Lang Thompson wonders:



> Hi,  A friend just told me about an episode of "Angel" where he became
> fully human but finally decided to change back with the catch that the
> story went back to the beginning and only Angel remembered what had
> happened in this alternate reality that he rejected.  This concept sounds
> very very familiar to me but I'm having trouble placing it.  Anybody know
> of a similar film/TV episode/book?

SF writers have toyed with such premises for some time, although the
story "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" (by, I think, Phillip Jose
Farmer) and Joanna Russ's THE FEMALE MAN are the only ones that come
readily to mind.

The Star Trek franchise has played with such paradoxes in a number of
episodes, maybe most wittily and elegantly in several episodes of DEEP
SPACE 9, which even introduces a "Bureau of Temporal Anomolies" whose
business is to keep such conundrums from getting out of hand.

Almost all of the QUANTUM LEAP episodes were based on a similar concept.

Beatty's HEAVEN CAN WAIT and its original version, HERE COMES MR.
JORDAN, has a similar theme.

The BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy also uses similar paradoxes.

Don Larsson
----------------------
Donald Larsson
Minnesota State U, Mankato
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