Twilight
- by John W. Campbell, Jr.
- Short Story
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “Twilight,” as by Don Stuart, Astounding Stories, November 1934.
In 1932, James Waters Bendell picks up a magnificently sculpted hitchhiker named Ares Sen Kenlin (the Sen means he’s a scientist, but Waters is just a name) who says that he’s trying to get back to his home time (3059) after beding pulled into a far distant future where mankind has atrophied because of their reliance on machines.
—Jeff Delgado
They stand about, little misshapen men with huge heads. But their heads contain only brains. They had machines that could think—but somebody turned them off a long time ago, and no one knew how to start them again. That was the trouble with them. They had wonderful brains. Far better than yours or mine. But it must have been millions of years ago when they were turned off, too, and they just hadn’t thought since then. Kindly little people.
Tags
(11)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1930 to 1939: time of the story’s frame: 1932
- Near Future, AD 2300 and Beyond: home time of Ares Sen Kenlin: AD 3059
- Far Future: main time of the story: about seven million years into the future, the twilight years of mankind
- Timeline Models
- Time Travel Methods
- Time Rifts: An accidentally created time rift: “When I slipped into that field, it grabbed me like a gravitational field whirling a space transport down to a planet. It sucked me in—and through. Only the other side must have been seven million years in the future.”
- Themes
- What Year Is It?: “Tell me what the date is—year and all [. . .].”
- Fictional Tags
- Robots, Androids, and Cyborgs: “They had machines that could think—but somebody had turned them off a long time ago, and no one knew how to start them again.”
- Groupings
Variants
(1)
- “Twilight,” as by Don Stuart, Astounding Stories, November 1934.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
written by
[Error: Missing ']]' tag for wikilink]