Nominate your favorite fictional time machines. (OK, maybe I didn’t need the qualifier there.) Books, TV, movies, comics, whatever the source.
Want to go old school? The George Pal special with its Victorian trappings fits the bill. High tech, like the “Legends” Waverider? Or the “Relativity” from the ST:VOY episode of the same name. Or perhaps you want to go in style with the BTTF DeLorean. Me, I like the basic “Time Bubble” from the Legion of Super-Heroes comic. Oh, yes. Mustn’t forget the Tardis. Any others? Talk about the strengths and weaknesses, pick apart someone else’s choice. Let’s have some fun with this.
I would vote against the TARDIS. You’d think they could have fixed the “stuck as a police call box” flaw by now.
I also vote against the machine in Primer, because it’s too byzantine.
I think the Guardian of Forever is not a scientific time machine, but a kiosk remnant of an old shopping mall - you’re supposed to go back in time and try to make changes. Great fun - amuse your friends. until one smart alec destroyed the entire past.
No, I’ll vote for the Time Tunnel. I like the look, the fact it seems to be complex and takes enormous power is a plus. The fact it doesn’t work right is a minus they should have rectified. They can still have good episodes even if Buzz and Todd (or whatever their names were) can come home at the end.
Does the Wayback Machine count? I guess it’s called a WABAC Machine also according to wiki. Never seen that before.
It’s easy to operate, just tell it where and when you want to go, it always brings the time travelers back to their own time, translates all languages to English, I’d say it’s a nice one. Things do seem to go a little sideways when you arrive in the past but it turns out that the problems are easy to fix.
I guess the one big disadvantage is that it can only travel to the past.
I like the old sling shot around the sun in StarTrek:the Voyage home. I like that Scotty was able to whip the Klingon bird of prey into shape for the trip and able to make adjustments for the Whales. He’s truly a miracle worker.
The tunnel was more than complex; it extended to infinity.
I like the Victorian time machine in the original movie of the same name. The rotating disk was obviously meant to generate a high-energy vortex that would suck the machine and its operator into the continuum. That’s why the table and the chandelier shook so violently just before the model went shhhhhhhh-WHOOP! and disappeared.
The time machine in the remake was also cool, in that we could see what happened when something was halfway in/halfway out of the bubble the machine was traveling in.
The thing was, you had to be “prepared” before you could go back in time. Makes sense because if you weren’t prepared, you wouldn’t last long in the past. You’d be exposed to all sorts of pathogens to which your body has never built up a resistance.
I like the Time Machine from H.G. Wells’s story; his adventures in the year 802,701 captivated me when I read the kids’ version in middle school. Then he traveled millions of years into the future to witness the last living things on Earth.
I read the Classics Illustrated versions of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds when I was six. Scared the daylights out of me, and I sat up with the lights on until I finally fell asleep around four in the morning! :eek:
Their version of the machine was pretty cool too. It really looked like something some tinkerer would build in his home workshop.
