The Time-Traveler
- Eloi Honorable Mention
- by Ralph Milne Farley
- Short Story
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Debatable Time Travel
- English
- “The Time-Traveler” by Ralph Milne Farley, Weird Tales, August 1931.
Mathematics professor John D. Smith rues the day he saved his college room-mate from drowning only to have the ungrateful cad thwart his every career move for the next decade. Oh, if only Smith could redo that fateful day!
Fun note: Under the pen name Ralph Milne Farley, Massachusetts state senator Roger Sherman Hoar carried out explorations of all the early time travel paradoxes, most of which are available in his Omnibus of Time.
Fun note: Under the pen name Ralph Milne Farley, Massachusetts state senator Roger Sherman Hoar carried out explorations of all the early time travel paradoxes, most of which are available in his Omnibus of Time.
—Michael Main
If I could go back into the past, there is one event which I should most certainly change: my rescue of Paul Arkwright!
Tags
(10)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1900 to 1929: earlier time when Smith and Arkwright were students
- Circa AD 1930 to 1939: presumed home time of the story
- Timeline Models
- In a Changed Timeline, You Don’t Remember Your Changed Life: When Smith returns to the present where he has been named chair of mathematics, there is no other Smith who grew up in that changed timeline.
- Multiple Naive Timelines: two or three timelines, depending on whether the story’s opening and closing timelines are considered to be the same
- Remembering Other Timelines: While in the changed timeline, Smith remembers only the timeline where he did rescue Arkwright.
- Time Travel Methods
- Possible Dream, Hallucination, et al.: Perhaps the whole business was just a long dream where Smith changed the timeline and then set it back again. But we’ll leave things open by marking the story as having debatable time travel.
- Wish Travel: Perhaps something more than a wish is behind Smith’s dreams, but wishing certainly plays a role: “And with the recollection of all those ungrateful indignities, he sincerely wished that the dream were true, and that the truth had been only a dream.”
- Themes
- Fix Your Own Past!: During his first "dream" to the past, Smith tries to fix his past by not rescuing Arkwright.
- Fix Your Time Travel Screw-Up!: During his second "dream" to the past, Smith tries to set things right again by rescuing Arkwright.
- Groupings
Variants
(2)
- “The Time-Traveler” by Ralph Milne Farley, Weird Tales, August 1931.
- alternate title.
“The Time Traveler” by Ralph Milne Farley, in The Omnibus of Time (Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc., 1950).