Some Curious Effects of Time Travel

by L. Sprague de Camp

Release: April 1942
Format: Short Story
Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Adults
Content: Definite Time Travel
Original Language: English

The very first Probability Zero story in Astounding took us on a romp back in time by the members of the Drinkwhiskey Institute to obtain saleable specimens of Pleistocene fauna, where we learn that time travel has an effect on aging (coincidentally, the same effect described by Gaspar in Chapter 9 of El Anacronópete).

A curious feature of time travel back from the present is that one gets younger and younger, becoming successively a youth, a child, an embryo and finally nothing at all.

DEBUT

“Some Curious Effects of Time Travel,” Astounding, April 1942.

VARIANTS

1 English variant

TAGS(SPOILERS!)

Groupings

Cited in Time Machines by Paul J. Nahin ()

TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY: We haven’t yet mapped out the time travel itinerary.

ITTDB Work #1345: by L. Sprague de Camp
Indexer: not yet assigned
Curator: Michael Main
as of 8:13 p.m. MDT, 5 May 2024
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