Rooting For No One: Sports as Religion

NOTE: This is not meant to be insulting to sports fans. This is just an explanation of my perspective. I've told plenty of people that I am not into sports and yet every now and then, when presented with a game or sports discussion, people often seem genuinely surprised when my reaction ranges from disinterested to incomprehension. 

I don't get understand sports. OK, on a practical level I understand the games. I don't understand fandom. I've really tried. Many of my sports-inclined friends have tried to explain it to me, I've tried rooting for teams, I've tried caring about the camaraderie. I don't get it.

Not only do I not get it, I don't get it on the deepest of levels. Any reason I have been given for sports fandom doesn't stick. Liken it to something else and it comes across as a flawed metaphor. Show me a psychological paper on it and it becomes all the less appealing. It doesn't just not click with me, it sets off warning signals.

Part of the reason is that it fills a lot of roles that religion usually does but it does it far too close to religion for my comfort. At services and sporting events you have a large number of people come together to revel in the fact that their group is right regardless of statistical evidence. In both situations fellowship is conveyed through constant affirmations of being correct and unified clapping and sometimes chanting. The people espousing their belief in something larger usually come to their affiliation arbitrarily, by birth or geography, rather than through deep analysis of facts. I know this last one to be true because I asked for clarification when some of my friends complained that many recent fans of a team only rooted for them because they had been winning a lot in the bast couple of years. I asked them what the problem was, as I would assume one would want to support the best team. Apparently this is not so and I was told that loyalty (faith?) was valued more.

I listen to the Sklarboro Country podcast because I like their comedy, not for the sports. They sometimes try to sell the nerd aspect of fandom. I can see where they're coming from as far as statistics go but too much about fans seems completely  arbitrary. While the mechanics of fantasy football mirror Dungeon's and Dragons I find sports nerds and any type of classic nerds aren't the same. A music, movie or comic book nerd is a fan of the content. A sports nerd seems more a fan of the medium.

The closest comparison I can think of to break down fandom into something I get still makes it come up wanting. So here I go.

Sports are kind of like movies. The players are the actors. The coach is the director. The teams are the production companies. On that level I can understand certain things. It's obvious why someone would be devoted to a player; they are the ones who are out there performing and if they're good then you can reasonably expect a good performance from them on a regular basis. I get respecting a coach. Their job, like a director, is to be able to teach meaning to the players and give them a big picture to play into. But what I'm left with is team fandom. Essentially a team is nothing more than a company. The players change, the coaches come and go. A team is a production company. And while there are fans of George Clooney and Steven Spielberg there are no fans of Universal Pictures. There is no reasonable person who says, "Oh, 20th Century Fox has a new movie coming out. I bet it's going to be good." I can't comprehend how a team represents a consistent enough set of variables to logically be a fan of it.

Unless you really like their colors.

Review of 11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63

by Stephen King

*possible spoilers*

I've recently read a string of mediocre novels and put out a call for something to really enjoy. I was recommended 11/22/63 bu Stephen King. I approached it with apprehension. There are a number of things about this book that would have stopped me from picking it up on my own. It's historical fiction, which I generally find dull. It's first person which I see as an over used style to let the author feign the depth of a main character by making everything seem more immediate and intense. And it's by Stephen King.

I don't think I've read king since I was maybe 14 at the latest and when I did it was to put me to sleep. I have always found him heavy handed, long winded, nostalgic to the point of laughable, and formulaic. I was willing to give him a second chance and was told that this was the novel to win me over.

It wasn't.

The basic story is that a man steps through a literal door in time that takes him back to the late 50s and he plans on using this to stop the Kennedy assassination. See the title? Good. And from that I was actually interested. I put aside my reservations and plowed through this thing. And I was surprised that the Kennedy story was actually pretty darned good. But there's a problem.

The problem is that Stephen King gets in the way of the story. Literally. The entire first act of this tome is a complete waste where King sets the main character up to be himself. He goes to a small town that has a general sense of foreboding, finds that something possible magical and definitely evil is driving people to victimize children. He encounters friends that have some sort of magical power. There are comments about a clown that lives in the sewers and kills the kids. It is literally all stuff that we've seen before.

This town becomes the cover story the time traveler uses. He presents himself as a writer who is penning IT. Then the book focuses on a romance starting with the next act. I suppose it's necessary as he has no actual motivation for going into the past other than a diner cook tells him that stopping the assassination would make the future a much nicer place. With the romance he now has a reason to spend years hiding out until the trip to Dallas. But this romance gets in the way of both his mission and the furthering of the story. He splits his time between his girlfriend and his mission and therefore the narrative gets watered down as well. He's not a compelling person (he's King's avatar) and spends more than half his time trying to make a life for himself in the past.

I got bored waiting for the author and the main character to get back to their mission. Eventually they do but, thanks to King's need to make his settings vaguely sinister, time itself sends car accidents and unfortunate minutiae to thwart his attempts to change things. Maybe it's because I've read science fiction before but I found this turn a trite one to add drama and conflict where there was none. I won't say what the outcome of his rescue attempt is but I will say this: after the climax there's a halfhearted attempt to show a bigger picture that fails terribly. It comes far to late and doesn't hold up without further explanation. Which never comes. Instead there's a wistful, and essentially pointless, denouement. Perhaps it would have been a more satisfying  ending if I had picked up what I thought was to be a romance centered novel but I didn't. I was sold and signed up for a time travel/historical story. It's like going to see Back to the Future Part 2 and instead seeing a showing of Somewhere in Time.

On a scale of -5 to +5 stars 11/22/63 gets -2.

I would have given it a -1 but I was interested in the Kennedy plot so I was really bothered when King failed to deliver on it.

Time Travel Made Easy

I recently started 11/22/63 by Stephen King. The plot is a man is presented with a door that leads back in time and he goes through it in order to stop JFK from being assassinated. I’ll leave the critique of King for another time, but one thing that stood out to me was that he spends about 10-15 pages explaining the concept of “travel back in time to change the future” by way of "watershed event" and "butterfly effect". While the process of making those changes can be complicated and convoluted the idea that things in the past will affect the future is a pretty simple one. It’s no different than something in the present changing the future.

And then I realized that King actually puts a lot into this book to explain in unnecessarily long passages the most basic concepts of science fiction, concepts that should easily be picked up through the story. The huge data dump in the beginning of the novel shouldn’t be needed. And then I realized that King has made the same mistake that a lot of people make. He thinks time travel is complicated.

Time travel is simple.

Oops. I’ve let out the secret. But truly, the basics of time travel really aren’t that difficult. Sure, you can wind the narrative around obfuscation and overlapping trips, like in the wonderfully infuriating Primer, but the basics are always easy to grasp. Any storyteller that pretends otherwise is either trying to seem overly clever for dealing with it, doesn’t get it themselves, or thinks their audience is pretty dim. So here’s the breakdown.

The bottom most level of time travel is moving from one point in time to another but not in the usual way. We all deal with regular time travel which is into the future at the speed of one second every second. In H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine we get a really nice visual of someone sitting in a chair and watching time rewind as well as fast forward. The rate is changed. There are also instantaneous jumps in time travel fiction. That would be like Doctor Who, Back to the Future, Time Bandits… the list goes on quite a bit. Even King’s 11/22/63 has this. Step through a door and you’re decades in the past. Fast as that.

Where it gets a little more complicated is what kind of time the character is travel through. But don’t worry, it’s still a much simpler concept than most people expect. A lot of time different versions of time are rationalized or justified with technobable but that’s like putting fancy clothes on a mannequin. The model underneath is almost always eerily simple and usually one of three choices. With mannequins it’s man, woman or child. With time I’ve named the three fundamental forms solid, liquid and gas.

• Solid – Time is completely unchanging. If you go back in time and do something then you were there before and that action has already happened. Time travel is a closed loop. There is no free will, everything is predetermined. Or at least determined the first time events occur.
• If you travel back and step on an early amphibian then that animal had already died in the past.
• Examples
• Time Traveler’s Wife
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - Since they come back to the present and nothing noticeable has changed we know that it is either a solid or liquid timeline. Small details, like their time loop escape from the jail cell seems to suggest a solid timeline.
• Liquid – Events can be changed but small changes will get passed over. You can visit and things won’t change but if you make a large change then it will affect the future.
• If you travel back and step on an early amphibian then another will end up evolving to eventually fill a similar role in history.
• Examples
• Quantum Leap
• Back to the Future
• Gas – Every little thing a future visitor does in the past will have consequences in the future. This is the scenario where the butterfly effect is often brought up.
• If you travel back and step on an early amphibian then perhaps you will return to a future of intelligent sea life. Or there will be no life at all.
• Examples
• A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury
• Time and Punishment, the Simpsons parody of the above short story
• Uncertain
• Doctor Who - The very definition of inconsistency for the sake of a story. This universe seems to vacillate between 
• Primer - Evidently a malleable timeline though the range is so short it's impossible to tell the extent of changes to the future.
• Star Trek
• Solid or liquid. The novelization of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales) suggests a solid universe as the employee Scott gives the formula for transparent aluminium to is the historically credited inventor.
  HOWEVER! The new Star Trek begins with an event that branches the timeline so the new Trek movies take place in a changeable timeline. Since the crew still gets together I'm going to call it as liquid.

And that is the basic gist of time travel. Once you figure out the material of time then the events should just fit into the template. Of course, some fictional universe will change their physics. The Terminator universe is notorious for this. The first movie is a solid (possibly). Kyle Reese seems to always be John Connor’s father. His trip back and sleeping the Sara Connor is part of repeating events. Terminator 2 seems to be a liquid universe since large changes are made (blowing up Cyberdyne) and that gets things changed in the future (avoiding the robot uprising). Terminator 3 tries to pretend they are the same form of time and end up with a soft solid, something like rubber. Events can be pulled and bent but the main points are always there. The war always starts, the robots always revolt. The TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles can actually be somewhere along the liquid/gas rules. Small changes in the past are seen to make small changes in the future. Since the timeline isn’t very long long it’s impossible to tell how soft their version of time is, but changes can be made.

That's your time travel cheat sheet. The type of time that a story deals with is infinitely more important with the mechanism. Travel may be achieved by a magical trinket, a medical condition or a machine but as long as you know the timeline is solid then it's not that confusing.  A writer can justify time travel with as convoluted a device as they want. Primer uses a mysterious effect of cold temperature physics. Planet of the Apes used relativistic effects in a fast moving space capsule. Back to the Future has a car with little to no technical explanation. And while each of those mechanisms helps with building atmosphere and style it's not necessary to understand the inventions to still understand the world. Do not let talk of quantum physics or dozens of pages detailing the definition of "watershed event" or "butterfly effect" scare you. Just see what time does and it'll all work out in the end.

Or go horribly wrong and destroy the world you know.

• The "Not Actually Time Travel" bonus list
• Terra Nova and Michael Crichton's Timeline - Both of these are actually alternate universes. While stories like Back to the Future play with branching timelines these two stories involve parallel earths that already exist and just run next to ours. Calling these time travel is like saying that going to Canada puts you 10 years in the USA's past. While it may look similar it's not true.
• A Christmas Carol - This is more akin to astral viewing. The "travel" is hazy and even the future  vision is yet to happen so it's not much of a trip.