a Haertel Complex story

Common Time

by James Blish

Spaceman Garrard is the third pilot to attempt the trip to the binary star system of Alpha Centauri using the FTL drive invented by Dolph Haertel (the next Einstein!) The Haertel Complex stories provide little in the way of actual time travel, but this one does have minor relativistic time dilation and more significant differing time rates.

— Michael Main

Figuring backward brought him quickly to the equivalence he wanted: one second in ship time was two hours in Garrard time.

“Common Time” by James Blish, in Shadow of Tomorrow, edited by Frederik Pohl (Permabooks, July 1953).

Tyrannosaurus Rex

by Ray Bradbury

We could have told special effects meister John Terwilliger that the only way to get a truly monstrous T. rex on film is to build a time machine, but alas, he relied solely on stop-motion animation with no time travel, and look at the abuse he gets for his efforts from the renowned producer Joe Clarence.

— Michael Main

Step by step, frame by frame of film, stop motion by stop motion, he, Terwilliger, had run his beasts through their postures, moved each a fraction of an inch, photographed them, moved them another hair, photographed them, for hours and days and months.

“The Prehistoric Producer” by Ray Bradbury, in The Saturday Evening Post, 23 June 1962.

Fredy Köpsell

narrator, translator