Nat Schachner

writer
Short Story

20,000 A.D.


Tom Jenkins heads into the “Vanishing Woods” to prove that there’s nothing dangerous about them, but he doesn’t return until six months later, and he refuses to talk about where he’s been and what he’ seen—but fortunately for us, the titles of the two Wonder Story stories (“In 20,000 A.D.” in Sep 1930 and “Back to 20,000 A.D.” in Mar 1931) give us a big clue, although it doesn’t tell us that the world he visits is divided into cold-hearted Masters and their four-armed, giant human Robots.

The use of the word “robot” had not yet evolved from Čapek’s meaning of a humanoid laborer to the modern usage as a purely mechanical being.
True, he says, the Masters are far advanced, an’ able to do lots o’ thingsas a result. They’ve learnt everything there was to be learnt, they can live on the earth, in the air, in the water, or underground; they can travel to the other stars; they know how the world come about an’ when it’s ending, they think great thoughts an’things I couldn’t even understand, but, he says, what about the Robots?
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Time Express


Under strict rules against smuggling technology, time-travel tourism is permitted to the residents of 2124 A.D., but, of course, when a tour guide tries to take modern technology to the nontechnical time of 4600 A.D., our man Denton Kels must bring the dastard to justice.
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  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Ancestral Voices


Time traveler Emmet Pennypacker kills one ancient Hun without realizing who will disappear from the racist world of 1935. —Michael Main
The year of grace 1935! A dull year, a comfortable year! Nothing much happened. The depression was over; people worked steadily at their jobs and forgot that they had every starved; Roosevelt was still President of the United States; Hitler was firmly ensconced in Germany; France talked of security; Japan continued to defend itself against China by swallowing a few more provinces; Russia was about to commence on the third Five Year Plan, to be completed in two years; and, oh, yes—Cuba was still in revolution.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Time Impostor


Newspaper reporter Derek Williams leaps into a time machine that’s come from the 9th millennium to rescue the condemned murderer Mike Spinnot because he’s worshiped as a hero in that future time. —Michael Main
You know as well as I that in 1932 the Earth was groaning under a tyranny more brutal, morehorrible, thanany in all recorded history.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

Reverse Universe


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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
Short Story

Past, Present and Future


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  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Novelette

Lost in the Dimensions


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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
Short Story

City of the Rocket Horde


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  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Short Story

Island of the Individualists


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  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Novelette

Master Gerald of Cambray


Unassuming Gerald Cambray, a professor of Latin at Harvard in 1939, has a dizzy spell and wakes in Paris of AD 1263 where his accent in speaking Latin is considered odd and his makeshift plan to earn a living by teaching astronomy brings dangers that even his brazen, swashbuckling young student, Guy of Salisbury, might be unable to forestall. —Michael Main
“My subject,” he began, “is the science of astronomy. I am going to be frank. In my land and time . . . uh . . . that is—” Guy frowned. He had warned him against any mention of that insane delusion of his about having been catapulted back from a future age. But Cambray recovered himself. “What I meant is that there are far greater masters of this science where I come from. I am familiar only with the skirts of this knowledge. Yet what I have to say will be novel to you, and will doubtless upset many of your present concepts.”
Pen-and-ink drawing of a balding modern man leaping into a sword melay among
                medieval men.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

When the Future Dies


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  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
Short Story

City of the Cosmic Rays


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  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Short Story

City of the Corporate Mind


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  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena