At odds with my naturalism! *SPOILERS* kinda

The whole idea of time travel within the book is that time isn't linear, that it's possible to slip out of time if you will. If you reach a certain state of mind and crash a car, or any physical trauma I suppose, it's possible to go back, or forward, out of your time. If you kill your ancestor then you become immortal, is just one of the many theories relating to the grandfather paradox. Killing your ancestor you'll seise to exist, but you can't just stop existing, making you a paradox forcing you out of time.

The incest involves some suspension of disbelief. It's a form of selective breeding if you will. The idea is that through the generation only the dominate genes will surface if the father is the same man. The only problem with that is that dominate genes aren't always the desired genes, ie. dwarfism. The idea is to remove all the junk DNA from a person, it's just that so many things could go wrong that to get someone to get the genes to improve their sense of smell is nigh impossible. It's theoretically possible, but there are too many variables for it to ever truly be successful.

I hope that kind explains it, ones confusing metaphysics, the other confusing theoretical evolution.

That's basically what I thought at first, but I guess I've looked too much into science to know none of that is at all plausible. I was hoping someone could give me an idea of how it COULD be plausible. I guess not.

The immortality thing is just absolutely ridiculous. I can deal with the time travel thing (although I wouldn't call it nonlinear), since if it actually could be considered another dimension, it's possible it's set in stone with time paths of different systems flowing through time from specialized metaphysical circumstances that were already set, so the single universe designed itself by random chance at that (however improbable that may be). And you're right, the dominant gene isn't always the desired gene.

Also, I found this on wikipedia:

This is sorta what's going on, and this is referring to how you can make a near genetic copy of S, with each new D having a very large percent of their genes (an eventual D4 would have somewhere around 97 percent of their genes). But this doesn't take into account the fact that He already has a percentage of each of their genes, being the last D's offspring. I'd like to see some percentages when S is all the way on the bottom first, then goes back to the top.

no one seems to get all flustered when Superman can fly because the Earth's sun is yellow, yet he can fly throughout the entire universe.
It's just something you accept to have some fun.

Like I've already said, I can accept a lot of inaccuracies in movies, but something gets me about this. It seems like a Sci-Fi with no plausible science to speak of. It doesn't even make sense in its own universe. Futurama did the same thing for humor, with Fry being his own grandaddy. But it recognizes its own ridiculousness, like the creature that collects every species ever made for preservation on its back in the movie to point out the farce of creationism vs. evolution. But the book takes these inaccuracies seriously and intwines them with some of its central themes, so you can't just ignore them. A lot of the inaccuracies go against common knowledge, and it's very bothersome to me. But that's just me.

A few years back, they refitted Supes so that his powers didn't come from our sun. I called bullshit on that at the time.

This would classify the book as fantasy, or maybe "science fantasy". The plausibility of the science in Rant has always been negligible.

I don't get the trouble with suspending belief for just a more of a dramatic story though. It seems like it's easy for something done with humour or horror.
No one cares how absolutely implausible Star Trek is with space travel.
Rant's about time travel, but because it's set in the really real world the science doesn't add up all of a sudden? Maybe if they were party-crashing in DeLoreans?

I was buying a lot of comics that year.

There was also a pretty cool "Issue 400" of a Superman title that year. I was not a big DC (or Superman) fan, but I picked that one up, you betcha.

The scientific inaccuracies in Star Trek are mostly based on implausibility, like two species that formed on different planets miraculously having nigh identical DNA structures that allow for offspring between the two. That's just wow, but not impossible (hell, they might even have an episode where they explore that idea in depth, I don't know). Star Trek is actually awesome because it explores different scientific theories that were still plausible and posed what ifs that make sense. Even interstellar space travel was explained on the show (the writers knew interstellar space travel would be impossible going at lightspeed, and that it was impossible to surpass lightspeed, anyway) by explaining the idea of timespace, and that if you actually made a device that jumped between waves of space (hyperspace) you can essentially get somewhere faster than light without moving faster than light. People complained about the behavior of black holes in the new movie, and so did I, but it was a small complaint because it mostly dealt with inaccurate visuals and negligible dramatic scenes rather than the thematic elements of the movie itself. Good science fiction poses what ifs without explaining anything too thoroughly, because if we COULD explain it thoroughly, these wouldn't be what ifs.

Rant explained that if you have sex with your mother in order to become your own father, that somehow causes you to attain better senses, and that killing your own mother before you were born would make you immortal. It does not pose any basis on how these things could be possible, and it goes against evidence that we already have that it's impossible. I can take the metaphysics of jumping out of time, but everything else was just... ugh.

Tuffy's right, it's essentially a fantasy, but it appears to have been set in the real world, so it still doesn't sit right with me. I still loved the book, though.

It was a true story until they erased themselves, so maybe they changed the fabric of the universe too and it all became "fiction."

As long as you're satisfied with that.