As a bonus, this essay appeared in the very issue of Astounding that has the final installment of The Legion of Time and which caused all the trouble in my story “Saving Astounding.”
Wah lenksh? Inksh lenksh, coss. Wah you speak? Said, sah-y, daw geh-ih. Daw, neitha. You
fresh? Jumm?
Padway feared a mob of religious enthusiasts more than anything on earth, no doubt
because their mental processes were so utterly alien to his own.
The problem of backward-jumping has not hitherto been solved. It involves an obvious
paradox. If I go back and slay my own grandfather, what becomes of me?
A curious feature of time travel back from the present is that one gets younger and
younger, becoming successively a youth, a child, an embryo and finally nothing at all.
Oh, I’m no four-dimensional thinker; but, as I understand it, if people could go back
to a more recent time, their actions would affect our own history, which would be a
paradox or contradiction of facts. Can’t have that in a well-run universe, you know.
Like his colleagues, Aristotle never appreciated the need for constant verification.
Thus, though he was married twice, he said that men have more teeth than women. He never
thought to ask either of his wives to open her mouth for a count.
This story gave me a game that I play of pretending that I have just arrived as a passenger in my own body with no control over my actions or observations. How long does it take to figure out who and where I am? So, I enjoyed that aspect of the story, but I have trouble reading phonetically spelled dialects.
In his autobiography, de Camp says he based the setting of the story on his time as a graduate student at MIT in 1932, when Lovecraft (whom de Camp didn’t know) lived in nearby Providence: “I put H.P. Lovecraft himself, unnamed, into the story and stressed the contrast between his idealized eighteenth-century England and what he would have found if he had actually been translated back there. To get the dialect right, I read Fielding’s Tom Jones.”
I didn’t say that we could or should go back to pre-industrial technology. The changes
since then were inevitable and irreversible. I only said. . .
The scientists had been arguing for half a century over the nature of the K-T Event. Some
said a comet or a planetoid hit the Earth; others, that one or more of those big
super-volcanoes, like the one that mad your Yellowstone Park, cut loose with an eruption
that blanketed the Earth with ash and smoke.
One day this bloke Standish came in with his friend Hofmann, saying they wanted a time
safari to cave-man days, to shoot dinosaurs the way our ancestors used to do.
Imagine a newt or salamander expanded to crocodile size, with a huge head for catching
smaller fry, and you’ll have the idea. Might call it a crocamander, eh?
It will demonstrate that all these prehistoric beasts, whereof your clients bring home
heads, hides, and photographs, did not live in succession, but all at the same time.
But the beasts my clients hunt on these time safaris are all long extinct anyway. Ending
the safaris wouldn’t bring any dinosaurs or mastodons back to life.