This ebook argues that point trip fiction is a story “laboratory,” a environment for concept experiments within which crucial theoretical questions on storytelling—and, through extension, concerning the philosophy of temporality, historical past, and subjectivity—are represented within the kind of literal units and plots.

Drawing on physics, philosophy, narrative thought, psychoanalysis, and movie idea, the publication hyperlinks concepts in time shuttle fiction to precise shifts within the popularization of technological know-how, from evolutionary biology within the past due 1800s, via relativity and quantum physics within the mid–20th century, to more moderen “multiverse” cosmologies. Wittenberg indicates how expanding wisdom of recent medical types ends up in fantastic thoughts within the literary “time machine,” which evolves from a “vehicle” used mainly for sociopolitical observation right into a mental and narratological equipment in a position to exploring with nice sophistication the temporal constitution and importance of matters, viewpoints, and old events.

The e-book covers paintings by way of recognized time commute writers corresponding to H. G. Wells, Edward Bellamy, Robert Heinlein, Samuel Delany, and Harlan Ellison, in addition to pulp fiction writers of the Twenties throughout the Nineteen Forties, renowned and avant-garde postwar technological know-how fiction, tv indicates resembling “The Twilight area” and “Star Trek,” and
current cinema. Literature, movie, and television are learn along theoretical paintings starting from Einstein, Schrödinger, and Stephen Hawking to Gérard Genette, David Lewis, and Gilles Deleuze. Wittenberg argues that even the main mainstream audiences of renowned time commute fiction and cinema are vigorously engaged with the various similar questions about temporality, id, and background that hindrance literary theorists, media and movie students, and philosophers.