Tony Westermayr

narrator, translator
Short Story

a Haertel Complex story

Common Time

  • by James Blish
  • in Shadow of Tomorrow, edited by Frederik Pohl (Permabooks, July 1953)
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.
Illustration of a rocketship and three astronauts on the moon with a full Earth in an orange sky.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Novelette

When You Care, When You Love

Sylva—an heiress who is used to getting her way—devises a plan to (sort of) save her terminally ill lover, Guy Gibbon. —Michael Main
But lots of things were crazier and some bigger, nd now they’re commonplace.
Illustration of a naked woman coming out of Theodore Sturgeon’s head, which rests on a hodgepodge of science fiction and fantasy images.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Novel

Up the Line

A series of layered two-dimensional drawings including many purple clouds, a woman with a head jewel and long black hair, and possibly Byzantine cities.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Utterly Perfect Murder

A moving story of an outcast boy who continued to feel the pain of how he’d been excluded throughout his adult life. You’ll need to decide for yourself whether time travel creeps in. —Michael Main
I tossed the few bits of gravel and did the thing that had never been done, ever in my life.
An abstract design of a person in a bed seen through a double-hung window inset in a stone wall.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Fantasy
  • Mainstream
  • Debatable Time Travel
Short Story

What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

  • by Robert Silverberg
  • in Infinity Four, edited by Robert Hoskins (Lancer Books, November 1972)
When all eleven families on Redford Crescent receive a newspaper from the middle of next week, the result is a hastily called neighborhood meeting and an assortment of get-rich-quick plans. —Michael Main
Which sounds more fantastic? That someone would take the trouble of composing an entire fictional edition of the Times setting it in type printing it and having it delivered or that through some sort of fluke of the fourth dimension we’ve been allowed a peek at next week’s newspaper?
A hairless man (or possibly an android) emerges from a giant rectangular portal with a puzzled expression.
  • Horror
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

Breckenridge and the Continuum

  • by Robert Silverberg
  • in Showcase, edited by Roger Elwood (Harper and Row, June 1973)
Wall Street investor Noel Breckenridge has been summoned to the far future, possibly to tell stories, but is there a larger purpose? —Michael Main
Am I supposed to tell you a lot of diverting stories? Will I have to serve you six months out of the year, forevermore? Is there some precious object I’m obliged to bring you from the bottom of the sea? Maybe you have a riddle that I’m supposed to answer.
The red edge of a partial sphere, possibly with abstract craters or flames, behind a list of twelve author names.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

Many Mansions

  • by Robert Silverberg
  • in Universe 3, edited by Terry Carr (Random House, October 1973)
With eleven years of marriage behind them, Ted and Alice’s fantasies frequently start with a time machine and end with killing one or another of their spouse’s ancestors before they can procreate. So naturally, they each end up at Temponautics, Ltd. Oh, and Ted’s grandpa has some racy fantasies of his own.
In Silverberg’s Something Wild Is Loose (Vol. 3 of his collected stories), he posits that this story is “probably the most complex short story of temporal confusion” since Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (1941) or “—All You Zombues—” (1959), but I would respectfully disagree. In particular, I would describe Heinlein’s two stories as the most complex short stories of temporal consistency in that there is but a single, static timeline and (in hindsight) every scene locks neatly into place within this one timeline. By contrast, Silverberg story involves multiple time travel choices by the characters in what I would call parallel universes. The confusion, such as it is, stems more from what appears to be alternate scenes in disconnected universes rather than temporal confusion per se. —Michael Main
On the fourth page Alice finds a clause warning the prospective renter that the company cannot be held liable for any consequences of actions by the renter which wantonly or wilfully interfere with the already determined course of history. She translates that for herself: If you kill your husband’s grandfather, don’t blame us if you get in trouble.
A yellow silhouette of a kneeling person in the bottom have of an hourglass.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel