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Post by Jeff Gerke on Mar 6, 2009 8:25:50 GMT -5
I love the idea of autistics being expert Analyzers spotting patterns in quantum histories. Awesome.
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Post by seraphim on Mar 6, 2009 10:02:56 GMT -5
Vernor Vinge did something like that in Deepness in the Sky with his "Focused", people who had been altered by having their obsessive compulsive aspect jacked up and tightly focused so that they became savants in that narrow band whether artistry, cleaning and maintenance, or scanning data streams to detect and analize hidden patterns of information. But that process left them almost nonfunctional in every other aspect of their life so that they had to be herded and tended like cattle.
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Post by mongoose on Mar 6, 2009 22:25:46 GMT -5
Going back to Jeff's idea of an agency trying anylize and manipulate multiple realities or whatever. There was a TV show I enjoyed, which probably means it was short lived, in which someone in the DOD developed a time machine and one man was selected to take it back in time to alter events. They chose a special operations trained NCO or low ranking officer for obvious reasons. To simplify things he would only go back a limited amount of time. I think maybe it was something like 24 or 48 hours, and he had that much time to change whatever event had just occurred.
But is the choice of whom to send back so obvious? Usually the operators, the commanders, the analysists, and the policy makers are different people, but do you always want the operator to be the one in the field without communications or support back to the commanders or the rest of the network? In the movie "Contact," another one I enjoyed, they chose the scientist who figured out the device, to take the ride in it. She got where she was going, and said, "They should have sent a poet."
You don't always know what you'll be going into in the past, or the alternate realities, or whatever, right? And you can't afford to train a different person for every mission, can you? So do you want a diplomat? A hostage negotiator? A really nice guy? A beautiful woman who always gets her way? Rambo? a jack of all trades and master of none? Or do you take one of the five people in the world who's equally extraordinary at planning a massive campaign, leading a tactical assault, charming a hostile diplomat, solving complex political issues, finding the truth, and anything else you want him/her to do? Someone like the Pretender, or Michael Weston of Burn Notice.
In Stargate they had to deal with that question, which, I suspect, is why they use a balanced 4 person team. A female astro physicist, an initially dorky little anthropologist and language expert with natural diplomatic tendencies, the quintessential warrior, and a natural military leader who's pretty good at all of it, but not nearly as good as any of his colleagues in any of it other than leadership and field command. But what would YOU do if you could only select one person for the field operations, and you had to trust them with your present and future reality?
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Post by Jeff Gerke on Mar 7, 2009 8:06:55 GMT -5
Was the show Quantum Leap?
I discovered that show in the brief period we had cable. It was in daily reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel.
Every day, I'd think, this is a goofy show. And every day, I'd be right back watching it and loving it.
Jeff
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Post by seraphim on Mar 7, 2009 9:39:43 GMT -5
I think the show you are thinking about is "7 Days" which ran on UPN from 98 to 2001
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Post by torainfor on Mar 7, 2009 16:03:28 GMT -5
My husband loves Quantum Leap. I have a hard time with cringe-inducing story lines, though. Oh, great. This week, he's a black woman in 1930s New York. And he's pregnant. How's he going to pull this one off?
My show was The Pretender, definitely. I like it when I can trust the person to be able to fit in with little problem beyond not knowing what Halloween is. Life on Mars (Which I just found out they canceled! I am not amused!) is somewhere in the middle. He certainly knows how to be a cop in New York, he just keeps bringing up that he's from 2008, living in 1973. Fortunately, Annie thinks he's cute, anyway.
I haven't stopped to think what background my Agents might have. Currently, they're Jacks-of-all-trades with a serious understanding of history and culture. Which isn't easy, because "history" changes with every major change an Agent enacts. Fortunately, Agents, like most everyone else, are temporal-bound. Once their history changes, they are of that new past. Only the "Heirs" remember every timeline they've lived through. They get a lot of headaches.
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Post by mongoose on Mar 7, 2009 23:54:37 GMT -5
I don't think I could deal with a time travel story in which the character returns to the time from which he/she departed, and is instantly a different person as a result of the changes they caused in the past. It seems almost convention that, by one means or another, explored within the story or just assumed, they are immune from fluctuations in the time line that they might have caused. They could come back to find Earth a wasteland, and they'd be surprised, knowing very well what life was like when they first went back in time. Of course it's un-realistic, but it makes a story that we can identify with better, and time travel is un-realistic to begin with.
I remember watching a special feature that came with the movie "Blade." They were going to make the bad guy become a tornado of blood that would throw blade around for a while. But the trial viewers they brought in lost touch with the movie at that point. They could no longer identify with the bad guy as a human (sort of) character that needed to be killed. So they replaced the tornado with a quickly regenerating vampire in a humanoid body. We do these things for the sake of our readers/viewers. I see nothing wrong with it.
And I think that show was "7 Days," yes. Thank you. *checks netflics*
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Post by metalikhan on Mar 8, 2009 13:18:56 GMT -5
Does anyone know who coined the term "multiverse" (as opposed to universe)? I've seen it used in a couple of books.
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Post by mongoose on Mar 9, 2009 1:43:20 GMT -5
Isn't it also used in the Chronicles of Riddik, or else in Serenity?
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Post by seraphim on Mar 9, 2009 14:00:35 GMT -5
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Post by fluke on Mar 21, 2009 21:14:55 GMT -5
>I love the idea of autistics being expert Analyzers spotting patterns in quantum histories. Awesome.
You might enjoy Probe by Margaret Wander Bonanno. The Enterprise visits an archeology dig and they begin to put the pieces together that the whole society was made up of autistic savants. Some were great musicians. Others were great at astronomy.
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