Palindromic
by Peter Crowther
I wouldn’t have used the word palindromic to describe the happenings of this
story: Aliens arrive in 1964, and their sense of time is backward from ours. It’s not
palindromic because they experience the events in backward order: If I spell out the word
time, they will hear e-m-i-t. It would be cool, however, to have a real
palindromic story where some sequence of events in reverse is the same as that sequence
experienced forward, like the expression emit time.
P.S. I just stumbled across another time travel story that is an actual palindrome! The Palindrome Paradox.
He seemed to be trying hard to find the right word. “They’re palindromic.”
“Palindromic” by Peter Crowther, in First
Contact, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff (DAW Books, July
1997).