The Atom-Smasher
- by Victor Rousseau
- Novella
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “The Atom-Smasher” by Victor Rousseau, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May 1930.
We've got the evil Professor Tode (who modifies an atom-smasher into a time machine that travels to the Palaeolithic and to Atlantis), a fatherly older professor, his beautiful young daughter (menaced by evil Tode), casually written racist pronouncements (by Rousseau), and our hero scientist, the dashing Jim Dent. But my favorite sentence was the brief description of quantum mechanics, which I didn’t expect in a 1930 science fiction tale.
—Michael Main
The Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of a body cannot vary continuously, but only by a certain finite amount, or exact multiples of this amount, had been the key that unlocked the door.
Tags
(14)
- Time Periods
- Stone Age (3.4 Ma to 3000 BC: Paleo/Epipaleo/Meso/Neo/Chalcolithic): “We are on what will be the Russian steppes some fifty thousand years ahead of us in time,” grinned Tode.
- Circa AD 1930 to 1939: presumed starting time
- Timeline Models
- Outside of Time: “Nothing mattered, therefore, even though they two were plunged into that awful nothingness of the fifth dimension, where neither space nor time recognizably exists.
- Time Travel Methods
- Time Ships: The machine was inside what looked like a flat boat, but more circular than a boat, and apparently was made of some metal resembling aluminum.
- Themes
- Anachronistic Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Creatures: a great dinosaur, fifty or sixty feet in length [in the time of Atlantis]
- Blur of Days and Nights During Travel: The blur of nights and days began to slow.
- Free Will, Fate, and Determinism: The future isn’t quite clear, like the past. There’s a cloud moves across the spectral lines and blurs them. I think it's the element of free will—or God!]/i]
- Travelers Must Account for Earth's Movment: You see, Earth has moved a good many millions of miles through space since the time of Atlantis.
- True Histories: the true story of the sinking of Atlantis
- Real-World Tags
- Fictional Tags
- Atlantis: He’s taken us back twelve thousand years or so to the island of Atlantis.
- Mad Scientists: For it was the visage of Lucius Tode, and on those huge and distorted features was something that looked like a diabolical smile. And Parrish lacks a few marbles, too.
- Groupings
Variants
(3)
- “The Atom-Smasher” by Victor Rousseau, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May 1930.
- alternative title.
“The Atom Smasher” by Victor Rousseau, in Outlaws of the Sun and Other Tales to Astound (Black Dog Books, March 2018). - audio reading.
“The Atom Smasher” by Victor Rousseau, in Astounding Stories 05: May 1930, coordinated by Alan Winterrowd (LibriVox, November 2013) [audio] [Audio collection accessed at https://librivox.org/astounding-stories-05-may-1930-by-ray-cummings/ on 8 April 2022.].