Time-travel has long been a staple of genre films, novels and television shows serving as everything from a backdrop to teen-comedy hi-jinks in Back to Future to thoughtful contemplation in Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder. Perhaps the craziest of the time travel paradoxes was cooked up by Robert Heinlein in his classic short story All You Zombies. But in the ‘real world’ time travel is thought to be impossible. The world-famous late physicist Professor Sir Stephen Hawking famously once threw a party at the University of Cambridge which was, he said, “a welcome reception for future time travellers,” a tongue-in-cheek reference his 1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively an impossibility. The ‘grandfather paradox’ outlines both philosopher’s and physicist’s main objection to time-travel: the possible violation of causality. The term for this comes from the paradox’s common description: a person travels to the past and kills their own grandfather before the conception of their father or mother, which prevents the time traveller’s existence. Whilst time-travel itself remains in the realm of pure speculation, the possible results of the violation of the principle of causality and how nature may prevent them, are hotly debated topics beyond the realms of pulp-fiction with philosophers and physicists speculating on possible solutions.
Top Posts & Pages
Liddell’s Ghost
Click image to read my short story, 'Liddell’s Ghost' in Cygnus, the Journal of Speculative Fiction.
Changed
Click image to read my short story 'Changed' in The Cynic Online Magazine.
First Date
Click image to read my short story 'First Date' in Aphelion, the Webzine of sci-fi and fantasy.
Ghost Walk
Click image to read my short story 'Ghost Walk' in Aphelion, the Webzine of sci-fi and fantasy.
M R James
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Ghosts of Christmas Past
‘There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas,’ wrote Jerome K. Jerome in the introduction to his darkly comic collection Told After Supper (1891), ‘something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails’. Dickens would no doubt agree, […]
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M R James’s Suffolk
The macabre beneath the landscape is not dispelled by nearness to the sea. What Henry James knew, and described in English Hours (1905) – the strangeness present on a flattened seashore – M R James (no blood relation, although the two were acquainted) expressed in two of his best-known ghost stories: Oh, Whistle, and I’ll […]
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A Warning to the Curious
Here’s a real festive treat. In 2000 the BBC produced a series called Ghost Stories for Christmas, with Christopher Lee in which Lee played M R James reading four of his own stories. Lee, who actually once met James, obviously enjoyed making this series and A Warning to the Curious is a real highlight – enjoy!
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Lost Hearts
I have been haunted by the writings of M R James since childhood but when asked what is my favourite of all his ghostly tales I’ve never fully been able to answer. Lost Hearts, an early tale which apparently James didn’t much care for, and which only appeared in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to […]
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A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Tractate Middoth
Here’s a real treat to conclude the series of Christmas ghost stories that I’ve been posting for the last few weeks – the BBC adaptation of The Tractate Middoth from just a couple of years ago. Fingers crossed they do another one this year!
Ghost Cities 