Ed, Herb, Ray, Gene, Homer and Me

 

I’ve always really been into the whole going back in time and messing up  the smallest thing resulting in alarming consequences  in the present scenario. In between the time that I was first sucked into the sci-fi web and now, there’ve been  a whole lot of years during which I simply lost touch. Somewhere in that time, the term “space time continuum” popped up.  This here  “ space time continuum “ I thought, until recently,  was a jargonesque contrivance ground out by some overworked B-movie Hollywood hack who deserved the raise they didn‘t get.

 Well, I find that (unless my online sources are flat out lying), it ain’t some Bob Cratchit wordsmith’s invention but an idea that first popped up in a serious academic paper by Edgar Allan Poe in the early part of the 18^th century. Pass the ball to Herbert Wells ( H.G. to his close friends ) who also contemplated it at school and  ran with it in “ The Time Machine” . Both of these guys were, by day, serious eggheads so they weren’t just diddling with this as a timewaster during staff meetings.

 Ray Bradbury snags the pigskin and, through his “The Sound of Thunder”, I get exposed to it in my closet years as a  geek in training. Around the same time, Gene Roddenberry okays a Harlan Ellison ( also at my icons head table ) script for an original Star Trek Episode “ City on the Edge of Forever” that sees McCoy, suffering from an accidental drug malfunction, scoot through a time portal and flirt with similar future sabotaging mayhem in America in the 1930‘s.  The episode not only allows William Shatner to do some requisite cougar tracking but will ultimately win a Hugo Award and a Writer’s Guild of America Award. I will sit enrapt at the glass teat (Ellison’s term) more than once while it plays. The seriously crackerjack Simpson’s writers also corral the pigskin from quarterback Ray and use it for one of their best “Treehouse of Horrors “ episodes. You know, the one with the toaster that sends Homer way back to the time when dinosaurs weren’t in zoos! 

And here we are.

 It remains one of my primo idle time fillers. If I could go back and change the future by doing something back then, what would I do??  And why would I do it?

Right now I think I’d go back and do whatever needs to be done to prevent the formation of petroleum. Then those powers that be ( but should not be ) couldn’t just goose the price of gas and oil based electricity generation  capriciously up and down , but mostly up!

Don’t get me started. 

Anyhow, if you could do some in the past tinkering, what would you do ??

Don B.