Sands of Time 1

The Sands of Time

by P. Schuyler Miller

• Release: April 1937
• Format: Novella
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Audience: Adults
• Content: Definite Time Travel
• Original Language: English

Incidentally, I have forgotten the most important thing of all. Remember that Donovan’s dominating idea was to prove to me, and to the world, that he had been in the Cretaceous and hobnobbed with its flora and fauna. He was a physicist by inclination, and had the physicist’s flair for ingenious proofs. Before leaving, he loaded a lead cube with three quartz quills of pure radium chloride that he had been using in a previous experiment, and locked the whole thing up in a steel box.

VARIANTS

2 English variants

TRANSLATIONS

Translations to German, Portuguese

TAGS(SPOILERS!)

Time Periods

• Age of Reptiles (252 Ma to 66 Ma: Mesozoic/Triassic/Jurassic/Cretaceous): described as being in the Cretaceous, roughly 60 Ma
• Circa AD 1930 to 1939: The year 1937 is specified in the sequel as the time of this story.

Time Travel Methods

• Time Spheres, Cubes, etc.: The Egg: a chamber barely large enough to hold a man, with a host of dials and switches [. . .]

Themes

• Helical Time: “Time is coiled like a spring. Some other age in earth’s history lies next to ours, separated only by an intangible boundary, a focus of forces that keeps us from seeing into it and falling into it.”
• Paleontologists: Professor E. J. Belden

Real-World Tags

• Dinosaurs

Groupings

• Astounding · Analog (periodical): Astounding Stories, April 1937
• Sands of Time (story series): the first of two stories
• Cited in Time Machines by Paul J. Nahin ()

TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY (SPOILERS!)

1. From a desert, 1937 ⋙ to the Cretaceous. Multiple round trips. Note: Donovan takes three trips, but does not return (in this story) from the third.