Coils of Time
- by P. Schuyler Miller
- Novelette
- Science Fiction, War
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “Coils of Time” by P. Schuyler Miller, Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1939.
You’ll need some patience with “Coils of Time," seeing as how it takes the hero, Rutherford Bohr Adams, twenty-some pages before you’ll realize that the story is a sequel to “The Sands of Time,” and it’s going to fall to space pilot Adams to travel through the 60-million-year coils of times into the future and the past, saving Earth from the evil Martians and their zombies, while also saving his own boss’s beautiful daughter from a fate worth than death.
—Michael Main
It’s another form of the space-time field that I use in the Egg to bridge the gap between the coils of time.
Tags
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- Time Periods
- Age of Reptiles (252 Ma to 66 Ma: Mesozoic/Triassic/Jurassic/Cretaceous): in the Cretaceous, roughly 60 Ma
- Circa AD 2100 to 2199: Two hundred years after the 1937 story, “The Sands of Time.”
- Near Future, AD 2300 and Beyond: circa AD 60,000,000
- Time Travel Methods
- Big Time Machines: The Golden Glow is never fully explained, but it creates time portals wide enough to swallow an entire invasion fleet, including the miles-wide space dredge.
- Time Portal: “A black hole seemed to have been bored is space—a tunnel of blackness into which he looked for interminable distances, and into which the ships were moving one by one—and vanishing!"
- Time Spheres, Eggs, et al.: The original egg from “The Sands of Time” is still around.
- Wearable Time Object: “The space armor Donovan had given him was self-powered, a miniature spaceship in which he could live for several days. It operated on the principle of the Time Egg, creating new geodesics in the space-time continuum and riding them as a comet rides its orbit.”
- Themes
- Adjacent Times: “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.”
- Long Life: “I’m going on two hundred and forty-five and I feel like thirty.”
- Time Invaders: Baldar’s space pirates
- Fictional Tags
- Future Wars: Lana’s people vs. Baldar’s
- Zombies: “His zombie army would swarm over Lana’s citadel and crush it by sheer force of numbers.”
- Groupings
Variants
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- “Coils of Time” by P. Schuyler Miller, Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1939.