EP141: The Color of a Brontosaurus

[gelee]

I enjoyed the story, but the use of the term "brontosaurus" aged it a bit.
Beyond that, I really don't want to pick on the writer for not knowing more than me about the subject.  Realy, isn't that all it would take?  If somebody started babbling gobledy-gook about particle physics at me, I'd just have to shrug and take him at his word.  If good science were a requirement for good fiction, there would be no James T. Kirk, and that would be a damned shame.
As to the actions of the scientists, I didn't have any trouble with the way they reacted.  Scientists are human.
Strictly speaking, they each failed to uphold the ideals of rationality and objectivism that the scientific method demands.  To mangle a phrase, to fail is human.

[Jhite]

If good science were a requirement for good fiction, there would be no James T. Kirk, and that would be a damned shame.

Thanks.
James T. Kirk LOL

[ajames]

I liked this one.  It was pretty good.  I liked the idea that someone that could do so much potential damage to the time line could only be allowed to time travel once they were dead.  What I didn't get was how he figured out it was his wife.  I guess sheer deduction. .

The clue that Stu finally realized was that there were all of those pictures of the discovery spot [before the discovery], without any particular reason for them -- remember that he said he knew no-one was hanging around the spot before the discovery because of all the pictures of the spot.  So the person taking the pictures must have known something no-one else did about the spot.  And that person was his wife.

[gelee]

If good science were a requirement for good fiction, there would be no James T. Kirk, and that would be a damned shame.

Thanks.
James T. Kirk LOL

Hey, Jim Kirk is/was the effing man, and my personal hero.  He was like King Arthur, James Bond, and George Washington rolled into one body.

[Roney]

I was hooked by the start of this one.  The setup of the impossible discovery was intriguing: what would the explanation turn out to be if we really found a fossil human bone?  Then, step-by-step, the story threw all that goodwill away, for reasons already well covered by other posters to this thread.

The only other highlight was the depiction of Stu's selfishness.  His instinctive belief that his reasons for wanting to abandon the marriage to go time travelling were superior to his wife's sounded very human.

The rest was, at best, mediocre.  The underlying problem seemed to be an attempt to cram far too much into one very short story.  (It reminded me most of John Crace's column "The Digested Read" in The Guardian: here's his distillation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Children of Hurin for a flavour.)  If the focus really was meant to be the love story, I'd rather have seen more words given to it at the expense of the unconvincing arguments between the scientists.  That could easily have been left off-screen.  How's this?

Stu dropped onto the couch.  "We got nothing at all done today," he said, as much to himself as to his wife.  "Again.  Joel's convinced that we're the victims of a hoax and Renee's taking the bone as proof of creationism, of all things.  All they do is argue about it, making the same tired points over and over until they've entirely drained my will to live."

At least the reader might mentally fill in the blanks with some dialogue that sounds more like real scientists.

One other clunker that hasn't been mentioned so far is the whole point of Marcy's trip to the past.  Like Listener, I was concerned that the story was building to a clumsy handling of 9/11, but that would almost have been preferable to what we got.  A speech that somehow ushers in a new era of peace, love and understanding for all humanity?  Right.

But yay! Jonathan Coulton again.  And I think the song did have some relevance to the story.  They both addressed the dangers of letting the pursuit of a dream get in the way of making the most of what you already have.

[contra]

I don't think I liked this story. 

No.  Thats wrong.  It didn't make an impression and I have no idea why.  I love time travel stories; especially people working out things about it.  This just missed for me...

Odd.  Hmmm.  I can't pick up on anything specific that I didn't like.  Maybe its all just what has been said so far.

At any rate it reminded me of Chronoclasm by John Wyndham....

[DKT]

This story amused me more than I thought it would.  I found the previous discussion about the scientists interesting.  I do think they were painted as caricatures, for the most part, and that was the author's intention.  The creationist-bent one had purlple hair and a nose ring.  The guy who destroyed the fossil had a goatee.  They definitely felt like caricatures.  It didn't bother me like it did some others.  That said, eytanz (I think) brought up a good point point about scientists not waiting to figure out what does this mean, but would just publish the thing.

The real stumbling point for me was that I knew knew knew as soon as the story started that Stu was going to end up being the guy in the fossil.  That's like a rule for these kind of stories.  (There was also a story with a similar twist rule on Drabblecast recently, I believe.)  I thought the way he got there was clever, but I still knew that somehow, someway Stu was going to go back in time and end up in the belly of a dinosaur.

So all in all, I thought it was an amusing story while I was listening to it, but not one of my favorites here.

[CammoBlammo]

I liked this one.  It was pretty good.  I liked the idea that someone that could do so much potential damage to the time line could only be allowed to time travel once they were dead.  What I didn't get was how he figured out it was his wife.  I guess sheer deduction. .

The clue that Stu finally realized was that there were all of those pictures of the discovery spot [before the discovery], without any particular reason for them -- remember that he said he knew no-one was hanging around the spot before the discovery because of all the pictures of the spot.  So the person taking the pictures must have known something no-one else did about the spot.  And that person was his wife.

That's obviously correct, but it leaves us asking how Marcy knew the femur was going to be discovered. The scientists kept the discovery quiet and the evidence was destroyed before it could be made public, so there would have been little record of the discovery for the future. Even if there was, Marcy's brief was to gather information about the speech in NYC, which was sidetracked by her longer than expected stay in C21 and her falling in love with Stu. Why was she so obsessed with the dig?

The only explanation I can see is that her C21 self communicated with her younger, future self. She would have had told her to hook up with Stu, get him obsessed with time travel and bear a son to invent it. If that were the case, there were no accidents---she planned it all (and made some pretty big sacrifices) in order to make it happen.

Or have I missed something?

(For the record, I enjoyed this story, but I did notice a few of the problems others did. I hate it when I come to the forums and realise the story wasn't as good as I thought!)

[eytanz]

Well, if her son was really the inventor of time travel, he could have been pretty famous. Maybe he wrote an autobiography (or said in multiple interviews) that the reason he invented time travel is because he knew it was possible, and give his father's discovery as evidence (and though the bone itself was destroyed, not all photos and such were - it may not be useful to prove people of Stu's time it wasn't a hoax, but it would be possible to convince people who already knew time travel existed). He might also have left out the details about his mother being a time traveller, for various reasons. So, she might be going back to witness the famous event that led indirectly to the discovery of time travel without knowing what her role in the events was.

[Russell Nash]

Sorry i got to this one kind of late guys.  I hope the off-topic arguement didn't keep down the discussion of the story itself.  I moved the disection of scientists here.

[Russell Nash]

It was like watching a Jerry Bruckheimer film except not as stupid.

Total bubblegum.  I wasn't in the mood for a hard piece and I choose to listen to this because of the title.  It was what I wanted at that moment.  I enjoyed it for the time I was listening to it and then I spit it out.  I mean, I deleted it.

[CammoBlammo]

Well, if her son was really the inventor of time travel, he could have been pretty famous. Maybe he wrote an autobiography (or said in multiple interviews) that the reason he invented time travel is because he knew it was possible, and give his father's discovery as evidence (and though the bone itself was destroyed, not all photos and such were - it may not be useful to prove people of Stu's time it wasn't a hoax, but it would be possible to convince people who already knew time travel existed). He might also have left out the details about his mother being a time traveller, for various reasons. So, she might be going back to witness the famous event that led indirectly to the discovery of time travel without knowing what her role in the events was.

I get that, and historical transmission is one of the ways the future Marcy could have received information from her earlier-but-older self. We're still left with a puzzle though. There are three ways things could have played out.

• Marcy looked for Stu and purposely married him in order to get the shots of the dig. Whilst we know Marcy always had secrets this makes her a much darker person than the story suggests. Of course, it's a common story device for someone to woo someone for non-romantic reasons, only to fall in love with them. (I'm thinking of The Taming of the Shrew, but out of deference to the events of the last week I'll also mention Ten Things I Hate About You. That her son was to invent the time machine may also provide a motive to stay. I wonder what part she played in its invention?
• Marcy came to our century with no motive other than to record the speech. She unexpectedly fell in love and married someone who also happened to do something that was to be pivotal in history. This is the obvious reading of the text, but it introduces some enormous coincidences.
• The third possibility falls somewhere between the two. Marcy came to our time to record the speech as the story suggests, and then fell in love. At some point after that she realised that her boyfriend/husband was the guy that found the femur that eventually led to the invention of the time machine. If history had recorded those details she would also have realised that she was to be the mother of the inventor (and perhaps stopped using contraception to ensure she conceived.) She also would have known about the destruction of the femur, and just not said anything.

This third possibility (or range of possibilities) is probably the best way to read around the problems in the text, but it also raises sticky (but not problematic) causality issues. She must have been aware that she played an important part in these events and in the very invention of the technology that got her there in the first place. How did the pictures she took affect the future, ensuring the invention of time travel and thus her presence in C21 and the femur? Did she aid more in the invention of time travel than bearing and raising the inventor? Or did she slip him a look at the machine and a few technical details to get him started? And if that were the case, who invented time travel? Why didn't she stop the destruction of the femur? Or was she aware of alternate endings to the story that weren't as good? Or was she using her knowledge of the situation as little as possible, just letting be where she could? All of those paradoxes that beset time travel stories seem to raise their heads, detracting from a good premise.

Getting off the topic, I like well written time travel stories. Can anyone suggest any that manage to escape these sorts of problems? I remember the writers of Stargate Atlantis managed an interesting attempt involving Elizabeth Weir. Others?

edit: Fix formatting of bullet points.

[qwints]

It was like watching a Jerry Bruckheimer film except not as stupid

I didn't like the story, but it was nowhere near Jerry Bruckheimer.

[Russell Nash]

It was like watching a Jerry Bruckheimer film except not as stupid

I didn't like the story, but it was nowhere near Jerry Bruckheimer.

I was kind of tongue in cheek comparing it to the way Bruckheimer uses magic technology and has no concept of science.  I submit Armageddon into evidence.

Help me out here.  Didn't the son say he wasn't able to make time travel possible.  I kind of read the ending to mean someone else would do it in the future.

[eytanz]

Help me out here.  Didn't the son say he wasn't able to make time travel possible.  I kind of read the ending to mean someone else would do it in the future.

I may be misremembering, but I think the son just said he didn't get it finished before Stu died, implying that he's do it eventually.

[Talia]

Not a fan.

There wasn't a single well-drawn character in the entire story. None of the dialogue between characters was (to my mind) at all believable; it seemed just thrown out there as a way to perpetuate the plot with no thought given to how people actually interact. The emotional aspect of things just didn't affect me at all, because I just couldn't come to care about Stu in the least. He came off as a delusional nutcase, just as much a caricature as the other two irritatingly unbelievable pseudo-scientists. I'm not sure if his relationship with Marcy was meant to be a cornerstone of the story, but if so, he should have developed it more. One little cheesy anecdote about how they met and them repeatedly gushing over eachother does not paint much of a portrait of a relationship.

So yeah. The concept of the story and general plot points were interesting enough, but the delivery just didn't do it for me.

[Loz]

I did enjoy this story although by no means is it the best story ever or anything like that. In many ways it felt like a journey done many times before or listening to an old album, you don't get anything new out of the experience but there's pleasure in following a well worn path. Definitely a point in it's favour is it's an Escape Pod story rather than a Pseudo Pod one, if it had been written for the latter then the point where Stu confronts his wife about being a time traveller would have been followed with him messily butchering her with a kitchen knife and then spending the rest of the story living in his attic with insufficient gusset support.

But having said that, I had a problem with a number of the characters. I think we needed more of a development of Marcie's character before she reveals she is a time traveller. After all, Stu is basing his accusation on the fact that she went to New York and, shock, something happened. I never knew New York was such a dull town. It's not really up there with discovering who Keyzer Soze was is it? And Renee's sudden conversion to Creationism is a story idea that suddenly disappears so abruptly I wondered why it was introduced in the first place, while Joel is given the shortest shrift in the story for being the voice of reason. The facts as presented do not support either a hypothesis of time travellers or man coexisting with dinosaurs and no effort is made to give enough depth to the characters to make their jumping to conclusions understandable, even if it's bad scientific method. Perhaps if they were all enthusiastic amateurs rather than, apparently, accredited scientists?

I also can't help but feel that, considering how obsessed Stu is about finding a way to the past, it can't have been too pleasant for Chris to grow up as his son, surely Stu would have tried to guide him towards more scientific fields of study, always checking up on him to see if that day was the day he invented a time machine. It doesn't seem to be of a piece with what Chris says at the end about him. And I'm hoping that someone sometime writes a time-travel story where the mystery isn't due to the central character going back in time a la La Jetee or Twelve Monkeys.

[robertmarkbram]

I found this story highly entertaining and humorous story. Five minutes into piece and my step daughter says "Wouldn't it be ironic if the bones were his?" It was clear from the start of the story that it was written with a tongue deftly in cheek - creation, hoax or time travel!

[Monty Grue]

Every now and then parts of a story make me gag.  The declarations of love between Stu and Marcie could have been lifted out of a dime o'dozen romance paperback.  Arrrghhhorra!  I'm certain my wife would look at me like I was an idiot if I ever talked like that.

Other criticisms mentioned before are valid. 

I know from the beginning the femur was Stu's, but at least there was an interesting twist to how it got there.  Overall, give it a Meh - .

[Roney]

This third possibility (or range of possibilities) is probably the best way to read around the problems in the text, but it also raises sticky (but not problematic) causality issues.

Oh dear.  You've awakened the terrible time travel pedant in me.  (I've been trying to keep him asleep.  You wouldn't like him when he's argumentative.)

I was trying to treat this as a ST:TNG-level time travel story: it's nominally about some magic called "time travel", but it doesn't ask for nor deserve any kind of scrutiny of the internal logic.  I stick my fingers in my ears and pretend that time travel was never mentioned.  CammoBlammo's unanswered questions reveal that it's exactly this kind of story.

Actually, I had wondered whether the use of "Brontosaurus" was a deliberate indication that the story takes place in a counterfactual timeline.  In which case we could probably explain away some of the time travel paradoxes by saying that the future that Marcie came from was on a different branch from the future she ended up in.

(My inner time travel pedant's starter for ten: why is multiple universe / branching timeline time travel incompatible with narrative drama?  Your first bonus question: given the answer to the starter question, why do authors keep on using it?  Sorry.  Like I said, he's argumentative.)

[Tango Alpha Delta]

Two comments, one quibble:

1) All sins of character, errors in science, awkward lurve dialogue, and logical weaknesses were absolved by the line "she looked as though she had added two plus two, and gotten... a green plastic fish".  (feel free to fix that if you have the quote handy)


2) All of that imagination, and the color of a brontosaurus is "green"?  He's pushing a time travel theory... he could at least see them in electric chartreuse, or paisley.


Q) I don't think it was spelled out, but they established that the femur was modern human through... DNA testing?  If it was a modern human, there would be a lot one could tell from the results, without necessarily having to "match" the bone to a known individual.  Of course, if you felt, as I did, that Stu thought the bone was his, anyway, couldn't he have done a quick test to see?  Or did Stu not take any DNA to the office that day?

[bolddeceiver]

Generally, lithified fossil material contains either no DNA, or very occasionally highly fragmented bits.

[Thaurismunths]

Q) I don't think it was spelled out, but they established that the femur was modern human through... DNA testing?  If it was a modern human, there would be a lot one could tell from the results, without necessarily having to "match" the bone to a known individual.  Of course, if you felt, as I did, that Stu thought the bone was his, anyway, couldn't he have done a quick test to see?  Or did Stu not take any DNA to the office that day?

I don't think he suspected the bone was his, I think "modern human" was only speaking anthropologically.

[Tango Alpha Delta]

Thanks, bolddeciever... that's what happens when I base a scientific question on my mis-remembered reading of Jurassic Park!  (On a side note, why does every person who tries to convince me that "the science behind global warming is faulty" point to Crichton's fictional screed about global warming, and never to an actual scientist?)

Q) I don't think it was spelled out, but they established that the femur was modern human through... DNA testing?  If it was a modern human, there would be a lot one could tell from the results, without necessarily having to "match" the bone to a known individual.  Of course, if you felt, as I did, that Stu thought the bone was his, anyway, couldn't he have done a quick test to see?  Or did Stu not take any DNA to the office that day?

I don't think he suspected the bone was his, I think "modern human" was only speaking anthropologically.

Okay, if you say so; I thought there was a scene after Renee and Joel (or whomever) stomped out where Stu looked down at the bone and grew convinced that it was literally his.  I wasn't sure if he really suspected that it was, or was just running with his delusions.

[Thaurismunths]

Thanks, bolddeciever... that's what happens when I base a scientific question on my mis-remembered reading of Jurassic Park!  (On a side note, why does every person who tries to convince me that "the science behind global warming is faulty" point to Crichton's fictional screed about global warming, and never to an actual scientist?)

Q) I don't think it was spelled out, but they established that the femur was modern human through... DNA testing?  If it was a modern human, there would be a lot one could tell from the results, without necessarily having to "match" the bone to a known individual.  Of course, if you felt, as I did, that Stu thought the bone was his, anyway, couldn't he have done a quick test to see?  Or did Stu not take any DNA to the office that day?

I don't think he suspected the bone was his, I think "modern human" was only speaking anthropologically.

Okay, if you say so; I thought there was a scene after Renee and Joel (or whomever) stomped out where Stu looked down at the bone and grew convinced that it was literally his.  I wasn't sure if he really suspected that it was, or was just running with his delusions.

Hmmm... I might be wrong. I'll have to go back and check it out.