This week’s Flashback Friday: Back to the Future
Since everyone else is looking at Back to the Future this week and having such a fabulous time with it, I wanted to jump on board.
The first film came out in 1985–I was 7 years old. While there are many films I recall seeing in the theater at that age (Red Sonja being one of them), I don’t have any solid memory of seeing this in a theater. Yet I know I did. And after that, I have many memories of seeing this movie over and over again on television.
I remember its two sequels (and I’d like to pretend II never happened), but beyond this, I remember puzzling out the idea of time travel.
Doc Brown spoke of the space-time-continuum and paradoxes, which were new concepts to me at that age. My father and I had lengthy discussions about the what-ifs and whys of time travel.
This movie brought up questions in me that had no answers–or at least had no answers that a child could comprehend. If a movie or book came out involving time travel, I was sold. (It’s too bad I didn’t discover Doctor Who earlier!)
I grew up with The Time Machine, Terminator, Donnie Darko, 12 Monkeys, and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I even enjoyed some of the cheesier flicks like Peggy Sue Got Married, Timecop, and Groundhog Day. One of my favorite’s as a child was Flight of the Navigator. I smile even thinking about that movie, because like Back to the Future, the main characters are young (though Flight of the Navigator’s protagonist was much closer to my age when I first saw it).
I saw most of these movies because of how much I enjoyed Marty and Doc’s antics in Back to the Future. In the same way that I owe my love of fantasy to movies like Red Sonja and Labyrinth, I owe my love of science fiction to films like Back to the Future.
While many physicists will argue that time travel is impossible, science fiction writers continue to push the boundaries and write about the concept because we keep asking questions with no answers.
That eagerness to answer those questions is what makes me write. It’s what makes most of us in the SF/F community write–in hopes that some day, we’ll have the answer to our what ifs and whys.
