Early Modern History (AD 1454 to 1600)

Tag Area: Era
Novel

El Anacronópete

  • He who flies backwards in time
  • The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey
  • by Enrique Gaspar
  • in Novelas (Daniel Cortezo, 1887)

Mad scientist Don Sindulfo and his best friend Benjamin head to the past in Sindulfo’s flying time machine along with Sindulfo’s niece, her maid, a troop of Spanish soldiers, and a bordelloful of French strumpets for madcap adventures at the 1860 Battle of Téouan, Queen Isabella’s Spain, nondescript locales in the eleventh and seventh centuries, 3rd-century China, the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, and a biblical time shortly after the flood.

After taking a year of Spanish at the University of Colorado, I undertook a three-year project of translating Gaspar’s novel to English, which is available in a pdf file for your reading pleasure. Even with the unpleasant twist at the end, it was still a fine, farcical romp through history. —Michael Main
—Poco á poco—argumentaba un sensato.—Si el Anacronópete conduce á deshacer lo hecho, á mi me pasrece que debemos felicitarnos porque eso no permite reparar nuestras faltas.

—Tiene usted razón—clamaba empotrado en un testero del coche un marido cansado de su mujer.—En cuanto se abra la línea al público, tomo yo un billete para la vispera de mi boda.
translate “One step at a time,” argued a sensible voice. “If el Anacronópete aims to undo history, it seems to me that we must be congratulated as it allows us to amend our failures.”

“Quite right,” called a married man jammed into the front of the bus, thinking of his tiresome wife. “As soon as the ticket office opens to the public, I’m booking passage to the eve of my wedding.”
A flower plant in a vase and a Chinese woman holding a large shpere
                containing the flying time machine, El Anacronópete.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Debatable Time Travel
Short Story

The Devil of the Western Sea


I was always drawn to the idea behind [Error: Missing ':]' tag for wikilink] —Michael Main
But the main point I desire to make is that this neutralization was to be effected by a combination of the ordinary wave impluse with the Callieri Cool Wave. The combination, you understand. It had never been tried on a large scale—it was a virgin experiment.

So the professor was given a free hand, and went below. It was past nine o’clock.

I remained on the bridge enjoying a cigar with the officer of the deck, and chatting over a coming boar hunt we were to have south of the canal during the coming weekend. we had been talking for perhaps ten minutes in the darkness of the bridge, with the black satin of the Caribbean spreading out ahead and about the ship, and the diamond stars projecting just above our heads as though ready for any plucking hand, when suddenly we found ourselves half blinded by a dazzling light in the west.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

The Road to Yesterday


Bickering newlyweds Kenneth and Malena Paulton are thrown back to previous lives in Elizabethan England where they are a knight and a gypsy. The film is loosely based on the earlier play of the same name by Dix and Sutherland.

Safety note: Do not attempt this movie’s method of creating a timeslip—via a fiery train crash—at home. —Michael Main
I know I love you, Ken! But today—during the marriage service—something seemed to reach out of the Past that made me—afraid!
Jetta Goudal clutches her bedclothes with a wide-eyed Joseph Schildkraut
                outside her door.
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Time Flies


After Susie Barton’s husband invested their nest egg in Time Ferry Services, Ltd., it appears that the only way she’ll ever get anything out of it is by giving a performance in Elizabethan times.

This is the earliest appearance of a time machine—the “Time Ball”—in film that we know of. And based on the name Time Ferry Services, Ltd, it may also be the earliest film mention of a time travel agency. —Michael Main
Normally, we drift with the current and travel downstream and into what we call the future. Now, if we equip our little boat with a motor, we can speed our passage downstream into the future or, breasting the current, travel upstream to view again those selfsame scenes that were passed by humanity ages ago.
A cartoonish Tommy Handley pops out of a porthole on a spherical time
                machine.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Book

Unusual Tales #5

The Man Who Changed Times


A prisoner, Vincent Rand, is offered a way out of his ten-year sentence. —Michael Main
Wouldn’t you prefer being free, even five hundred years in the past, to serving out a ten year sentence in this prison?
In three panels, a man in a green suit makes a proposal to a prisoner about
                travel to the past.
  • Science Fiction
  • Weird Fiction
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

The Nonsuch Lure

  • by Mary Luke
  • (Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, September 1976)

—based on publicity material
Timothy spoke. “Are you there? In 1536?” He avoided using Andrew’s name. If there was to be an answer, any name would be unfamiliar at the moment. “Do you wish to tell me, my friend, what you see?”
A young blonde woman in a Tudor-style, orange dress stands in front of a young
                man and a palace.
  • Fantasy
  • Romance
  • Time Phenomena
Feature Film

Jubilee

  • written and directed by Derek Jarman
  • (at movie theaters, UK, February 1978)

In this early punk movie, John Dee, advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, calls forth the spirit Ariel who transports Dee and the queen to an anarchistic and largely unintelligible) England not far beyond the 1970s. —Michael Main
Now shall one king rise up against another. And there shall be bloodshed throughout the whole world, fighting between the devil, his kingdom, and the kingdom of light.
Black-and-white drawing of a punk Britannia sneering at us all.
  • Fantasy
  • Experimental
  • Satire
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Non ci resta che piangere


While stranded in a thunderstorm in Tuscany, lifelong friends Mario and Saverrio find themselves unexpectedly in 1492, whereupon they fall in love a few times, pretend to be the composer of “Yesterday” and other modern-day hits, and come to the conclusion that they must stop Columbus from discovering America (either to prevent the genocide of the Native Americans or to prevent Mario’s sister from having her heart broken, depending on who you believe), and try rather pitifully to explain trains and other modern marvels to da Vinci, including a proposal to split the proceeds “thirty-three, thirty-three, and thirty-three!”

An extended director’s cut also expands the story of one of their heartthrob-esse, an Amazon named Astriaha]], but we don’t know the details of its release or whether an English-subtitled release of the film exists. —based on Wikipedia
Trentatré, trentatré e trentatré!
translate Thirty-three, thirty-three, and thirty-three.
Laid-back Massimo Troisi (as Mario) and pleading Roberto Benigni (as Saverio)
                pose in front of Botticelli’s Venus on the Half-Shell and Giorgione’s Sleeping
                Venus.
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

Invaders


The story tells us of two sets of invaders—the 16th-century Spaniard Pizarro, who violently invaded the Incan Empire, and the Krel, who economically and culturally invaded 21st-century Earth—and we briefly hear of one man’s use of Krel tech to travel from the 21st century to the 16th. —Michael Main
Sf is full of this sort of thing, from the power fantasy of the alienated child to the alternate history where Hitler is strangled in his cradle and the Library of Alexandria is saved from the torch.
A long USA spaceship, named the SS Orion and resembling a large sea cruiseship,
                approaches a green and brown planet.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Isabella of Castile Answers Her Mail


A lovely series of letters between Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella—as conveyed by messenger albatross in 1492!—describing a modern-day NYC, wondrous yet horrifying. —Dave Hook
No image currently available.
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

Magic Tree House: Merlin Mission 10*

Monday with a Mad Genius


Jack and Annie travel 500 years back in time to Florence, Italy, and spend a day helping Leonardo da Vinci in the hope of learning another secret of happiness. —based on fandom.com
Wearing large wings and startled looks, young Annie and Jack fly high over the
                Cathedral of Santa Maria in Florence.
  • Fantasy
  • Audience: Children
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Infinity Ring 1

A Mutiny in Time


This first book of the multi-author series tells of how teens Dak (a history buff and odd duck), Sera (a science nerd), and Riq (a member of the secret Hystorians society) end up as the only ones who can save the world by fixing breaks in time that changed what was meant to be. Their first mission—saving Columbus from a mutiny that was meant to fail—is a disquieting choice that I would not choose as an introduction of history to children. For starters, they are choosing to save the man who brought genocide to the Americas. And to boot, in the broken world where the mutiny succeeded, his three ships still completed their voyage with no noticable change to subsequent centuries (apart from Columbus resting at the bottom of the Atlantic). —Michael Main
Time had gone wrong—this is what the Hystorians believed. And if things were beyond fixing now, there was only one hope left . . . to go back in time and fix the past instead.
An eight-pointed gold compass, marked in twenty-degree intervals around the
                edge.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: Children
  • Definite Time Travel
Picture Book

Mr. Peabody and Sherman

Time-Travel Trouble!

  • by Billy Wrecks
  • (Random House Children’s Books, July 2014)

A short picture book of the 2014 Mr. Peabody and Sherman movie. The images are all from the movie’s CGI (or at least generated by the same process). —Michael Main
Sheman was supposed to keep the time machine secret, but he broke the rules. He took his friend Penny back in time to ancient Egypt.
Animated characters Sherman and Mr. Peabody peek out of a door frame.
  • Comedy
  • Audience: Children
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

How to Stop Time


As a 400-something-year-old member of the Albatross Society, Tom Hazard ages less than a month for each year of life. But now, after falling in the 21st-century and butting heads with the Society, he seems to be on a mental trip that covers his entire life (but not an actual time traveling trip). —Michael Main
But as time goes by, at birthdays or other annual markers, people begin to notice you aren’t getting any older.
A silhouette dog and man sit on a sandy beach inside an hourglass, withg a
                giant rose growing up through the hourglass like a beanstalk.
  • Fantasy
  • No Time Phenomena
Picture Book

Arthur Travels Back in Time


Arthur the fearless dog travels to different times in a large blue cannister. The story is written in verse that ignores meter and uses rhymes that don’t quite work. —Ruthie Mariner
With sights on events his eyes have never seen, Arthur is ready for his new time machine.
A dog wearing clothes and a red cape leaps onto a cannister-shaped time
                machine.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: Children
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Da Vinci’s Cat


As a hostage to Pope Julius II in 1511 Rome, 11-year-old Federico is lonely until he receives a visit from a tawny cat, an art collector from the 20th century, and an 11-year-old kid named Bee from the 21st century. —Michael Main
All we need is to get Raphael to draw me and make sure he signs it.
Illustration of part of the Sistine Chapel with left side showing a cat above a
                modern kid climbing a tree and the right side showing the same cat above a medieval
                kid riding a horse.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: Children
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Unredacted Reports from 1546

  • by Leah Cypess
  • Future Science Fiction Digest #11, June 2021 [e-zine · webzine]

An 18-year-old history student hopes to show that her research subject, 16th-century poet Lucia of Gonzaga, was a modern woman supressed by her time period, but as the traveling student sends messages back to her 21st-century mentor, she reveals more than just history as she’d hoped it would be. —Michael Main
You were wrong about my age, though. In the sixteenth century, I’m an adult. I am physically mature and able to bear children, and that’s all that matters. No one cares about the completeness of my frontal lobe.
Large, spherical glass terrariums float above a futuristic city in the sky.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

Loki, Season 1


Hang on to your Tesseracts! Apparently, in Endgame, when the Avengers traveled back in time to swipe various things from the 2012 Avengers, they inadvertantly started a branch in time where Loki ended up with the Tesseract. Of course, once that occurred, the Time Variance Authority spotted him as a Variant and quickly recruited him to help in their fight against even more variant Variants. —Michael Main
Appears to be a standard sequence violation. Branches growing at a stable rate and slope. Variant identified.
Tom Hiddleston (as Loki) stands with his arms crossed and an annoyed look on
                his face, in front of a large analog clock with multiple hands.
  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel