Fair
enough, but what about Future Ghost? Isn’t He bringing information from the future to
Scrooge? Transfer of information from the future to the past may be boring compared to
people-jumping, but it is time travel, so the Carol must be granted membership in
the list after all, don’t you think? Ah, not so fast again! At one point, Scrooge asks
a pertinent question:
Thus speaketh the ITTDB.
The original edition of The Great Romance is one of the rarest books extant, with single copies of Parts 1 and 2 existing in New Zealand libraries. After a century of neglect, the book has been reprinted by editor Dominic Alessio, first in Science Fiction Studies in 1993 (Part 1) and then in a separate volume in 2008 (Parts 1 and 2).[9] (A third part of the story is thought to have existed, but no copy has yet been found.) The two extant volumes were reprinted in 2008, along with commentary by Dominic Alessio on the influence the writing likely had on Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.
Considerable detective work has been applied to the question of the
identity of the pseudonymous Inhabitant, although with no definite result.
Nevertheless, we lean toward the theory of one “Honnor
of Ashburton,” because of an annotation to this effect in the only known original
copies of the first two volumes of the work. Additionally, of the two title leafs
found with Volume 1, the Ashburton page was printed on paper that matches that of the
volume itself, and the volume contained advertisements for Ashburton businesses. This
explains the photo we’ve attached to the story, which depicts the Ashburton Borough
Council and Public Library, circa 1881. So far as we know, the clock tower has no
connection to the lightning storm of 12 October 1955
Act II represents the dream. It is the medieval age—the age of chivalry, of bold, bad barons and gallant knights. An ancestor of the hero is one of these latter. His love story is depicted vividly. There is nothing lackadaisical about the lovemaking. The bold knight finally seizes the maiden in his arms and carries her off bodily to the altar in the face of strenuous opposition.
In act III the twentieth century again appears. There hero wakes up and follows, so far as modernity will let him, the example of his ancestory shown him in the second act.
— San Francisco Call, 14 December 1906
In any case, we don’t know whether the 1910 film used the just-a-dream ending—or perhaps the film itself was just a dream of a 1940 obituary writer.
— The Bioscope, 6 February 1929
Because of the story’s opening, I’m convinced the Twonky is from the future. The “temporal snag” that brought it to 1942 feels like an unexpected time rift to me, although the route back to the future is an intentional journey via an unexplained method.
Seeing as how there are no recordings of the broadcast, I wish I had my own time machine so I could send my Betamax® back to 1949.
“My husbands.” She shook her head dolefully. “To find five more difficult men would be positively Martian.”
In his blog, Fred Pohl wrote about how Heinlein’s agent gave permission for Pohl publish the novel in If and to cut “five or ten thousand words in the beginning that were argumentative, extraneous and kind of boring” (and Pohl agreed to pay full rate for the cut words). But apparently, Heinlein “went ballistic” when he saw the first installment, so much so that when the book appeared as a separate publication, Heinlein made sure people knew who was responsible for the previous cuts by adding a note* that “A short version of this novel, as cut and revised by Frederik Pohl, appeared in Worlds of If Magazine.”
* The version of
Heinlein’s note that Pohl recalled was much funnier than Heinlein’s actual note in
our timeline, but sadly, we have lost track of where we saw Pohl’s version.
The story continues in a 1990 sequel, Times Change.
If he dug it up now and carried it back to his ship, it would not be there for him to find on that high summer day in the twenty-third century. And if that was true, how could he be here, in this time, to dig it up at all?
Jack studied the picture of the odd-looking creature soaring through the sky.
“Ahhh!” screamed Annie.
“What?” said Jack.
“A monster!” Annie cried. She pointed out the tree house window.
“No,” Charlie said quickly. “I’m sorry.”
His uncle hadn’t finished. “Henry’s parents mourned him, just as they mourned poor little Daphne. James was their only child and, as a result, he was probably spoiled. His father died in the war and his mother left everything to him, including her lovely cottage by the sea. You can’t change that, can you?”
“Time isn’t circular,”
she said to Dr. Kellet. “It’s like a palimpsest.”
“Oh, dear,” he said.
“That sounds very vexing.”
“And memories are sometimes in the future.”