Cloche vaine
- by Francine Pelletier
- Short Story
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “Cloche vaine” [Vain bell] by Francine Pelletier, in Solaris 109, Spring 1994.
At the end of her long successful writing career, a woman is still haunted by her sister’s death four decades earlier.
—Michael Main
Tags
(10)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1970 to 1999: 7 August 1983
- Circa AD 2000 to 2099: June 2024
- Timeline Models
- Resilient Timeline: Even though the narrator saves her sister initially, the timeline is resilent and her sister dies shortly after. Also: “Like the waves created by a pebble in water, the effects of the change would spread out slowly from the ‘centre’ of the event towards of the outer edges, the extremities of the temporal matrix, gradually dissipating.”
- Sensing Unfamiliar Timelines: “According to Lanoix, this was enough to protect the measurement instruments from the ‘ripple effect.’”
- Time Travel Methods
- Emotional Outcries through Time: “following a very specific line in the temporal matrix, the emotional line”
- Hypnosis, Mental Powers, Potions, and Drug-Induced Travel: Even though there is a big machine, hypnosis is also involved.
- Time Tethers: It seems to be a time tether in a huge concrete hanger, connected to a nearby nuclear power plant. Sometimes it is only the mind that travels, but sometimes, as in this story, it is followed by the body. And although the return trip is not described, the narrator does snap back to 2024 after seemingly saving her sister (hence, a tether rather than a catapult.
- Themes
- Groupings
Variants
(1)
- “Cloche vaine” [Vain bell] by Francine Pelletier, in Solaris 109, Spring 1994.
- “Empty Ring” by Francine Pelletier, in Tesseracts 5, edited by Yves Meynard and Robert Runté (Tesseract Books, December 1996).
Translations
(1)
- “Cloche vaine” [Vain bell] by Francine Pelletier, in Solaris 109, Spring 1994.
- English.
“Empty Ring” by Francine Pelletier, in Tesseracts 5, edited by Yves Meynard and Robert Runté (Tesseract Books, December 1996).