Reading or conducting an interview with Norwegian comics genius Jason can be kind of frustrating, because he’s just not a fountain of words. But Brian Heater gets him to yap about as much as possible:
That multimedia aspect doesn’t interest you? Doing slides and presenting the work?
No, I don’t really like to talk about my comics. They should speak for themselves.
Indeed. But in news we’re surprised that Splash Page hasn’t jumped on already, Jason lets slip the info that I KILLED ADOLF HITLER, his time travel masterpiece, has been optioned for a film.
Have you been approached by anyone about adapting one of your comics?
People have expressed interest in doing movies versions. One of the books, I Killed Adolf Hitler has been optioned. I’m not holding my breath though. If it happens, it happens. It just seems like a small miracle every time a good movie is made, especially in Hollywood.
We won’t hold our breath either — and it’s certainly not necessary–but it would be a great story for a movie. Is there anyone who would be up for the task of directing this tale? What do YOU think?
I’m afraid that approach to time travel is so outdated, there’s not much that can be done with it, IMO. Assuming that the effects of the assassination aren’t worked out in detail, in the form of an alternate history, whether the assassin realizes he made a mistake and goes back in time again to prevent his own action, or the assassination changes history to the extent that the assassin isn’t born and a paradox results, the end result is still a mess. That’s the kind of story the alternate timeline system specifically eliminates.
SRS
SRS — a word of advice. If you want to live a happy life, don’t try to analyze the science in Jason stories.
Once you’ve got time-travel, nothing can ever be outdated.
p.s. I Killed Adolph Hitler wasn’t about time travel and paradoxes anyway.
I Killed Adolph Hitler is one of the best stories I think I’ve ever read. It is in absolutely no way about time travel or paradoxes. The time travel is just a device for moving the story forward.
Next, someone will say The Last Musketeer doesn’t work because everyone knows you don’t breath on Mars without a spacesuit.
Here’s a (publisher’s?) description of I Killed Adolf Hitler:
The story as described doesn’t work as time travel. It’s impossible for anyone to travel into his own future, and the life of the would-be assassin would overlap his birth, but in absurdist fiction, the plot details don’t matter much, so I’m willing to believe that the story succeeds as intended.
In SF, though, there’s simply no point in telling single-timeline time travel stories any more. Time travel paradoxes are logical impossibilities, and stories in which the leads strive to avoid causing paradoxes, or fix them when they happen, will invariably be repetitious. I’ve seen far too many stories over the last several years in which the point of the stories is to create paradoxes and other time travel snarls and treat them as dramatic problems to be solved. But the stories didn’t make sense, of course, so readers responded by complaining that they didn’t make sense and, in some cases, complained that time travel stories in general don’t make sense. That’s bullshit. It’s the shared responsibility of the writer and editor to ensure that the time travel story makes sense, as would be the case with any published story.
SRS
SRS: I warned you!
Yeah, fortunately, I Killed Adolph Hitler is neither a sci-fi story nor an exploration of time-travel paradoxes. You’re complaining about something that’s utterly inconsequential to the book.