and television seem to have had a massive arresting effect on pronunciation shifts.

William Shakespeare provides a valuable example of the former: His works are 400 years old and are definitely filled with archaisms. But the differences between modern English and Shakespeare pale in comparison to the differences between Shakespeare and the stuff written in 1200 AD. In fact, the vast majority of the shift away from Shakespeare’s English happened in the 100-150 years after his death: You can read commentators in the mid-18th century and the vast majority of the passages we have difficulty with in Shakespeare today are the same passages they were having difficulty with then. At the midpoint between us and Shakespeare is Jane Austen, whose English is essentially modern.

The baseline for the second point is obviously much shorter and might just represent a coincidental lull period in the evolution of pronunciation. But I don’t think so. I think the fact that we are regularly listening to words spoken 50 or 80 years ago is providing a consistent pressure that prevents (or at least radically slows) significant shifts in pronunciation which were common prior to the advent of sound recordings.

A common meme seems to be that CGI special effects are ruining modern films. This seems to have received a recent boost with Jackson’s CGI extravaganza of The Battle of the Five Armies getting panned and J.J. Abrams promising that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is going back to basics with more models and practical effects.

Laying aside the fact that the former assertion is often confidently proffered by Middle Earth fans who have apparently forgotten that Jackson’s earlier Lord of the Rings films were also laden with CGI effects, I feel compelled to point out that this meme is bullshit: The reasons the Star Wars prequels and Jackson’s Hobbit movies were mediocre films is primarily because their scripts are badly flawed. And, I’m going to be frank with you, the CGI didn’t write the scripts.

A related meme is that practical effects are somehow “timeless” while CGI effects age badly.

Bad special effects always look dated. Great special effects are always timeless.

People watch crappy 1950’s films and say, “Wow, these special effects look super-dated.” But nobody watches Citizen Kane or The Day the Earth Stood Still and says that.

The xenomorph in Alien looks fantastic… but it’s just a guy in a rubber suit. And there are plenty of examples of guys in rubber suits that look ridiculous.

The same is true of CGI: When it’s done well, it’s great. When it’s done poorly, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft are available in a handsomely compiled e-book from the Arkham Archivist, so there’s never been a better time to read Lovecraft’s original stories if you’ve been depriving yourself until now.

If you’re feeling ambitious and want to read all of Lovecraft, then simply reading the stories in the order that they were written is definitely the way to go: You’ll see the evolution and transition of his ideas in “real time” (so to speak) as the mythology of the Mythos grows up around you. I, personally, find this experience fascinating because, at the beginning of his career, Lovecraft was extremely racist, virulently xenophobic, and cynically terrified of the future. At the end of his career he would certainly not be considered liberal by today’s standards, but his views on all of these subjects had radically shifted and softened. I find Lovecraft’s racism appalling, but I find the totality of his career to be hopeful and uplifting: People can learn. People can get better. People can expand their horizons.

But tackling the complete corpus of Lovecraft is definitely a major undertaking, so it’s understandable if you’d rather just sample his work. For that approach, this is the list I recommend for getting a good overview:

• The Dunwich Horror
• The Call of Cthulhu
• Shadow Over Innsmouth
• The Colour Out of Space
• Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
• At the Mountains of Madness

The order in which you read these six stories doesn’t matter much (although I’d save At the Mountains of Madness until last). But if you read all six you’ll have a pretty good sense of Lovecraft’s breadth, you’ll have experienced most of the “big ideas” that people talk about when they talk about Lovecraft, and you’ll have read a good selection of Lovecraft’s best work.

A case could be made for adding “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Statement of Randolph Carter” to this list (the latter of which should be read before “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” if you read both). But I, personally, don’t think they’re as good as the six stories listed above.