Fortunately, the Milk
- by Neil Gaiman
- Novelette
- Fantasy, Comedy
- Children
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman (Harper, September 2013).
When Dad is late returning from a milk (not the fat-free kind) run, he has to explain to his two kids about how he’d been delayed by sundry trips through time.
—Michael Main
I am slightly lost in space and time right now and need to get home in order to make sure my children get milk for their breakfast.
Tags
(20)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1700 to 1799: time of the pirates
- Circa AD 2000 to 2099: presumed home time of the story
- Far Future: “the far, far future” with colorful ponies
- Unspecified Year: time of the wumpires
- Timeline Models
- Time Travel Methods
- Chronoscopes: “We have been tracking your movements through time and space.”
- Luggable Time Machine: “It was a large cardboard box with several pebbles on it, and stones stuck tothe side. There was also a large, red button.
- Time Portal: The aliens’ emergency exit is a portal into the space-time continuum.
- Themes
- Blur of Days and Nights During Travel: “The sun shot around the sky, and the sky started to flicker in nights and in days” . . .
- Object Meets Self with Bizaare Consequences: “Because, according to my calculations, if the same object from two different times touches itself, one of two things will happen. Either the Universe will cease to exist. Or three remarkable dwarfs will dance through the strees with flowerpots on their heads.”
- Rescue after the Fact: After escaping the Splod people Dad and Prof. Steg go back in time to plant the prophecy that will save them.
- Self-Visitation
- Tracking Someone or Something through Time
- Real-World Tags
- Dinosaurs
- Native Americans
- Precolonial Americas: the Splod people in the 8th century
- Fictional Tags
- Aliens
- Fairies, Goblins, Dwarves, Nymphs, Elves, and Others of the Fae: Dwarves. Three of them. With purple skin and flowerpots on their heads.
- Smart Dinosaurs
- Vampires and Soul-Suckers: the wumpires
Variants
(1)
- Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman (Harper, September 2013).
Indexer Notes
(1)
- Content—We believe Dad. It all happened just as he said it did.