Review: The Technicolor Time Machine

The Technicolor Time Machine by Harry Harrison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the most irresponsible time travel story that I've read to date. It's a no consequences adventure story that mucks about with only the fun possibilities of time travel, so buckle up, forget about all your ethical questions and spare no thought for the preservation of the timeline!

Summary:
- Professor needs funding to turn his mini prototype time machine into a full size working time sled.
- Barney is a director for Climactic, a film company at risk of being shut down if their next flick isn't a roaring success.
- LM is the producer at Climactic and Barney convinces LM to endorse the Professor's project and to payroll a new movie using the technology to film history "on location."

So after a little demonstration LM greenlights the project and starts outlining the film with Barney. On a test run, they kidnap a viking and with a little training (and payment in bourbon) they turn him into a movie star. Only most of the characters that our star viking will interact with are not actors.

Can you picture the mess this is going to make of the timeline as these cads go back to film battles that they instigate? Not to mention that the catering team serve "French fried trilobyte" as a delicacy and that eventually some of the crew become features of the viking sagas.

That's kind of what makes this wild ass story so quirky and entertaining. Even the earliest Doctor Who stories were considerate of the impact of meddling with the timeline and I think everything else I've read either aims to preserve the timeline or claims that no significant change can be affected.

I'm not sure that I ever hoped for these crazy bastards to succeed. You get the sense that the only possible consequence which they will face is blowing the movie budget and I was pretty much rooting for that outcome.

I could see this story as an old black and white film, it has the right kind of plot, characters, and comic approach for it. Old scifi time travel shows more often than not went into the past instead of the future for budget reasons and here we have a book about a tv team that actually get hold of time travel technology and what do they use it for? To travel into the past. It's just too classic!

There is an early statement made by the professor which claims that it requires "infinitely" more power to go into the future, which can't quite be technically accurate because he then demonstrates doing so. Swap out "infinitely" for "a lot." I was thinking that this would cause problems when they try to return home but this concern was countered by treating the trip like an elastic band, or bungee cord. The travellers return through the same channel carved out in the departure and it is explained that because of the existence of point "k" the point "e" (end point) can never be before the point "b" (beginning point).

There are a few things that I thought were done really well in this story. One is using the time machine to save time. Jumping back to spend months getting the work done and returning moments later to submit that work. Another that I quite like that is you can't just jump about from time to time because of the bungee jump effect; you must jump and return before jumping to another time which meant that some current time was always being sacrificed between jumps.

When LM agrees to a contract which pays the film crew for as long as they actually spend working in the past, regardless of how much time has passed in the present, he apparently doesn’t get it, because when the scriptwriter goes back for 8 weeks then returns an hour later he argues persistently that he's only willing to pay for the hour.

Also, this story does have fun with a couple of great causality loop examples. The drawing that is never actually drawn in particular is fantastic and absolutely no explanation is given.

"You disrupt these people’s lives completely for your cinematic drivel, then you avoid the consequences of your actions"

There is one person in the time travel film crew who ocasionally pipes up about the film and its impact being bad. Responsible for the quote above is the philologist brought along to study the cultures, liaise with the locals, then advise with filming and safety, (which was a little weird to me because I had misinterpreted philology as phrenology until I looked it up after finishing the book). This guy draws a connection to something that their captive viking says and discovers that they were already a part of the history books before they arrived.

“You can’t stop the world and get off, so you just have to learn to live on it.”

There's a bit of rough dialogue about a woman who gets pregnant and is told she should consider not bringing the baby back to present time because she wasn't married and... "there are names for people like that." Plus being a story set in Hollywood of the 60s there's a fair amount of attention to jug size when it comes to hiring and directing the female lead actress. These are certainly unfortunate remnants of the time.

You can tell that nobody here learned anything about meddling in history because at the end they talk about the possibility of trying another film by travelling into the past. I had to laugh at the idea and I liked the implicit way it was told, so I'm going to end my review by quoting the final paragraph of the book:

But L.M. was smiling and not listening. “And that,” he said, “gives me an idea for the absolutely infinitive religious picture of all time, a theme that positively cannot miss!”

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