Signs of the Apocalypse: No Time Travel for Chinese Sci-Fi

BoingBoing has an interesting little blurb about how Chinese censors are banning portrayal of time travel in sci-fi films or television.  I see this is a bad thing.

Listen, it isn’t that I expect a whole lot from the Chinese censorship programs, especially because I think that censorship is a pretty lame thing in general.  But taking time travel out of science fiction is like taking the tusks off of a walrus; sure it might be neat to look at, but seriously it is nowhere near as fun anymore.

Time travel is a staple of any cultures quality science fiction production and when you have the worlds largest population suddenly being denied the pleasure of time traveling fiction, I feel like you run the risk of creating huge discontent.  Imagine the poor chinese children who cannot dream of being able to travel to the future with flying cars, or back in time to rodeo up some dinosaurs.  If you take away time travel in fiction then you essentially take away the dreams of the masses (which might be a central part of Chinese censorship reasoning, who knows).

Anyways, I feel like such a decision is apocalyptic because it deprives merit from great works of art like the entirety of the Back to the Future franchise.  Without such creative fiction what does a culture have to live for?  The censors say “Many stories are totally made-up and are made to strain for an effect of novelty. The producers and writers are treating the serious history in a frivolous way, which should by no means be encouraged anymore.”  Well duh!  Who wants to treat history seriously anyways?  It is totally more fun to imagine time traveling back to the Revolutionary War only to discover that George Washington was a warlock.  Where you say “frivolous” oh Chinese censors, I say “Flippin’ sweat ass shit!”

~ by Nathaniel on April 11, 2011.