In Blackadder Back & Forth, on the brink of Y2K, Lord Blackadder presents his dinner guests with an amazing trick…a time machine. The trick is just that, a trick, his plan is to walk in and our of the prop while his servant, Baldrick, grabs the items that the party guests ask for from history: a centurian helmet, the Duke of Wellington’s wellingtons, and 200 year old underwear. The bumbling host accidentally sends himself and his servant back in time and they fight a T-Rex, bows before Queen Elizabeth I, punches Shakespeare, and bumbles through history as he and Baldrick try to remember how they set up the time machine. I won’t spoil the end but Blackadder Back & Forth shows the depth of science fiction and alternate histories. Again, like all our other posts here, they don’t take themselves too seriously, but they still deal with the same limits that all Sci-Fi does (time travel paradoxes). The alternate histories engage with genres outside of Sci-Fi in an interesting and thought provoking (although funny) manner. After all, what would happen if someone had punched Shakespeare and bullied him out of writing his plays!
10/10 would reccomend.
Yesssss! So glad you posted this! (I am a fan of Blackadder, of course) You are right about how even the lightest kind of comic sf still has to deal with the paradoxes of time travel, and how funny those paradoxes can actually be. On another note, since you brought up Blackadder, one of the things I as a scholar of medieval literature find fascinating is how often medieval scholars love sf. Scholars of the Renaissance, for example, generally show less interest in sf. There are even some studies on the connections between medieval lit/philosophy/culture and sf. Very interesting, considering how often the Middle Ages are used as a model for fantasy world building.