well, I don’t think think you’re missing anything really. I’m only a fan of very particular types of sci-fi. Dr Who, Star Treks up to a point, and pretty much anything time travel related.
But that’s about it. Why time travel? I don’t know. It’s likely because I do it in my mind and it’s weird that the regular world doesn’t work like that.
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I started watching it with my grandmother at 6.5 years of age. Shadowy memories of it. First solid memories of the show I was around 8 years old.
Her interest waned. Mine continued and I watched on my own after that.
I always prided myself on “never becoming a Whovian”. Not owning any merchandise. Not doing any of the “fandom” things…
.. but really, and I even knew it as a teenager, it was envy. They were able to “let go” and dive all the way into what’s now called “cosplay” and I could never do that. It’s not my nature.
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They’re acted out thought experiments, as most fiction is, but particularly direct in this case.
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Like
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For example, one of the most significant episodes when I was a boy, had a planet where there were a group of monks who chanted in pure mathematics.
The Universe had long passed its heat death due to entropy and it was the chanting of the monks that was keeping the Universe alive, using what they referred to as “Block Transfer Computation”.
This allowed them to convert mathematics directly into energy or matter as needed and they were borrowing from a nearby universe to do so if I remember right.
Anyway, it all went awry, etc etc, but I loved the concept.
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It’s mostly cheap science fiction for kids. But I was lucky that there was a short period of time where they REALLY attempted to stay close to known science. It only lasted maybe… five years on the show before they stopped trying but it piqued my interest in theoretical physics and was even my first exposure to Bertrand Russell.
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My mind is such that it hangs on to places very strongly, or once did.
I’d complain, “Why does it feel like I can just walk through a door and end up back in [place/time] and everything will be just as it was?”
I was genuinely baffled as to why. I could smell the places. See them. I knew the people would be there just as they were, how they sounded, what they’d say.
It was a bit of clutter really because I knew rationally they weren’t and yet, it was “as if” they were a mere timeslice away. Just shift over a paper-thin dimension diagonally and there it is.
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