The Man Who Never Lived
- by Donald Wandrei
- Short Story
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “The Man Who Never Lived” by Donald Wandrei, Astounding Stories, March 1934.
Strange Nicholas van Allensteen joins with a universal mind to journey back before the start of time.
—Michael Main
“[. . .] This is an experiment in mental monism, you know, along the time-space continuum that forms material totality.”
I looked at Nicholas and, despite all my conversatons with him, I did not comprehend.
Tags
(34)
- Time Periods
- Before the Start of Time: “driven by the supreme mind before the beginning of time”
- Big Bang (13.8 Ga): “The nebula returns to that prime source of things. There is no universe.”
- Early Stelliferous Era (12.4 Ga to 4600 Ma): “This is ecstasy; to watch masses, from each of which will erupt the millions of stars in each galaxy of years to come, fuse into ever-growing splendor is a sight for the gods alone to witness.”
- Formation of the Solar System (often 4600 Ma to 4540 Ma): “The solar system is unborn.”
- Paleozoic Era (541 Ma to 252 Ma): “A polypod is coming ashore in a continent where the Pacific will roll.”
- Age of Reptiles (252 Ma to 66 Ma: Mesozoic/Triassic/Jurassic/Cretaceous): “Brontosaurus roaring against the dinaosaurus.”
- Pre-Human Age of Mammals (66 Ma to 3.4 Ma: Cenozoic/Paleogene/Neogene): Going backward in time: “The beasts are getting larger. THe shaggy apes are becoming one with the beasts.”
- Stone Age (3.4 Ma to 3000 BC: Paleo/Epipaleo/Meso/Neo/Chalcolithic)
- Circa AD 1930 to 1939: presumed home time period
- Timeline Models
- Cognizant Eternalism: “[. . .] the theory that all matter and life can be understood in the conception of one mind of which the universe and all its works, past, present, and future, are only parts.”
- Time Runs in Reverse for Some Beings: Most of the story is a journey back to before the start of time.
- Time Travel Methods
- Hypnosis, Mental Powers, Potions, and Drug-Induced Travel: “If we could develop out mental powers sufficiently, we might understand in a flash of supreme knowledge.”
- Themes
- Incorporeal Traveler: “My own mind will be divorced, in a sense, from my body, while it roams across the ages and approaches the monistic whole.”
- Time Montages: At various times, the traveler slips through different times in rapid succession. When an event is obvious, we've tagged it as as being minor.
- Real-World Tags
- American Civil War: “Brothers kill each other in civil war.”
- Boxer Rebellion: “a rebellion in China”
- Elagabalus: “Heliogabalus”
- Elizabethan Era: “age of Elizabeth”
- Georgian Era: “Georgian period”
- Italian Renaissance
- Leif Erikson
- Mammoths and Mastodons
- Neanderthals and Other Cavemen
- Panic of 1907
- Precolonial Americas
- Roman Empire: “A thousand Goths fight a thousand beasts in the Colosseum. he streets of Rome run wild.”
- Saber-Toothed Predators
- Theia-Earth Collision: “With a noise like the blasting of worlds, the Moon has untied with Earth from which it will part.”
- Victorian Era: “Victorian era”
- World War I: “the World War”
- Wright Brothers: “A man is trying to fly a machine—it rises from the ground.”
- Fictional Tags
- Lemuria: possibly the “Murathians” on a continent in the Pacific
- Groupings
Variants
(1)
- “The Man Who Never Lived” by Donald Wandrei, Astounding Stories, March 1934.
Indexer Notes
(1)
- Tags—The minor tags are the easily recognizable historical times, events, and people seen in Nicholas’s time montage. I may have missed some.