Re: (ReacTor) Five Stories About Time Travel on a Limited Scale

On 14/06/2025 07:57, Jerry Brown wrote:

On Fri, 13 Jun 2025 08:38:40 -0700, Paul S Person
<psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:
 

On Thu, 12 Jun 2025 12:50:44 -0500, "Michael F. Stemper"
<michael.stemper@gmail.com> wrote:
>

On 12/06/2025 10.24, Paul S Person wrote:

On Wed, 11 Jun 2025 14:32:26 -0500, "Michael F. Stemper"
<michael.stemper@gmail.com> wrote:

On 09/06/2025 19.06, Tony Nance wrote:

>

The Time Machine - Wells

>
This is the second classic Wells you've recently mentioned (the other one
was _The War of the Worlds_), neither of which I've read. (I have seen the
George Pal interpretations of both, of course.) I need to fix this.

>
Yes. You do.

>
>

Pal's version of /The Time Machine/ is -- awful. No, seriously, read
the book and forget the film, if you can. (The main problem is that it
is obsessed with Nuclear War which, of course, the book knows nothing
of.)

>
Nuclear war? Wells didn't even know about the Blitz when he wrote it, or
even WWI.

>
Thanks for confirming my point.
>
I didn't notice this when I saw it as a child, but the Eloi are lured
into the Morloch domain /in the movie/ by the sound of an air raid
siren and the opening of an air raid shelter's doors -- a siren we
heard and a shelter we saw earlier in the film.
>
The problem for me here isn't that they changed the book, the problem
is that the changes are modern-day (well, "modern" when the film was
made) concerns.
>
Maltin, who likes the film, calls it a "cartoon version" of the book.

 The fallout shelter is just as valid an explanation, since the class
struggle mentioned in the book is only the Time Traveller's theory
which he explictly states as such (Baxter's authorised sequel did
being the class war into canon though).
 The film added multiple stops so he got to witness this, as opposed to
the book where he goes straight from his initial jump of a few minutes
to 802,701, noting only that the buildings around him seemed to fall
away at some point.

Indeed my vague recollection is that the 1950s
film presents a 20th century War like the one in
_Things to Come_, or indeed actual wars of the
20th century.  "Air raid" discipline of entering
a shelter when the siren sounds could have become
a permanent social arrangement, if the threat
persisted.  Though the year 802,701 is a very
long time later.
I expect that most of us here understand the
difference from a fallout shelter, where you go
in and stay there until the radioactivity outside
wears off a bit.  My point is you probably only
do it once.