Alas Babylon Parallel

T

Temporal Recon1

Temporal Novice
Among those who study the JT posts, the book Alas Babylon by Pat Frank (his pen name) is known to closely follow the Titor plot line in a general (and sometimes very specific) sense. It was published in the early 60's (IIRC).

Many have pointed to this improbable parallel as evidence of a hoax; that the Titor author(s) merely took Frank's idea of survival in post-apocalyptic Central Florida as inspiration for the Titor posts.

I have a question for those who have been following and researching this longer than I:

How did we find out about this book? Who was the genius to recognize its close parallels to the JT story?

TR

 
Among those who study the JT posts, the book Alas Babylon by Pat Frank (his pen name) is known to closely follow the Titor plot line in a general (and sometimes very specific) sense. It was published in the early 60's (IIRC).Many have pointed to this improbable parallel as evidence of a hoax; that the Titor author(s) merely took Frank's idea of survival in post-apocalyptic Central Florida as inspiration for the Titor posts.
I have a question for those who have been following and researching this longer than I:

How did we find out about this book? Who was the genius to recognize its close parallels to the JT story?

TR
Click to expand...
I was one, along with one other Member who recognized the similarities.
Younger members had never heard of the book, just like they had never heard of The Bedford Incident, Advise & Consent, On the Beach or Fail-Safe; all Cold War novels written in the late 1960's to the mid 1960's. But I'd seen the films and read each of those novels several times. They had all been on my required reading list for high school American Lit. in the 1960's. Picking up the similarities between Alas, Babylon! and the Titor Saga was not very difficult.

I have to believe that Boomer miscalulated the age of his target audience. He wrote the story assuming that no one in the audience would have ever heard of the rather obscure novel, Alas, Babylon! He probably guessed the general age of the members on TTI was 16 to 25. However that wasn't the case. We had a few high schoolers but the age of the members tended to be from the late 20's to the late 50's. There were several people that recognized the book once we posted the references to Alas, Babylon!

In fact, there were so damned many plot germs lifted by Boomer directly from Frank's novel that we simply couldn't find all of them. Titor made a big deal about salt shortages in his Florida. Chapter 11-13 in Alas, Babylon! are all about their salt shortage, the salt pool that they discovered and the boat trip they had to make in order to recover some of the salt. We missed that one back then. We got the 12-volt batteries and bicycle tires but missed the salt. :)

 
Titor made no references to salt or its shortage.Who was the one other "oldster" who recognized the parallel besides yourself?
Kindly

TR
Click to expand...
This kind of looks like either you or Darby remember something from a parallel timeline. But which one of you? This is the first I've heard about the salt reference too. I guess it's time to reread the JT posts and find out if the past has changed.
I notice changes to the past very frequently. But have never seen others talk about this except in the JT email experiment.

 
TR, John talked about running oranges up and down the river with his father. In the book, the characters do just that.

There is also a strong parallel between Steve Jackson's Time Travelling GURPS game and the John Titor story. His entire world seems to be taken from the time travel plot of those games and Alas Babylon. Whoever was behind the "John Titor" persona was probably a science fiction reader, aspiring writer and a role-player. If you can match someone with that description, you might find who the guy is.

 
I am a science fiction reader, an aspiring writer, and a role player but only in the beginning stages. There was a book that I bought in 2004 that seemed like it was co-wrote by John Titor and the book reminded me of the movie A Beaufiful Mind. The two were similar.

 
I read it and took notes while I did and I found many interesting things in the book, although I have not come to any concrete conclusions. If anyone is interested, I can dig up my notebook. It has been a while.

 
Back
Top