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118. Which Fantastical Stories Help Us Celebrate Human Life?
Fantastical Truth Podcast, Jun 28, 2022

Tilly
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Tilly
“Written in 1986, Frank E. Peretti’s novelette Tilly may feel melodramatic to today’s readers, but remains a tearful tale of brokenness and redemption.”
—Lorehaven on Jun 24, 2022

The Wonderland Trials
“Although indebted to a classic, The Wonderland Trials is inventive and colorful in its own right, abundantly able to charm and to intrigue.”
—Lorehaven on Jun 24, 2022

Rise of the Earthborn
“Societal intrigue plus steampunk flair and a dash of romance help make Emma Buenen’s Rise of the Earthborn a solid extra-biblical adventure.”
—Lorehaven on Jun 17, 2022

Elite
“Elite explores parallels to the early Church, beautifully intertwining faith and action in this high-stakes post-apocalyptic adventure.”
—Lorehaven on Jun 10, 2022

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118. Which Fantastical Stories Help Us Celebrate Human Life?
Fantastical Truth, Jun 28, 2022

117. Why Should You Build a Fantastical Lending Library? | with L.G. McCary
Fantastical Truth, Jun 21, 2022

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Yes, Speculative Faith Is Closed, At Least For Now
E. Stephen Burnett, Dec 30

Last Stands, Custer, General Gordon, and Being a Christian Warrior
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How Christian Must Christian Fiction Be?
Rebecca LuElla Miller, May 24

Gender In Fiction: The Implication Of Failure
Rebecca LuElla Miller, May 10

Making a Story Visual UPDATE: Behind the Scenes of the Animal Eye Comic
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Lorehaven helps Christian fans explore fantastical stories for Christ’s glory: fantasy, science fiction, and beyond. Articles, the library, reviews, podcasts, gifts, and the Lorehaven Guild community help fans discern and enjoy the best Christian-made fantastical stories, applying their meanings to the real world Jesus Christ calls us to serve. Subscribe free to get any updates you choose and to access the Lorehaven Guild.
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Speculative Love, Part 3: Standing The Test Of Time

By way of wrapping up last week’s discussion of romantic love in science fiction, or the lack thereof, I want to highlight a sub-genre that seems to grasp the power of the emotional bond between a man and woman devoted to each other: The time-travel story.
Fred Warren on Sep 27, 2011
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By way of wrapping up last week’s discussion of romantic love in science fiction, or the lack thereof, I want to highlight a sub-genre that seems to grasp the power of the emotional bond between a man and woman devoted to each other: The time-travel story.

In a world where romantic love is defined by hormone-charged dalliances, throwaway relationships of convenience, and spur-of-the-moment “hookups,” the idea of a love that endures across the years in defiance of the ravages of time can seem alien indeed. Yet, I think human beings, deep down, long for love that lasts. Wedding vows that can seem trite and unrealistic in our cynical modern culture still resonate with our souls: “…to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health, to love and to cherish ’till death do us part.”

Last week, I objected to the “science fiction romance” as lacking a substantial speculative element–it may be set in an exotic locale somewhere beyond known space, but it doesn’t use that extraordinary opportunity in a way that makes a difference. There’s form, but no substance.

Enter the time-travel story. It’s often a romance, or has a romance embedded in it. It’s a metaphor writ large, the story of two people struggling to hold onto each other across the years…or centuries. Love that is figuratively and literally timeless. Love that endures despite the passage of time and its inexorable corrosive force. There are difficulties. Some might protest that time travel is silly, inherently paradoxical, and lacking in common-sense.

To that I would answer, “Big deal. So is love.” And that only makes the metaphor stronger. Love flies in the face of common sense and our own mortality. It is powerful despite our weaknesses, and it doesn’t give up no matter how vanishing the odds of success. As Paul reminds us in I Corinthians 13, “Love is patient…It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

Finding examples of romance in a time-travel story isn’t difficult, whether we’re talking about books, movies, or television. Here are a few:

“Somewhere in Time”: In this film adaptation of the novel Bid Time Return, by Edward Matheson, a self-absorbed playwright is smitten by the image of a woman in an old photograph and employs a kind of self-hypnosis to unstick himself from time and travel into the past to meet her. Although the premise is a little lightweight, the romance works, supported by some lavish cinematography of northern Michigan’s Mackinac Island and a musical score that plucks at the heartstrings.

The Forever War: Joe Haldeman’s novel is set centuries into the future and told through the eyes of a soldier endlessly fighting a mysterious alien race. It’s primarily an allegory of the author’s experience in and after the Vietnam War. There’s a strong love story at its heart, though, a romance both hampered and facilitated by lifespans extended hundreds of years via time dilation from near-lightspeed travel.

“Back to the Future”: The cinematic adventures of Doc Brown and Marty McFly focus on Marty’s growth and enlightenment from hot-headed idiot to someone who understands the value of friendship, family, and, yes, love, as he snarls and unsnarls the threads of past and future. In Part III, absent-minded Professor Brown meets his match in a forward-thinking Old West schoolmarm–it’s a sweet and adventuresome love-story-within-a-story.

Star Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever”: A personal Trek favorite, one of a couple of stories where the womanizing Kirk stumbles into genuine love, though it’s sadly torn from him in the end to save human history from an unspeakable alteration. Of course, the good ship Enterprise is Kirk’s only enduring love, which might come up again in next week’s column.

I’ll leave mention of everyone’s favorite time-tripping Doctor to our resident fans.

Plenty of examples, but what about an exemplar, a story that captures the enduring quality of love I’ve been talking about? Here’s a possibility:

The Time Traveler’s Wife: I wanted to read Audrey Niffenegger’s novel first, but my lovely wife beat me to the punch and rented the movie. The synopsis is linked here, for sake of brevity, but this is a story about a man whose peculiar affliction sends him bouncing backward and forward in time, and his one true anchor is the woman who loves him, never knowing when he’ll vanish and when he’ll return–or what age he might be when they’re reunited. She waits, and endures, and they both struggle with the challenges of their disjointed life while cherishing every moment they share together.

The critics didn’t show much love to the film version, but I liked it. I even got a little misty-eyed a couple of times, and that doesn’t happen to me very often. Having spent much of my married life in the military, with all the short-notice travel and frequent separations that entails, the story felt poignantly familiar–I may not jump around in time, but I know the difficulties of life on an uncertain calendar, and the profound joy of finding a person willing to share that life with me, even though it often means waiting and enduring, holding it all together in my absence.

She is a gift from God, and no matter how far or long we are apart, I will always and forever return to her.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Next week: alien gbznetnxyn.

Fred Warren
Fred was born in Tacoma, Washington, but spent most of his formative years in California, where his parents pastored a couple of small churches. He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1983, and spent 24 years in the Air Force as a bomber navigator, flight-test navigator, and military educator. He retired from the Air Force in 2007, and now works as a government contractor in eastern Kansas, providing computer simulation support for Army training.Fred has been married for 25 years to the girl who should have been his high school sweetheart, and has three kids, three dogs, and a mortgage. When he's not writing or reading, he enjoys running, hiking, birdwatching, stargazing, and playing around with computers.Writing has always been a big part of his life, but he kept it mostly private until a few years ago, when it occurred to him that if he was ever going to get published, he needed to get serious about it. Since then, he's written more than twenty short stories that have been published in a variety of print and online magazines, and a novel, The Muse, that debuted in November 2009 from Splashdown Books, which was a finalist for the 2010 American Christian Fiction Writers Carol Award for book of the year in the speculative genre. Speculative fiction is his first love, but he writes the occasional bit of non-fiction or poetry, just to keep things interesting.
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  1. Galadriel says:
    September 27, 2011 at 10:36 am

    >I’ll leave mention of everyone’s favorite time-tripping Doctor to our resident fans.

    *takes permission and runs away with it!*

    Although explicite romance really only became a part of the show with the revival, there were some elements in the Classic series as well.  The First Doctor inadvertantly got married to an Aztec woman, and the Eighth was the first to kiss a companion.
    New Doctors:
    Nine had the beginnings of something with Rose, but didn’t act on it until after the whole Bad Wolf thing…
    Ten: Primarily Rose, but also made kissyface at Madame du Pompedour, Astrid, and Queen Elizabeth I.  Possibly others that I can’t remember
    Eleven…has something kissy going on with River Song at some point in his knotty future, and a finally disclosed kissyface with the TARDIS. (The latter is not as weird as it sounds. Watch The Doctor’s Wife. Tearjerker:(

    Companions
    Rose: kissyface on the Doctor.
    Martha: onesided kissyface
    Donna: NO KISSYFACE 🙂
    Amy–She has…issues. And a job as a kissagram. But when she and Rory stop pussyfooting around, they make a wonderful couple.

    I think my favorite Whoniverse couples are Amy and Rory and River and the Doctor. They compliment each other well and make good use of the difficulties in timey-whimy romance.

    To reuse quotes I placed on the last post:

    River Song about the Doctor:
        Every time we meet, I know him more, he knows me less. I live for the days when I see him. But I know that every time I do, I’m one step further away. The day’s coming when I’ll look into that man’s eyes, my Doctor, and he won’t have the faintest idea who I am. And I think it’s going to kill me.

    Rory to the Doctor about Amy’s time in the Pandorica:
    Rory: Will she be safer if I stay? Look me in the eye and tell me she wouldn’t be safer.
    Doctor: Rory…
    Rory: Answer me!
    Doctor: Yes. Obviously. 
    Rory: Then how could I leave her?

    Reply
  2. Kessie says:
    September 27, 2011 at 10:38 am

    To this whole column today, I have to say, “Hear hear!”

    Reply
  3. Bob says:
    September 27, 2011 at 12:58 pm

    Why isn’t romantic love (unless you’re a Mormon or Muslim) a part of heaven’s experience? Sometimes the thought is deeply disappointing. Other times, it just makes sense – an eternal marriage to …

    Reply
    • E. Stephen Burnett says:
      September 27, 2011 at 1:14 pm

      For the same reason we don’t do animal sacrifices anymore — Christ has fulfilled that earthly foreshadowing of  eternal reality.

      I’m quite sure, though, that husbands and wives will continue to be best friends in the New Heavens and New Earth (which will, after all, be very much like our physical Earth today, only cleansed of sin and transformed into that fantasy world under Christ’s rule). That’s what my wife and I promise each other, anyway! 😀

      Notwithstanding one particular benefit of marriage, I’m quite sure many of the others we know now — closeness, companionship, great conversation — will be fulfilled in the New Earth in other ways.

      That’s different from many Christian books imagining the after-world, though, which not only neglect the New Earth in favor of the present-day “intermediate state” Heaven, but seem to act as if God will “neuter” people’s desires or even wipe their memories. But it was George MacDonald who, when confronted with this notion, asked, “Shall we be greater fools in Paradise than we are here?” And that has Biblical support; after all, in the intermediate state (not yet the New Earth), believers know they were murdered (Rev. 5). So surely they’ll also recall old-Earth pleasures, and will find even greater fulfillment of them.

      Reply
  4. Maria Tatham says:
    September 28, 2011 at 9:01 pm

    Fred, outstanding! writing, thinking, and sentiment! I enjoyed the responses!

    Reply
  5. Fred Warren says:
    September 29, 2011 at 12:25 pm

    Galadriel: I like the fact that the Doctor always has a Companion. There might be short lapses, and it’s not always a romantic situation (e.g., K-9), but I think it’s significant that despite all his knowledge, experience, talents, and functional immortality, there’s still something missing in the Doctor’s life, and it takes another person to fill that void.

    Bob & Stephen: Though I don’t have any Biblical support for it, I suspect there will be room for romance in heaven–perfected romance, whatever that means. The Mormon idea of deified marriages overreaches, and a gender-neutral eternity of emotionless Platonic discourse seems something less than divine. At any rate, I’m content to wait for that part of God’s plan to be revealed, and I’m sure it will be much better than anything I can imagine. 

    Reply
  6. Stories With Romance Or Stories With Love? — SpecFaith says:
    April 20, 2015 at 2:48 pm

    […] And if you’d like to read more on the subject of love in speculative fiction, I recommend a series of Spec Faith posts published in 2011 by then columnist Fred Warren: Speculative Love, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. […]

    Reply

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Lorehaven helps Christian fans explore fantastical stories for Christ’s glory: fantasy, science fiction, and beyond. Articles, the library, reviews, podcasts, gifts, and the Lorehaven Guild community help fans discern and enjoy the best Christian-made fantastical stories, applying their meanings to the real world Jesus Christ calls us to serve. Subscribe free to get any updates you choose and to access the Lorehaven Guild.