Interstellar {2014} and the Deus Ex Machina of Time Travel
If you've been around for a while, you may have heard me say before that I dislike time travel in fiction. I just do. There are (a very few) exceptions, of course, but, for the most part, if I know that a story involves time travel, I can give it a friendly "Not for me" and move along my merry way with no hard feelings on either side. I've more or less always known that this technique is one of my fictional no-go's, but I haven't always known why — or, at least, I haven't always known fully why. That changed when I watched Christopher Nolan's Interstellar for the first time a few months ago. (Yep, this post has been in draft that long. *coughs*) If you don't know, Interstellar tells a fairly familiar story: a retired military-pilot-turned-farmer living on a futuristic Earth teetering at the cusp of ecological Armageddon is recruited by a super-secret branch of NASA. His mission, should he choose to accept it, is to undertake a Perilous Que