Jon’s World
- Eloi Honorable Mention
- by Philip K. Dick
- Novelette
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “Jon’s World” by Philip K. Dick, in Time to Come: Science-Fiction Stories of Tomorrow, edited by August Derleth; Farrar (Strass and Young, April 1954).
First the Soviets and the Westerners fought. Then the Westerners brought Schonerman’s killer robots into the mix. Then the robots fought both human sides. You know all that from Dick’s earlier story, “Second Variety.” But now it’s long after the desolation, long enough that Caleb Ryan and his financial backer Kastner are willing to bring back the secret of Schonerman’s robots from the past to make their world a better place for surviving mankind, including Ryan’s visionary son Jon.
—Michael Main
And then the
terminator’sclaws began to manufacture their own varieties and attack Soviets and Westerners alike. The only humans that survived were those at the UN base on Luna.
Tags
(11)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 2000 to 2099: the time of the wars
- Unspecified Future Year: Ryan and Kastner’s starting time
- Timeline Models
- Fragile Timeline: It’s unclear whether the new world was spawned via Branching Timelines, via Changeable Timelines within Hypertime, or via some other model of timelines, but Jon definitely sees it before it appears in the story.
- Outside of Time: “At this moment, we exist in non-time. There’s no continuum in which we’re operating.”
- Time Travel Methods
- Themes
- Fictional Tags
- Groupings
Variants
(1)
- “Jon’s World” by Philip K. Dick, in Time to Come: Science-Fiction Stories of Tomorrow, edited by August Derleth; Farrar (Strass and Young, April 1954).