Travelers in Time

Tag Area: Anthology
Novel

The Time Machine

  • by H. G. Wells
  • serialized in New Review, (five parts, January to May 1895)

In which H. G. Wells’s third foray into time travel finalizes the story of our favorite unnamed Traveller and his machine, all in the form that we know and love.

The two earlier forays were  The Chronic Argonaut (which was abandoned after three installments in his school magazine) and seven fictionalized National Observer essays (which sketched out the Traveller and his machine, including a glimpse of the future and proto-Morlocks). The story of The Time Machine itself had three 1895 iterations:

[ul]
[li]A five-part serial in the January through May issues of New Review, The serial contains mostly the story as we know it, but with an alternate chunk in the introduction where the Traveller discusses free will, predestination, and a Laplacian determinism of the universe.

In addition, material from Chapter XIII of the serial (just over a thousand words beginning partway through the first paragraph of page 577 and continuing to page 579, line 29) were omitted from later editions. This section was written for the serial after a back-and-forth written struggle between Wells and New Review editor William Henley. The material had a separate mimeographed publication by fan and Futurian Robert W. Lowndes in 1940 as “The Final Men” and has since had multiple publications elsewhere with varying titles such as “The Gray Man.”[/li]
[li]The US edition: The Time Machine: An Invention, by H. G. Wells (erroneously credited as H. S. Wells in the first release), Henry Holt [publisher], May 1895. This edition may have been completed before the serial, as it varies from the serial more so than the UK edition. It does not contain the extra material in the first chapter or “The Final Men” (although it does have a few additional sentences at that point of Chapter XIII).[/li]
[li]The UK edition: The Time Machine: An Invention,by H. G. Wells, William Heinemann [publisher], May 1895. This edition is a close match to the serial, with the exception of chapter breaks, the extra material in the first chapter, and “The Final Men” (omitted from what is now Chapter XIV).[/li]
[/ul]
—Michael Main
I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud.
First page of the original release of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
                consisting of two long paragraphs.
  • Eloi Gold Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties

  • by Max Beerbohm
  • in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, May 1916

Beerbohm (then an undergraduate at Oxford) feels something near to reverence toward the Catholic diabolist Enoch Soames, seeing as how the man from Preston has published one book of stories and has another book of poems forthcoming, but over time, Enoch himself becomes more and more morose and unsatisfied that he shall never see his own work appreciated in future years. —Michael Main
A hundred years hence! Think of it! If I could come back to life THEN—just for a few hours—and go to the reading-room and READ! Or, better still, if I could be projected now, at this moment, into that future, into that reading-room, just for this one afternoon! I'd sell myself body and soul to the Devil for that!
|pending alt-text|
  • Eloi Gold Medal
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Rocking-Horse Winner


When young Paul frantically rides his rocking horse, he sometimes sees the names of sure winners in actual horse races. —Michael Main
You see, it’s all right, uncle, when I’m sure! Then we go strong for all we’re worth. Don’t we, Bassett?
A young boy and an older man, dressed in nice suits, sit on a park bench
                listening to another suited man.
  • Fantasy
  • Time Phenomena
Novelette

Elsewhere and Otherwise


A young soldier’s elderly cousin disappears after not having aged for more than two decades. But now, after the way, a spectre of the cousin reappears, needing to talk about where he’s been outside the plane of our existence and the great debt he owes. —pending
The alternative was staggaring more than my facilities could hold or deal with—that my cousin, sleeping calmly in that bed, had left our spance and time for a period of four years, and that before this complete disappearance, as a preliminary to it, by way of training possibly, he had escaped our time, while still occupying our space, for a far longer period, for some twenty-five years. 
No image currently available.
  • Horror
  • Time Phenomena