The Very Slow Time Machine
- Eloi Honorable Mention
- by Ian Watson
- Short Story
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “The Very Slow Time Machine” by Ian Watson, in Anticipations, edited by Christopher Priest (Faber and Faber, 1978).
In 1985, a small impenetrable living pod appears out of nothing at the National Physics Laboratory. A window on one side shows the pod’s occupant: a delirious man who grows younger and saner through the years, although generally doing little other than sitting and reading, leading the observers to conclude that his quarters are in fact a VSTM taking him back through time at the rate of one year for each year of his life.
As of writing this, I am only partway through my reading and wondering so many things: When the man in the world at large who will eventually enter the machine realize that he is the traveler? From his perspective, what happened to the machine (and him!) when it materialized in 1985? (Ah! That question is answered shortly after it occurs to me.) For that matter, why doesn’t he himself, while in the pod, already know that he will reach 1985? To what extent does his very appearance cause the technology that permits his trip to occur? VCIS! (Very Cool Idea-Story!), although it offers little in plot or character.
As of writing this, I am only partway through my reading and wondering so many things: When the man in the world at large who will eventually enter the machine realize that he is the traveler? From his perspective, what happened to the machine (and him!) when it materialized in 1985? (Ah! That question is answered shortly after it occurs to me.) For that matter, why doesn’t he himself, while in the pod, already know that he will reach 1985? To what extent does his very appearance cause the technology that permits his trip to occur? VCIS! (Very Cool Idea-Story!), although it offers little in plot or character.
Our passenger is the object of popular cults by now—a focus for finer feelings. In this way his mere presence has drawn the world’s peoples closer together, cultivating respect and dignity, pulling us back from the brink of war, liberating tens of thousands from their concentration camps. These cults extend from purely fashionable manifestations—shirts printed with his face, now neatly shaven in a Vandyke style; rings and worry-beads made from galena crystals—through the architectural (octahedron and cube meditation modules) to life-styles themselves: a Zen-like “sitting quietly, doing nothing.”
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- “The Very Slow Time Machine” by Ian Watson, in Anticipations, edited by Christopher Priest (Faber and Faber, 1978).