Now that we’re in the enlightened 21st century, every self-respecting reader is intimately familiar with all the early time travel classics. Anno 7603, Paris avant les hommes,[/em] “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Clock That Went Backward,” El Anacronópete, The Time Machine, blah blah blah. But let’s be honest and call a Morlock a Morlock: All those old tales are tales of vacuous travelers through time, none of them giving a thought to contorted paradoxes, none wondering which lover they would get back (or get revenge on) if given the chance, none fretting about what might happen should they kill their younger self, and none having impure thoughts about sleeping with their mothers or the consequences of doing so. Yep, I’d always proudly boasted that it was my generation who discovered such sauciness.

And then I stumbled upon Jacques Rigaut’s century-old gem that managed all that and more in under 1,000 words more than a century ago.

Two Evil Robots from the future are out to destroy Bill & Ted and their babes. After all that, the Two Great Ones begin a journey that starts with Death and ends with Two Little Ones.

At the moment when the speedometer on the Aether spaceship clicked over from .999999c to 1.00000c, a collective cheer erupted up in the ITTDB Citadel. Was it a jaw-dropping dramatic moment? Seems unlikely, but we were looking for something to cheer for in this cryptic story of three men who headed to the future via relativistic time travel, only to find themselves trapped in post-apocalyptic outer space and quantum technobabble.