I found
this account of Madden’s book in Googlebooks scanned copy of the work. The note is
attributed to Anecdotes of the Life of Mr. Wm. Bowyer:
Although the play is universally reviled for a lack of literary aspirations, it has developed a bit of a cult following as perhaps the earliest example of social science fiction (don’t pay attention to the fairy behind the curtain) and human time travel!
What’s less well known is that 25 years earlier, Boitard’s initial version—yes, including the time-traveling Asmodeus—appeared as a 44-page, two-part article in the family magazine Musée des Familles—Lecture pour Tous. I stumbled upon this in Jean Le Loeuff’s November 2012 blog, Le Dinoblog.
At that moment, I uttered a cry of terror because I had no choice but to recognize exactly what kind of monster he was. . . He was a man.
Fair
enough, but what about Future Ghost? Isn’t He bringing information from the future to
Scrooge? Transfer of information from the future to the past may be boring compared to
people-jumping, but it is time travel, so the Carol must be granted membership in
the list after all, don’t you think? Ah, not so fast again! At one point, Scrooge asks
a pertinent question:
Thus speaketh the ITTDB.
I have the honor of sending you, for your magazine, an article which I hope you will be able to comprehend rather more distinctly than I do myself. It is a translation, by my friend, Martin Van Buren Mavis, (sometimes called the “Toughkeepsie Seer,”) of an odd-looking MS. which I found, about a year ago, tightly corked up in a jug floating in the Mare Tenebrarum—a sea well described by the Nubian geographer, but seldom visited now-a-days, except for the transcendentalists and divers for crotchets.
The original edition of The Great Romance is one of the rarest books extant, with single copies of Parts 1 and 2 existing in New Zealand libraries. After a century of neglect, the book has been reprinted by editor Dominic Alessio, first in Science Fiction Studies in 1993 (Part 1) and then in a separate volume in 2008 (Parts 1 and 2).[9] (A third part of the story is thought to have existed, but no copy has yet been found.) The two extant volumes were reprinted in 2008, along with commentary by Dominic Alessio on the influence the writing likely had on Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.
Considerable detective work has been applied to the question of the
identity of the pseudonymous Inhabitant[/url], although with no definite result.
Nevertheless, we lean toward the theory of one “Honnor of Ashburton,” because of an annotation to this effect in
the only known original copies of the first two volumes of the work. Additionally, of the
two title
leafs found with Volume 1, the Ashburton page was printed on paper that matches that
of the volume itself, and the volume contained advertisements for Ashburton businesses.
This explains the photo we’ve attached to the story, which depicts the Ashburton
Borough Council and Public Library, circa 1881. So far as we know, the clock tower has no
connection to the lightning storm of 12 October 1955
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.
—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.
“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.”
Alas, the Outlandish watch doesn’t play much of a role in the story. Lewis Carroll tries to use it to avert a bicycle accident, and indeed the accident is annihilated, but only temporarily until the time when the watch was first set backward reoccurs. At that point, all is once again as it was with the bicyclist in a lump on the ground.
“What a blessing such a watch would be,” I thought, “in real life! To be able to unsay some heedless word—to undo some reckless deed! Might I see the thing done?”
“With pleasure!” said the good natured Professor. “When I move this hand back to here,” pointing out the place, “History goes back fifteen minutes!”
I’ve seen many references to the 1910 release of The Green Door in a slim volume (Illus. in color. Moffat Yard. 75 cents net.), but a 1911 review in the New York Times indicates that the story was first published “in a periodical some eighteen years ago.” I haven’t tracked down what that periodical was, so for now I’ll just list the story as being from 1893. I see that the story also appeared a few years later in the Times itself (13 Apr 1896). The wilkinsfreeman.org site lists the 1896 publication as the first, but that contradicts the later Times review.
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:
[list][*]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.”[/*]
[*]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).[/*]
[*]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).[/*]
[/list]
Windsor was a far-reaching British magazine with short fiction and serials from all genres, interviews, science and other articles (such as Walter George Bell’s article about asteroids in the Nov 1897 issue), wonderful illustrations, and even photographs.
William Wallace Cook’s larger claim to fame might be his 1928 aid to writers of all ilk: Plotto: The Master Book of All (1,462) Plots.
The story was initially serialized as The Amulet in twelve monthly issues of The Strand before the book was published in 1906 as The Story of the Amulet. Decades later, the children show up in a cameo in the fourth book of Edward Eager’s Tales of Magic series.
Clute classifies the work as having numerous fantastic elements such as when Sam and the author Bob Wells leave their bodies to invisibly view other happenings, at least one small bit of time travel, and the one item that’s of most interest: a potion that changes Mr. Jones into a Negro for the span of a train journey.
Whatever time travel does exist, such as a possible visit by Mr. Jones to 16th century Greece, is subtle compared to the other aspects of the satire.
Fantasy or science fiction? Nothing particularly scientific about the time travel method, but the presentation of the want ad for a party of courageous men convinced us to tag Cook’s yarn as both sf and fantasy.
These first ten Puck stories were published in British version of The Strand Magazine from January through October of this year. In the states, the first four stories appeared simultaneously in The Ladies’ Home Journal. All ten stories along with sixteen poems were published together in the 1906 collection, Puck of Pook’s Hill.
‘So they have; but I told you that you should come and go and look and know, didn’t I? The knight isn’t a fairy. He’s Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a very old friend of mine. He came over with William the Conqueror, and he wants to see you particularly.’
Act II represents the dream. It is the medieval age—the age of chivalry, of bold, bad barons and gallant knights. An ancestor of the hero is one of these latter. His love story is depicted vividly. There is nothing lackadaisical about the lovemaking. The bold knight finally seizes the maiden in his arms and carries her off bodily to the altar in the face of strenuous opposition.
In act III the twentieth century again appears. There hero wakes up and follows, so far as modernity will let him, the example of his ancestory shown him in the second act.
— San Francisco Call, 14 December 1906
In the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute connects the two books to the Fabian Society (named after the British socialists Fabian Society, which also included H.G. Wells) because “Nesbit’s consistent Fabian socialism is central to the version of British history’ presented in the books.
‘In the hay-mow, next to old Middenboro,’ Dan suggested. ‘He doesn’t mind.’
In any case, we don’t know whether the 1910 film used the just-a-dream ending—or perhaps the film itself was just a dream of a 1940 obituary writer.
“I’m bound for yes-ter-day,” the clock replied. “Want to go to yes-ter-day?”
I wish that today’s story magazines sported such alluring artwork. Not only that, but in October of 1912, for just 30¢ you could have bought this issue of The Argosy as well as the first-ever story of Tarzan of the Apes in Argosy’s sister magazine, The All-Story. And today, instead, we get endless reality TV, including Castaway 2000.
Put me out of my misery if I ever start sounding curmudgeonly.
Although the method of time travel is fantasy, the man’s struggles with the ethics of time travel put the story soundly in the realm of foundational science fiction.
The IMDb lists Herbert M. Dawley as a co-writer, but Wikipedia lists him as only the producer. The initial three-reel film premiered at the Strand Theater, but an unhappy Dawley cut it from over 40 minutes to about 12. Around six extra minutes were later restored by the Dinosaur Museum of Blanding, Utah, in 2016, but the full version no longer exists.
One review at Silent Hollywood indicates that the ending has Martin awakening from a dream and there is no explicit mention of actual time travel. With this in mind, we’re marking the time travel as debatable. Oh, and Mark Twain himself appears in the film, played by Karl Formes.
This is the earliest story that I’ve seen where the hero goes back into his earlier body and relives something differently. Some of the later stories of this kind have no actual time travel, but merely give knowledge of an alternate timeline (e.g., Asimov’s “What If?”); others live out the two timelines in parallel (e.g., the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, also set in motion by a missed/caught train); and some, like If, are couched in terms of time travel (e.g., the 1986 movie Peggy Sue Got Married).
Normally, we don’t list long-sleep stories, given that they are not true time travel, but this one deserves a spot in the ITTDB, seeing as how it‘s the first long-sleep silent film. As a bonus, you’ll see Houdini doing his own stunts as the frozen man brought to life. The script was based on a story by Houdini.
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.
He would not let me address him in the language intercession. “I am like you,” he said, “but of a different sphere and a different power. I am not immortal; nothing is immortal. Neither the Earth, the Sun, nor the God who made them. Everything is passing away, or rather, dissolving, to be re-fashioned into other forms.”
The short novel’s heroes—Professor Pankton and his beautiful daughter Haydnee, historian Tolna, and journalist Hersey—set out from the year 2123 to change the Napoleonic Wars, starting with the French Revolution and aiming to fix matters so that mankind can advance intellectually without the hindrance of war. But the outcome is even more miserable than the original bloody history.
Should I ever track down a copy, I shall need help from my Polish colleagues in computer science to translate the story to English.
The work was reprinted in 1930 as the first part of The World Below along with a second part (later called The Dwellers.
Safety note: Do not attempt this movie’s method of creating a timeslip—via a fiery train crash—at home.
This second part of the story was combined with The Amphibians in 1929 and published as a single volume called The World Below. In 1954, it was published on it’s own as The Dwellers.
— The Bioscope, 6 February 1929
“Of course not,” he affirmed. “I merely distrust the scientific positivism of the past fifty years, the positivism of Haeckel and Darwin and of Mr. Bertrand Russell. I believe that biology has failed pitifully to explain the mystery of man’s origin and destiny.
Lea is but one of the prolific Cummings’s many girls! You can also have the Girl in the Golden Atom, the Sea Girl, the Snow Girl, the Gadget Girl, the Thought Girl, the Girl from Infinite Smallness, and the Onslaught of the Druid Girls.
Apparently, Juve and his wife lived just down the road from me (in Moscow, ID) while I was bean’ edicated in Pullman, but I didn’t know of him then.
Dear Editor: I write this letter to comment, not on the stories, which satisfy me, but on a few letters in the “Corner” of the March issue; especially Mr. Berkowitz’ letter. . . . Since he brought up the question of the time-traveler interfering disastrously with his own birth, I will discuss it. . . . Back he goes into time and meets his grandfather, before his father’s birth. For some reason John kills his grandfather. —Robert Feeney, 5334 Euclid, Kansas City, Mo. (Jun 1932)
Dear Editor: I read and enjoyed Mr. Feeney’s interesting letter in the June issue, but wish to ask: Why pick on grandfather?. . . This incessant murdering of harmless ancestors must stop. —Donald Allgeier, Mountain Grove, Mo. (Jan 1933)
This is the first published story of fan, writer and long-time editor Raymond A. Palmer.
The use of the word “robot” had not yet evolved from Čapek’s meaning of a humanoid laborer to the modern usage as a purely mechanical being.
T = | t √ℓ - v²/c² |
Please let us know if you run across a copy of this oddly-titled 21-minute film!
“Ships from the stars!” Dick ejaculated.
I read this in Asimov’s anthology Before the Golden Age, which was the first SFBC book to arrive in my mailbox after going to college in Pullman in the fall of ’74.
The story—Barney’s only publication—was a plagiaristic hodgepodge of elements from the work of A. Merritt, although Everett Bleiler’s review notes that there were imaginative and ingenious original elements.
Although the mechanism of the weapon differed from the atom bomb, it still feels as though Wyndham anticipated the capability for world destruction that would soon be upon us.
Joane Cromwell was the maiden name of Skidmore’s wife, and her name shows up as a character in several of Skidmore’s stories, although not as the same character. However, Oliver Kent does show up in a later story, “The First Flight,” where he once again sends a friend into a previous incarnation.
This is the first issue of Astounding that lists F. Orlin Tremaine as editor, although he began that job two months earlier, and I think this is the first time-travel story that he published.
I am much inclined to think it was not on another planet, but on the same planet in another time.
Scoops was a weekly British publication that lasted about half of 1934. This particular Fearn story was reprinted in the 1997 Fantasy Annual.
For a moment the slow brain of Dowb fancied he had been hurled into a tree, as his sinewy arms and legs grasped an obstruction that had brought him up abruptly in mid-flight. But the object moved and swooped crazily, and Dowb realized that he had grasped the neck of the beast directly below its repulsive head.
Bobby: So can I! It’s that magic crystal that did it!
Brick’s strips were reprinted as early as 1934 with two hardcover issues of Saalfield Comics (#1059 and #1309). He was reprinted in King Comics starting with the first April 1936 issue, and he headlined one 1938 hardcover Big Little Book (#1468, combining text with line illustrations). Some Ace Comics had reprints (1947-49), and he appeared in four issues of his own comic book: #5 (Jul 1948) to #8 (Jul 1949) that were possibly strip reprints. In the 60s, new Brick backup features appeared in some issues of The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician (at least #5, #6 and #10) and Flash Gordon (at least #14, #16, #17). They probably all used the top, but I don’t know for sure. All that was just in the U.S.: He was vastly more popular in Australia and New Zealand.
It was fun to see both the advertisements and the innovation of Cosmopolitan to publish a time-travel story by the prolific Mildred Cram in 1935. The style reminds me of later Jack Finney stories of the 50s.
Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi says that Lovecraft saw the movie Berkeley Square four times in 1933, and “its portrayal of a man of the 20th century who somehow merges his personality with that of his 18th-century ancestor” served as Lovecraft’s inspiration for this story.
This may be the earliest use of something akin to a “wheel of time.”
Art Lortie’s guide and scans include 141 pages of new and reprint material from comic books, too, although I didn’t spot any time travel therein.
This story was under Tremaine’s Astounding editorship, but the sequel, “Coils of Time,” (May 1939) appeared after Campbell became editor.
The story also appeared in Healy and McComas’s seminal anthology, Adventures in Time and Space, and it was made into a one-act play in 1943 by Wayne Gordon.
The first four short books in the series were collected (with a substantial cut and revision to #2) into a single volume, The Once and Future King, in 1958. A final part, The Book of Merlyn written in 1941, was published posthumously in 1971.
With the substitution of waves of probability for concrete particles, the world lines of objects are no longer the fixed and simple paths they once were. Geodesics have an infinite proliferation of possible branches, at the whim of sub-atomic indeterminism.
Still, of course, in large masses the statistical results of the new physics are not much different from those given by the classical laws. But there is a fundamental difference. The apparent reality of the universe is the same—but it rests upon a quicksand of possible change.
My thought on this is that the notion of time as a dimension does not have anything to do with the stacking dimension. In fact, I don’t think they can be the same dimension because that would imply that there is nothing to distinguish a point in our space-time continuum from a point with the same space-time coordinates in some other continuum.
P.S. I also didn’t care for the president’s solution to the story’s problem.
As a bonus, this essay appeared in the very issue of Astounding that has the final installment of The Legion of Time and which caused all the trouble in my story “Saving Astounding.”
The first time travel that I tracked down here was an adventurer named Stuart Taylor who teamed with Dr. Hayward and his beautiful daughter Lora (later Laura) in many issues of Jumbo Comics. For me, it was exciting for two reasons: (1) It’s some of the earliest time travel in a comic book that I know of; (2) At least the first few stories were drawn by Jack King Kirby (as by Curt Davis). Time travel probably occurred in 1-4 (“The Experiment of Kromo”), as well as in 5-14, 17-78, 84-139, plus a reprint in 140. (Numbers 15-16 had no time travel; I think 79-83 are shorter, with no Stuart Taylor, and Stu disappeared after 140.)
Note: I should get The Complete Jack Kirby, Volume 1, which has the first three Kromo reprinted in black and white, to verify that they have time travel.>
Their science fiction comic, Planet Comics, had at least one bout of time travel when a chronoscope brought dinosaurs and such to The Lost World of heroes Hunt and Lyssa (Planet Comics 41, March 1946); it also short, 2-page stories, at least one of which was time travel (“Lost World of Time” in Planet Comics 7, July 1940).
The image to the left is from Alley Oop 12 from Standard’s 1947-49 run of nine comics (10-18) that reprinted strips. The first one had pre-time-travel strips, but all of the rest probably included some time travel. The time machine picture to the right is from Dragon Lady Press strip reprints in the 1980s.
I’ve also found one Alley Oop take-off called Irving Oops in an the EC comic Panic 8, May 1955—which makes me wonder whether that other Irving of the comics, Irving Forbush, ever time traveled.
My favorite Fox time traveler was the Sorceress of Zoom. She was a female anti-hero along the lines of the Submariner, but her realm was not in the sea, it was the cloud city of Zoom. She had at least one time travel adventure in Weird Comics 7 (Oct 1940) when she gets the best of Morgan Le Fay in Camelot.
As I find more, I’ll list each character’s first time travel here and the details will be on my time-travel comics page. (Sadly, I never spotted any time travel by Marga the Panther Woman, who appeared alongside Cosmic Carson in Science Comics.)
“Something always happens to me!” exclaimed Pete. “What if I she’d get bumped off in the Past? Nix. No more o’ that stuff for me.”
“Quite right, my son. And yet—” Mayhem’s benign tone and dreamy stare at the ceiling were pure ham. “I would never have invited you here again, Pete, knowing it to be a place of strange memories, except that occasionally in our lives there arise demands that transcend all selfish personal considerations. Do you follow me?”
This title morphed into Top-Notch Laugh Comics, and was then acquired by Archie Comics. I don’t know whether there were any further adventures in time by Rand or others during the Top-Notch run.
The earliest that I know of (courtesy of Buddy Lortie) is the continuing story of Mark Swift, his teacher Mr. Kent, and the Time Retarder, which ran in all seven issues of Slam-Bang Comics and finished its run in Master Comics 7. Another continuing character was Dr. Voodoo who began life in the comics as a jungle doctor, but had an adventure in the past in Whiz Comics 18 through 34.
As I find more of those, I’ll list them on my time-travel comics page.
One piece of that writing was a short episode after the Traveller leaves the Eloi and the Morlocks, just before visiting the red sun and the end of the world. This episode was deleted from both the American (Holt text) and the British (Heinemann text) published book editions of the novel, but it did appear as a 7-page mimeographed and stapled publication from American fan and Futurian Robert W. Lowndes in 1940, and it appeared in a number of other places, sometimes called “The Grey Man” and once called “The Missing Pages.”
I’ll bet there was more time travel in various of the comics published by Lev Gleason, but I haven’t yet tracked them down.
The story ends with a challenge to the reader with a total of $50 in cash prizes for the best answers! The answer to the challenge was given in the June issue. Somehow in the answer, George Worthey’s name changed to Sherwin, but I think that was just an editorial mistake. I didn’t much care for Farley’s “correct” answer, although I did spot Isaac Asimov’s name listed among the 112 correct respondents in the July issue. The contest winner was Albert F. Lopez from East Boston, Mass.
Your answer should be based on the facts of time travel and its rules, as stated in the story by Professor Tyrrell. Your editors suspect that the correct answer would also shed light on the fate of the Professor’s friend in Holland—rather FROM Holland. But of course, there is a little of George Worthey in all of us, and you may not believe this. Editors don’t know it all, either—
Except that Ralph Milne Farley has kindly supplied us with the answer, and we know it and believe it. We’ll give it to you in the next issue, what’s more, and they you’ll believe it too.
This is the first story sent to us up in the ITTDB Citadel via our special arrangement with the librarians down at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
. . . Please write and tell me what you think of my theory.
Respectfully,
Jack Lewis
This was a $25 contest winner story, but Harrison, 23 at the time and living in Portland, Oregon, never published another story.
Wikipedia cites Paul Norris (the Brick Bradford strip artist) as the creator of Power Nelson, but the Grand Comics Database gives a tentative identification of Dick Sprang as the artist for the first six stories, with Norris’s first works being the cover of Prize Comics 6 and the “Journey to 1940” story in issue 7. His first signed work, as by Roy Paul, is the Power Nelson story in issue 13.
“Never can tell what the goldurned guvvermunt is going to do next!”
This is the earliest sf story that I’ve seen with a time loop, although there was the earlier 1939 episode of The Shadow.
“Geographically,” said Face, “not very far from here. Chronologically, a hell of a long way.”
This is the sixth of the trio’s 24 films, and the only one to feature time travel, although (based on one review) it may be naught but a dream. Because of this, I’ve marked the time travel as debatable.
All the stories were fixed up into two books, The Weapon Shops of Isher and The Weapon Makers, and the SFBC gathered both those into The Empire of Isher.
Evan Zweifel gave me a copy of this magazine as a present!
O’Brien was a prolific author who died in action during World War II at age 26.
This is the earliest story that I’ve spotted anywhere with the time traveler coming to know his own mother.
Because of the story’s opening, I’m convinced the Twonky is from the future. The “temporal snag” that brought it to 1942 feels like an unexpected time rift to me, although the route back to the future is an intentional journey via an unexplained method.
Because of the opening, I’m convinced that this Twonky is from the future. The “temporal snag” that brought him there feels like an unexpected time rift to me, although the route back to the future is an intentional journey via an unexplained method.
Van Vogt combined this with two other stories and a little fix-up material for his 1970 publication of Quest for the Future.
This story was in the first book that I got from the SF Book Club in the summer of 1970, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1 (edited by Robert Silverberg). I read and reread those stories until the book fell apart.
“You must have been hoarding these,” he hazarded.
Smith said absently, “They’ve been on exhibit for sixty years—” He caught himself and drank rye.
Van Vogt combined this with two other stories and some fix-up material (especially for “Far Centaurus”) for his 1970 publication of Quest for the Future.
So why do I count this as time travel when, for example, The Gap in the Curtain is not? The future newspapers in Gap never actually appeared, and it felt as if they were mere visions of a possible future, whereas we had no doubt that Larry holds an actual copy of tomorrow’s paper in his hands. And besides, It Happened Tomorrow had a great take on how events may be fated and yet, when accompanied by charming misunderstandings, lead to the unexpected.
Early Edition, one of my favorite TV shows, uses the same idea of tomorrow’s paper, but its creators said that the show was not based on this movie.
It does make me reflective to know that this story was written shortly before O’Brien’s death in a World War II bomber over Europe.
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.
I don’t always include prescience stories in my list, but like Heinlein’s “Life-Line,” this one is an exception, both because of the origin of Peter Talley’s prescience and because it was made into episodes of Tales of Tomorrow (the TV show) and [work-142 | The Twilight Zone[/ex].
More or less concurrently, the broadcasts were repackaged nationally for NBC radio by Ziv Syndication with Ronald Colman as host; there were also some new NBC episodes (not adapted by Lawrence and Lee) including A Christmas Carol, which as everyone knows has no real time travel. The KFI dates below are taken from ocrsite.com; the NBC dates (which were aired differently across the country) are from audio-classics.com. The selector for each story is also given in the list below.
Van Vogt combined this with two other stories and a little fix-up material for his 1970 publication of Quest for the Future.
Hughes groaned inwardly.
“I was referring to an additional dimension of space,” he explained patiently.
The story is soft-spoken but moving, and for me, it was a good complement to T.H. White’s backward-time-traveler, Merlyn.
I keep finding earlier and earlier stories with the idea of destroying mankind by squishing a bug, and I am wondering whether this is the earliest linchpin bug (although that doesn’t actually happen here).
Piper’s first short story impacted me because I fantasize about the same thing (perhaps we all do). What would you do? Who would you tell? What would you try to change? What would you fear changing?
I enjoy stories with some personal connection to myself (and generally award an extra half star). In this case, the connection is Alfred Tarski, the Polish logician who was the advisor of the advisor of my own academic advisor, David B. Benson.
It’s fair to say that this story’s not about the time travel.
I enjoyed how he wrote out his visions in quatrains.
It’s nice that there’s no talk of the universe exploding when he meets himself, but even so, the story suffers from a murkiness that is often part of time-travel stories that are otherwise enjoyable. The murkiness stems from two points: (1) That somehow the events are repeating over and over again—but from whose viewpoint? (2) The events are deterministic and must be acted out exactly the same each time. I enjoy clever stories that espouse the viewpoint of the second item (“By His Bootstraps”). But this does not play well with the first item, and (as with many stories), Harness did not address that conflict nor the consequent issue of free will. Still, I enjoyed the story and wish I’d met Harness when I traveled to Penn State University in the spring of 1982.
The story is a crudely written Hitler fantasy, but it does have the interesting idea that travel through time can best be accomplished by stepping sideways into a parallel universe, traveling through time in that other universe, and then stepping back. Fortunately for Amba, the scientist who discovered this version of time travel knows more than Hitle ever will.
In the story, Borges himself tells of a man, Dom Pedro Damián, who first has a history as a soldier who lost his nerve at the 1904 Battle of Masoller and then lived out a long, quiet life. But after Damián dies some decades later, a second history appears in which the soldier was actually a dead hero at that very same battle, and no one remembers anything of the earlier life.
Motivated by the final part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Borges argues that the only complete explanation involves God granting a death-bed wish to the 1946 Damián, allowing him to return to the 1904 battle, causing time to branch into two universal histories, the first of which is largely—but not wholly—suppressed.
I lifted my eyebrows: “You mean in his classes?”
He seemed annoyed: “No, for Heaven’s sake. His research students! His doctoral candidates!”
Seeing as how there are no recordings of the broadcast, I wish I had my own time machine so I could send my Betamax® back to 1949.
Based on Hank’s knowledge of the castle and its displays, the time travel definitely occurred in this version, with both the travel back and travel forward caused by clonks on the head. And based on the ending, Hank might not have been the only traveler through time.
The mouse did save the day himself via time travel in 1961 (Mighty Mouse 152). As I find other instances, I’ll add them to my time-travel comics page.
A well-written, early time-loop story, and also one of the first two time travel stories (along with “An Ounce of Prevention”) to appear in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
I’m aiming for a complete list of EC’s time-travel vignettes, but the list as of now is only partial. The first one I found was in Weird Fantasy 13 (May/Jun 1950), which was actually its first issue. That was part of a ruse to take over a second-class postage permit from A Moon, a Girl . . . Romance (which ended with issue 12). They stuck with that numbering through the fifth issue (number 17) when the postmaster general took note, and the next one was number 6. I did kinda wonder how many of those romance readers were surprised when Weird Fantasy 13 showed up in their mailboxes.
There was a sister title, Weird Science, which began in May/Jun 1952 with issue 12 (taking over the postage permit after the 11th issue of Saddle Romance). It had many time travel stories, starting with “Machine from Nowhere” in issue 14 (the 3rd issue).
Weird Science and Weird Fantasy were not selling that well, so EC combined them into a single title—Weird Science-Fantasy—with issue 23 in March 1954. Alas, there was but one time-travel story, “The Pioneer” in number 25 (Sep 1954), about which EC’s site says A man attempts to be the first to successfully time travel, but there are some casualties on the way.. . .. By the way, the whole run of EC comics would be 4 stars, but it gets an extra ½ star because of Al Williamson’s adaptation of “The Sound of Thunder” in Weird Science-Fantasy 24 and the beautiful Frank Frazetta cover on the final issue (number 29) of Weird Science-Fantasy. The third image to the left is one Frazetta did of that cover in 1972, with a bonus vamp in the bottom right corner. The cover had a gladiator fighting cave men, but it was not a time-travel story.
In 1955, the Comics Code Authority banned the word “Weird,” so the title became Incredible Science Fiction with number 30 (Jul/Aug 1955). The four-issue run had only one time-travel tale (“Time to Leave” by Roy G. Krenkel in number 31).
I haven’t found definitive information on the creators of this series. Several sites name ACG editor Richard E. Hughes as the writer; some places speculate that it was drawn by Ken Bald, but Pappy’s Golden Age Blog indicates that a reader names Lin Streeter as the actual artist, and Pappy agrees.
This is the first of Finney’s many fine time-travel stories.
From behind there came the thud of hooves, a shout, shrill and defiant, the clang of metal on metal, and then a confused roar of sounds, shouts, more hoof-beats, clang after clang, dying away into the distance as suddenly as they had come. The gauntlet slipped from Peter’s hand, and he shook himself as if he had just awakened.
The story was the basis for the second episode of Science Fiction Theater and also Spielberg’s Amazing Stories.
“You will come in peace?” he asked, his voice beginning to tremble. “You will do no harm?”
“My husbands.” She shook her head dolefully. “To find five more difficult men would be positively Martian.”
The episode “And Adam Beget” came from a 1939 radio episode of Arch Oboler’s Plays, and it formed the basis for a 1953 Steve Ditko story, “A Hole in His Head,” in the Black Magic comic book.
“Fool’s Errand” was the second story del Rey wrote after moving to New York in 1944 where he rented a $3/week room near Ninth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, but Campbell rejected the story for Astounding as being too obvious. It was another seven years before Roger Sidney would find his way into the pages of Science Fiction Quarterly, one of the new spate of 1950s sf magazines.
My own student, David Black, who died unexpectedly in the summer of 2006, would always talk with me about anything and everything. So if he were still alive as I read this (in 2015), we would have a happy afternoon reading it and talking about the social situation the story brings up, or maybe we’d figure out why I’m so attracted to one-against-the-system stories.
One of the pleasures of reading old magazines is seeing the innocence of the ads, such as a 1.5-inch ad for Frank A. Schmid’s bookstore on Columbus Circle in New York. i’ve got them all! every one!, proclaims the ad, referring to sf books of the day. And perhaps they did!
Then I did something I hadn’t let myself do in years—I burst into tears.
In general, I’d place the stories on the more horrific end of the science fiction scale, but certainly worth watching.
“Ummm. But you must realize that we have time travelers turning up continuously these days.”
This was not the first speculation on small changes in the past causing big changes now (for example, Tenn’s “Me, Myself, and I”), but I wonder whether this was the first time that sensitive dependence on initial conditions was expressed in terms of a single butterfly.
We think you should consult a psychiatrist.
Sincerely,
Doyle P.
Gates
Science Fiction Editor
Deep Space Magazine
I first read this one on an overnight ice-climbing trek not far from the ITTDB Citadel, hosted by fellow indexer Tim.
That first issue had this Otto Binder story in which a farmer takes two archaeologists, Stoddard and Jackson, to a time capsule that’s so unusual it couldn’t possibly have been buried by any known civilization. They take it to the Archeological Institute where their boss instructs them to clean up the outside apparently believing that they’ll stop once it’s clean.
By the way, I’d love to know more about the story behind the two different versions of the Emsh cover. One has the old F&SF logo, last used on the Sep 1952 issue; the other has the new logo from Oct 1952 forward. Does anyone know the story behind this?
By the way, this is another example of a time traveler who arrives naked. I wonder who first penned that now clichéd mode of arrival. Also, the story expresses an early version of the Chronology Protection Principle.
Almost all of the recordings of that first series were destroyed, but most were rerecorded for a rerun series (renamed “Operation Luna”). Those rerecordings are available on CD along with the non-time-travel second series (“The Red Planet”) and third series (“The World in Peril”).
Harold snorted impatiently. “My dear Peter, ‘time’ is a meaningless word taken by itself, just as ‘space’ is.”
“But barring that, time travel.”
“If you like, yes.”
I haven’t found anything earlier that brings up this question, but although the resolution was clever, it didn’t satisfy me, and (though I could be wrong) I think Brown misses the fact that at one point there should be two copies of the object in existence at the same time. In any case, this was the first part of a pair of short-short stories in the Feb ’54 Galaxy, which together were called Two-Timer (the second of which had no time travel).
At Larry Shaw’s request, Blish expanded “Beep” into the short novel The Quincunx of Time, and both these stories share a background wherein the work of Dolph Haertel (the next Einstein) provides an FTL-drive (the Haertel Overdrive, later called the Imaginary Drive), an antigravity device (the spindizzy), and an instantaneous communicator (the Dirac Radio). I read many of these in the early ’70s, but can’t find my notes and don’t remember any other time travel beyond that one communiqué that Lje overheard. Still, I’ll list everything in The Haertel Scholium and reread them some day!
Marvelman (also called Jack Marvel in Australia, and later renamed Miracleman for a 1980s reboot) counted time travel among his powers, although I don’t know when he or his kin first traveled.
All in all, Sheckley’s story is a perfect example of a causal loop: I knew those potatoes would come in handy and that, given time, the girl would show up safe and sound.
The comic was published by Magazine Enterprises, which published from 1944 to 1958. So far, this Cave Girl is the only time travel I’ve spotted, though I do have one of their Teena issues in my dad’s stash of comics.
I had the good fortune to meet Fred Pohl in July of 2003 at Jim Gunn's workshop in Manhattan, Kansas. On a warm day outside the student union building, he kindly sat and talked to me about the background for a story I was writing about him and Asimov.
Yes, it’s Superman, strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands, and who—disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannored reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper—fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way!
For me, the logic of these stories pushes in a good direction, but still leaves one gaping hole that’s evinced by the fate of Manse’s compatriot Keith Denison in “Brave to Be a King”—namely, what happened to the younger Denison? Perhaps my problem is simply that I don’t grok ℵℵ-valued logic.
The stories have been collected in various volumes, the most complete of which is the 2006 Time Patrol that contains all but The Shield of Time.
Unlike Tucker’s earlier Gilgamesh book, The Time Masters, this one really does have a time machine.
The story was reprinted in the 1958 collection, Honeymoon in Hell, which features a cover by Hieronymus Bosch (indexer Grzegorz’s favorite painter) with an owl in the background (Grzegorz’s favorite bird)!
The cave does bring together animals and people from different times, but whether any actual time travel occurs is debatable. And before you ask, I don’t know what a mastondia is either.
Unfortunately, for me, the unexplained time-travel paradoxes in the ending lowered my enjoyment, even though it was no worse than the inexplicable paradoxes in so many other stories.
Most of it happened to his sister Ann, too, but she was a girl and didn’t count, or at least that’s what Roger thought, or at least he thought that in the beginning.
Part of it happened to his cousins Jack and Eliza, too, but they didn’t come into it till later.
A black and white version was reprinted in 1971 by Pendulum Press as a precursor to their original Pendulum Classics series.
For the most part, Bestor’s story has jaunting (teleportation through space) with no time travel, which is enough to cause plenty of excitement for Gully Foyle (aka Geoffrey Fourmyle) as he jaunts around the war-torn solar system, seeking revenge on various space merchants. But at one climactic point, he also manages a jaunt through time.
Most of it happened to his sister Ann, too, but she was a girl and didn’t count, or at least that’s what Roger thought, or at least he thought that in the beginning.
Part of it happened to his cousins Jack and Eliza, too, but they didn’t come into it till later.
George: Well, you know there is a theory that nothing is lost, nothing is destroyed.
Bart: Then you do believe it’s possible?
George: Anything is possible, Bart, to a degree. Science has proved that. It’s conceivable, with concentration and imagination, that a person might, for a moment, escape from the present into the past.
A few years later, the story was the basis of an Outer Limits episode.
Or else there Jane and Mark and Katharine and Martha would be, and there their grown-up selves would be, too, and they might bump right into each other. And that would be like those horror stories where people go walking down long hallways and meet themselves coming in the other direction. And everybody goes mad in the end, and no wonder!
I liked Kornbluth’s description of the differential analyzer as well as the cadre of office girls solving differential equations by brute force of adding machines.
“Aha!” said Hassel.
“I was terrified by the indicent. I had visions of returning to my world to find it completely changed as a result of this single death. Imagine my surprise when I returned to my world to find that nothing had changed!”
The story was a nice forerunner to Silverberg’s “Hawksbill Station.”
The story involves a time traveler, Pete Jensen, who couldn’t stop the attack on Pearl Harbor, but he certainly made his mark as the Twilight Zone precursor.
Billy: Even better! We’re covering a hundred miles at a step and we’re going back through history, too! These Ward shoes must have magical powers!
Parts of this story had the tenor of a Jack Finney story, but the characters and plot did not generate the interest that Finney’s can.
He nodded. “It could be,” he said, “since, in the absence of any real passage of time, it would be in temporal ratio to our involvement in our pasts, which might force it into a different time plane altogether.”
In this story, four orphans are sent to live in the past with the rather odd Aunt Martha and the slightly less odd Aunt Harriet, who together give the children only one commandment: Never play under the willow tree!
When I began putting together this Big List in 2005, I started with all the Asimov time travel stories that I could remember. Somehow I forgot about this story which I first read in 1973 in Nightfall and Other Stories. But then, while scouring the 1950s back issues of F&SF for more obscure stories, there it was: Sam Marten’s great, great grandfather brought from his deathbed to meet Sam, and there, also, was a moment of time travel for Sam himself.
Two new sentences were added at the end of the original story for the reprinting in Asimov’s collection, so I thought it would be appropriate to quote those new sentences here:
“Why?”
Betty looked to her boss for assistance. None was forthcoming. There ought to be some very quick, positive, definite answer. She said, “Well, for one thing, paradox. Suppose you had a time machine and traveled back a hundred years or so and killed your own great-grandfather. Then how could you ever be born?”
“Confound it if I know,” the little fellow growled. “How?”
Some of the stories were gathered into two collections: Mutiny in the Time Machine (1963) and Time Machine to the Rescue (1967).
Their words for the sixth Scout Law were weird, but I was glad to know they still had the law, especially if they thought I was an animal.
A black and white reprint appeared in the 2005 Alex Toth Reader (Volume 2).
Serling wrote this script based on a George Clayton Johnson’s bare bones, present-tense
treatment for a TV script, complete with an indication of where the commercial break
should go. For this episode, Serling filled in the flesh and
cut the fat from a bare bones, present-tense treatment by George Clayton Johnson. The treatment appeared in Johnson’s 1977 retrospective collection of
scripts and stories, and in Volume 9 of Serling’s collected Twilight Zone scripts,
Johnson commented that “Rod took my idea and went off to the races with it. He had a
remarkable knowledge of what would and wouldn’t work on television, and he took
everything that wouldn’t work out of ‘Execution’. He worked like a surgeon; a
little snip here, a complete amputation over there, move this bone into place, graft over
that one. When he was done, my little story had grown into a television script that lived
and breathed on its own.” Serling also added a nice twist at the end that, for us,
warranted the TV episode an Eloi Honorable Mention.
Rod
Serling wrote this script based on a 1960 Twilight Zone episode
of the same name, but I’m uncertain whether the story was published before
Johnson’s 1977 retrospective collection.
Professor Manion[/d]: They’re out there, Caswell. . . . Things you can’t imagine.
The flight to the future is explained by scientific gibberish that contains a high concentration of mumbo jumbo, but the gist of it is that the speed of Allison’s plane (around 10,000 mph) added to the rotational speed of the Earth plus the speed of the Earth’s orbit around the sun plus the speed of the Solar System around the center of the galaxy plus maybe another speed or two, managed to bring his total speed close to that of light, which brought him to the future. Apparently, reversing his plane’s path is all that’s needed to return him to the past (ideally with Trirene beside him).
A self-defeating act paradox is set up nicely (if Alison stops the plague, then the citadel in the, future won’t be there to send him back to stop the plague), but the issue is never explicitly discussed and the ending of the film is inconclusive on the matter. Nevertheless, I commend the film for being the first to raise the issue of time travel paradoxes, albeit in the background.
I’ve seen this listed as a retrofitted alternate timeline story in Chandler’s Rim World series, but I haven’t read enough of that series to know where the FTL time machine would fit in. Stay tuned for updates.
Tom departed from the late twentieth century because of its unpleasant political climate, but the description of Barlow’s orginal time reads more as if Anderson got a peek at 2016 Donald Trump.
When the story was reprinted in Nightmares and Geezenstacks it was presented as three separate vignettes (’The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver,[/i] Parts I, II and III), but the original EQMM publication had just one entry (Of Time and Eustace Weaver) in its table of contents.
Side note: The trio of stooges are also the first time travelers we’ve seen in film who fret over changing the course of history. Who woulda thunk?
This 28-minute photo montage with about 1,200 words of narration has a nice seed of an idea, but I find it insulting to other talented filmmakers that Time magazine ranked this sketch of a film as #1 in their 2010 list of best time travel movies.
I try to avoid major spoilers (stop reading now, if you wish), but the reason that Don Miguel ends up in a world without time travel is one that I thought of (long after Brunner) based on fixed-points in mathematics. That idea alone gives the story an extra star.
The original three stories appeared in three consecutive issues of Science Fiction Adventure, and they were later fixed up into a short novel that was subsequently expanded. It’s the expanded version that I read from the CU library.
I found the story to be quite a scary character sketch of Arthur, but was disapponted that the time travel aspect dealt with that worn-out aspect of the Earth moving away from the time traveler.
Nowadays, we all know that Doc Doom is far too smart to think the most profitable way to use his time platform is by sending three of the FF into the past with orders to bring back Blackbeard’s treasure (while keeping the fourth member of their team captive). And yet, the story has a charm that stems from the causal loop of Ben Grimm’s presence in the past actually causing the legend of Blackbeard, which in turn caused Doom to send the loveable lunk back.
As I find other time travel stories, I’ll add them to my time travel comic book page.
Other Harvey time-travel comics are listed on my time travel comics page.
For many years, Vance Aandahl was an English professor at nearby Metro State College in Denver, and among his students was another favorite Colorado writer, James Van Pelt.
The plot suffers from Alpha Centauri syndrome, where the time traveler might as well be from Alpha Centauri as from the future, but seeing the emergence of Kirby’s high-perspective artwork gives this issue a boost. In addition, the story provides a powerful image of the pre-Vietnam cold war era and its prevailing assumptions about the roles of women in society.
And the only thing that bothers me is that I just had to read this in the month of my own sixtieth birthday. Oh, that no-goodnick Silverberg!
Janet and I spent an enjoyable Saturday morning tracking down this single extant photo of Professor Seabury.
Although this story was too abstract for my taste, I did enjoy the early presentation of what today might be called a Boltzmann Brain.
I don’t know whether any episodes after the origin included time travel.
The full version, called Beyond the Barrier, was published shortly after the shortened two-part serial (about 45,000 words) appeared in F&SF.
As you may know, in the 1960s, the best way to present this kind of story was through an hour of snail-paced police procedural followed by detailed lectures from the mad professor. Oh, and also be sure to also send the majorette on a brief trip to the future, and keep a close eye on that brave Egyptian slave.
In his blog, Fred Pohl wrote about how Heinlein’s agent gave permission for Pohl publish the novel in If and to cut “five or ten thousand words in the beginning that were argumentative, extraneous and kind of boring” (and Pohl agreed to pay full rate for the cut words). But apparently, Heinlein “went ballistic” when he saw the first installment, so much so that when the book appeared as a separate publication, Heinlein made sure people knew who was responsible for the previous cuts by adding a note* that “A short version of this novel, as cut and revised by Frederik Pohl, appeared in Worlds of If Magazine.”
* The version of
Heinlein’s note that Pohl recalled was much funnier than Heinlein’s actual note in
our timeline, but sadly, we have lost track of where we saw Pohl’s version.
The film draws in at least four important additional time travel tropes: suspended animation, a single nonbranching, static timeline (with the corresponding inability to go back and change it), experiencing the passage of time at different rates, and a trip to the far future. And according to the SF Encyclopedia, the film was originally conceived as a sequel to the 1960 film of The Time Machine.
Jon Shultis told me of this comic strip that told the tale of the Cave of Time in many of the Boys’ Life issues from March 1965 through March 1967.
For many years, I thought this novel was part of Poul’s Time Patrol series, until Bob Hasse mentioned this as one of his favorites that is not in the series. The beginning reminded me of Heinlein’s Glory Road, and the rest is reminiscent of Asimov’s The End of Eternity, both of which captivated me in the summer of 1968. Poul’s book holds up well in that company.
Naturally, I never had any refined taste (as indicated by the Bronze Eloi Medal awarded tp Jeannie), but I was a product of my 60s childhood, and, besides, Jeannie (occassionly and briefly) had a belly button (including season 5’s “Mrs. Djinn-Djinn”).
I won’t bore you with how we worked out a lot of problems on our second model, or how Dennis managed to work out a time-meter that we could calibrate to send the machine a specific distance into time. Because all this is not important. What is important is what I found when I went into time.
I’ve already told you I’d read your book about Cretaceous dinosaurs and I liked the entire book, but that final chapter about the extinction of the dinosaurs is the one that really got me. Many a time I’d lie awake at night thinking about all the theories you wrote about and trying to figure out in my own mind how it really was.
So when it was time to get into that machine and go, I knew where I would be headed.
My favorable impression is no doubt reflective of the time when I read it (the summer of 1970, nearly 13, while moving from Washington State to Alabama). Perhaps the fiction doesn’t hold up as well decades later up, but the issues of time that it brings up still interest me and it was my first exposure to the idea of a geographic timeslip. And, similar to Asimov, Hoyle served to cultivate my interest in the natural sciences.
This was the first book that I got through the Scholastic Book Club when we moved to Bellevue in 1968. Each month, the club would give you a flier where you ticked off the books that you wanted, and the next month the books would magically show up at school!
During my 2012 visit to Bellevue, my college roommate Paul Eisenbrey reminded me of this show from our childhood.
“This the twentieth? Why, you’re right! I guess it is,” Diogenes agreed. “You see, I carry on experiments in other fields also, and sometimes get my times mixed.”
An invisible, subterranean gas can be supplied right to your house along with controls that let you control its delivery to your brain. Depending on the concentration, the result is to bring aspects of your previous consciousness (or that of your ancestors) right into your present-day brain: physical sensations, bodily abilities, mental attitudes, and the psychological make-up of the channeled person all take over your body, although you remain present. To me, this could be ancestral memory—perhaps passed down genetically and triggered by the newly discovered gas—but I’m going to list it as time travel.
“Dragonrider,” which first appeared as a two-part Analog serial (December 1967 and January 1968), was the second Pern stories, appearing after the shorter novella “Weyr Search” (October 1967). Together, the two stories formed the first Pern novel, Dragonflight (1968). When the online version of the ITTDB was in a nascent stage, my friend Allison Thompson-Brown reminded me that the dragons can travel to a new when as well as a new where, and that time travel first appeared near the end of “Dragonrider.” Time travel on Pern occurs in a single, static timeline, so the dragons and their riders can never change anything known to be certain in the past.
Robinton’s eyes widened as he digested this astonishing news.
“That is how we forestalled the attack on Nerat yesterday morning. We jumped back two hours between times to meet the Threads as they fell.”
Like the 1964 version, this version has a brief mention that it’s impossible to change events that have already happened, but unlike the original, the montage at the end of the film is mere chaos that no longer reinforces the idea of a single deterministic, nonbranching timeline. Despite that, I enjoyed the consequences of the villainous character running into himself, but at the same time, I dismayed at the discussion of how meeting yourself could instantly cause a disastrous explosion or implosion or maybe something-or-other (the audio was unintelligible at 1:12) would cease to exist. (I pray that the space-time continuum wasn’t in peril).
Kirk could not reply. Spock took his arm gently. “He knows,” he said. “Soon you will know, too. And what was. . . now is again.”
I wonder whether this was the first transporter accident story (which, as we all know, eventually leads to two Will Rikers).
Allison Thompson-Brown reminded me that dragons can go when as well as where, and the travel through time always results in a stable time loop, so that dragon travel can never change anything known to be certain in the past. The actual whening part (or going between time, as it’s called) didn’t come until the third installment (Part 2 of “Dragonrider” in the Jan 1968 Analog), but I’ll date the concept back to the slightly earlier appearance of the first story (“Weyr Search” in Oct 1967). The two stories were fixed up into the first Pern novel, Dragonflight, in July of 1968, but it was another ten years before I discovered it.
Robinton’s eyes widened as he digested this astonishing news.
“That is how we forestalled the attack on Nerat yesterday morning. We jumped back two hours between times to meet the Threads as they fell.”
The story includes flashbacks and previously unknown explanations of the team’s previous trip to the ’40s in [unknown link]Avengers #56, and at the end of the story, Goliath uses Dr. Doom’s Time Platform to banish the Scarlet Centurion back to his time—and we think this is the only time travel that actually appears in the story (apart from the flashbacks). We don’t know what happens to the alternative 1968 (now known as Earth-689, but the traveling Avengers return to the universe that we all knew and loved in the 1960s (a.k.a. Earth-616), with their memory of the whole affair wiped by the Watcher.
The story has a kind of reverse grandfather paradox: [spoiler Lucy and Jamie’s great-great-grandparents are Sara and Tom (a boy who died trying to save Sara and George). So, initially, Lucy and Jamie actually have no grandparents (at least not on that side), and it’s only by Lucy and Jamie going back in time to save Sara and George (as well as Tom) that Sara and Tom live long enough to have offspring. So where did Lucy and Jamie come from initially in order to be able to go back in time and create the conditions so that they will be born? This is almost a single nonbranching, static timeline, except for the fact that initially, Sara, Georgie, and Tom did die (as evinced by what Lucy and Jamie see and hear in the graveyar), so Lucy and Jamie did change things. I think we need a new name for it, perhaps the grandchild paradox.[/spoiler]
“Oh, I don’t understand it,” said Jamie cheerfully, “but then I don’t understand television either. But when you’ve seen it working, you can’t help believing in it.”
Mathematician Fred Galvin from Kansas University pointed us to this gem, which also got us wondering who was the first to pose the paradox. Both Clarke and Hawking have mentioned the problem, but where did it originate? We’re working on tracking that down. Let us know if you have any leads!
The writing, acting and sets had little appeal to me, though I did enjoy Batgirl (Yvonne Craig) in “Wild Journey,” aka Marta, the green Orion dancer from the third season of Star Trek.
This is Janet’s favorite time-travel novel, in which Finney elaborates on themes that were set in earlier stories such as “Double Take.”
For me, I see the tone of several later items, such as the TV show Seven Days, as descendants of Tucker’s novel—and we finally understand why the Terminator arrives at his destination naked.
“Naked? All the way naked?”
To be fair, I did enjoy this paperback when I bought it in the summer of 1970, but when I went to read van Vogt’s collected stories 42 years later, bits kept seeming familiar, which is when I discovered the truth. If I were a new reader, I’d just as soon read the individual stories and skip the conglomeration. The three stories are “Film Library,” “The Search” and “Far Centaurus” (all in van Vogt’s Transfinite collection).
The story puts me in the mood of Jack Finney’s wonderful non-time-travel story, “Home Alone.”
As early as the 1930s, stories have addressed the issue of the Earth moving to a different position when a time traveler moves through time. This story addresses the issue by saying that the time traveler appears only once per year, but that doesn't really solve the problem for so many reasons, starting with the fact that a given position on the surface of the Earth will not be at “the same” position in the subsequent year.
I’m attractive, am’t I?” She opened the blanket to look at herself. “I mean, am I attractive to you? Oh, Dovy, s-say something! I’ve come so far, I chartered three jets, I, I,—Oh, Dovy d-darling!”
According to the alien Yusharisp, Jherek’s time is at the end of the universe, which allows this story to be billed as the last love story of the universe. However, the phrase ’last story’ might be slightly inappropriate for the first story of a series that includes three other novels and five short stories. The first three novels, including this one, are gathered in an omnibus edition called The Dancers at the End of Time.
In addition to acknowledging that Ed Bryant’s stories are among my favorites, I can also add that he is a kind and generous mentor to writers in the Denver area, including myself!
The original manga comic was created by Fujiko F. Fujio.
I think the series had only one time-travel story, “Yesteryear” (written by D.C. Fontana), which was the second in Sutherland’s tenure. In that episode, Spock returns from a time-traveling mission to find that he’s now in a reality where he died at age 7, and hence he returns to his own childhood to save himself.
Plainly, only one other group could finance further explorations into the past—the world’s television corporations.
I met Pamela Sargent in Lawrence, Kansas, at Jim Gunn’s writing workshop. She was insightful and kind to the young writers who came to learn from her and other talented writers.
Asimov wrote this story in 1941, but it was lost until a fan found it in the Boston University archives in the early ’70s.
“Long ago.” Hornby smiled amiably and filled his glass again. “Better than the ones those amateurs at Stanford rigged up. I’ve destroyed it, though. Lost interest.”
In the 35th anniversary special, “The Street We Live On,” Grover takes Elmo on a trip through time to see how the street was in the past. Also, in a PBS special, “Elmo Saves Christmas,” the red guy visits a future Christmas.
Warning: The first publication of the story in that ultimate anthology (Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology) was “cut to shreds” by a ham-handed editor at Charterhouse, so your best bet is to read it in one of Silverberg’s later collections.
A sequel, The Humboldt Effect, picks up Luke’s life several years later.
This story gave me a game that I play of pretending that I have just arrived as a passenger in my own body with no control over my actions or observations. How long does it take to figure out who and where I am? So, I enjoyed that aspect of the story, but I have trouble reading phonetically spelled dialects.
In his autobiography, de Camp says he based the setting of the story on his time as a graduate student at MIT in 1932, when Lovecraft (whom de Camp didn’t know) lived in nearby Providence: “I put H.P. Lovecraft himself, unnamed, into the story and stressed the contrast between his idealized eighteenth-century England and what he would have found if he had actually been translated back there. To get the dialect right, I read Fielding’s Tom Jones.”
In submitting Captain Carter’s strange manuscript to you in book form, I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will be of interest.
My first recollection of Captain Carter is of the few months he spent at my father’s home in Virginia, just prior to the opening of the civil war. I was then a child of but five years, yet I well remember the tall, dark, smooth-faced, athletic man whom I called Uncle Jack. . . .
very sincerely yours,
Edgar Rice Burroughs
The time-travel connection is slight in this long story, but it is relevant to Joelle. As I read though, I wondered whether the story could have been much more had the time-travel element been taken more to heart.
Although the book was published in Oct 1977, it’s first half appeared as two long extracts in the first two issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction (“Time Storm” in Spring 1977 and “Across the River” in Summer 1977).
As of writing this, I am only partway through my reading and wondering so many things: When the man in the world at large who will eventually enter the machine realize that he is the traveler? From his perspective, what happened to the machine (and him!) when it materialized in 1985? (Ah! That question is answered shortly after it occurs to me.) For that matter, why doesn’t he himself, while in the pod, already know that he will reach 1985? To what extent does his very appearance cause the technology that permits his trip to occur? VCIS! (Very Cool Idea-Story!), although it offers little in plot or character.
I’m still searching for other time travel stories about Grimes or Chandler’s Rim Worlds.
“What for?” I asked. “Time Travel?” I sneered.
“Yes,” he said.
The radio series spawned six books and at least one time-travel infused short story.
I read this story as I was starting my graduate studies in Pullman in 1978. Sadly, there was no second issue of Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine.
The story incorporates the novella, “A Time When” (1975), which appeared only as a limited edition at Boskone where McCaffrey was the Guest of Honor.
The title avatar of Anderson’s book is present as one of the portal exploration team members right from the start of the goings-on, but the name avatar isn’t used until the conclusion of the book—and the meaning of the word is the one that predates our modern digital view.
In my first semester of graduate school, I bought the first issue of Omni, which included this story. But I forgot about it until Bill Seabrook (a baseball fan and sf reader from Tyne-and-Wear) sent me a pointer to this story as well as J.B. Priestley’s time plays.
Gaughan was better knowm as a prolific sf artist, but he also produced this story and one other for Asimov’s Science Fiction.
From beginning to end (well not end, I didn’t tell him of his own funeral) and tried to leave nothing out that was pertinent to the plan. I didn’t know what else to do. The year 1939 may have been ready for Buck Rogers or Brick Bradford and his Time Top, but was it ready for the hard, cold reality of time travel?
As for the actual time travel, I had always assumed that the Man of Steel time traveled as he always did, via high speed, but in the extended edition of the movie, Donner states: “And he stops the world. And now it’s actually going backwards. Which means, none of this actually happens.” Is that right? Does he reverse the spin of the Earth? CJ Moseley has more to say on the matter over at the Time Travel Nexus.
Akton: You would have tried to change the future, which is against the law.
There was no time travel in the food investigation, but at the start of Tockson’s memo, he refers to a previous investigation that took him to 15th century Italy. I found one later Tockson story, “Ask Penny Jupiter,’ but it was timetravelless.
“I’m not especially mad,” you answered, growling. “but the Time Travel Overseeing Community wasn’t much pleased. You shouldn’t have dropped in on Leonardo da Vinci with those tips on aerodynamics.’
One bridge was built slightly obtuse of the right-angle, and to cross it was to climb the temporal gradient of the flux-field; when one emerged on the other side of the Channel, twenty-four hours had elapsed.
The third bridge was built slightly acute of the right-angle, and to cross to the other side was to walk twenty-four hours into the past. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow existed on the far side of the Flux Channel, and one could walk at will among them.
The guy with the black hat scowls at him, but brings a flask out of his hip pocket and lays it on the table.
But not clever enough to preven the Fracture, when Augustan Romans had tumbled into the waters of the Spanish Main and bandannaed urban guerillas shot the hell out of the Sun King’s palace at Verasilles. Not clever enough to point the way to Homeline, except as a hundred-kilometer march from line to line through a hexagonal sewer in Space4.
There are other Zelazny works that drew me in much deeper (try Seven Princes of Amber). Still, Roadmarks has some interesting techniques. For example, Zelazny said that the second of the two storylines, which take place off the Road, was written as separate chapters and then shuffled into no particular order.
In Heinlein’s first version of this novel, written in 1977, the middle third of the story takes place on Barsoom, but in the 1980 published version, Barsoom was replaced by a futuristic British Mars
However, I later discovered one redeeming feature: Time travel in Part Three of the 1980 Galactica pilot show, when the warriors follow an evil scientist back to 1944 and foil his plot to give modern technology to the Nazis. I think this was the only hint of time travel in the Galactica franchise, although the same future wife whom I went to meet in 1980 now tells me that this bit of time travel may have planted a seed in writer Donald P. Bellisario for his later series, Quantum Leap.
Janet and I heard this read by James Whiteman in 2004 at a series of dramatic readings called Colorado Homegrown Tales. The other stories at the February session were “Hungry” by Steve Rasnic Tem, “The Dream of Houses” by Wil McCarthy, and my own “Childrey Green” read by Debbie Knapp.
Wayne Winsett, owner of Time Warp Comics, tells me that this is his favorite time travel movie. Wayne is not alone in his assessment of Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, as the film now enjoys a mild cult following.
Questions posed shake universes like constructs , like universes, shake posed questions, sound distant thunder.
I’ve read other Card stories where he portrays the dark side of a character in realistic and frightening form that I could deal with, but for me, the seeming comfort that the character gets at the end is more disturbing than anything else Card has written.
The first edition was released in 1983, possibly in multiple formats, although I’ve never spotted what I believe was the first edition published by Waldman Publishing in 1983; multiple editions, including a Chinese translation, have appeared since.
“Well, I think. . .” She smiled brightly. “Why, yes, I suppose that we have.”
Traveling between times does not play a big role in the story, but there are small uses: K’lon stumble upon the chronoability of his dragon, using it to spend more time with his love A’murry; later, Moreta hatches a plan to bring more of the needed needlethorn from the future
This is one of the stories that I read in my dad’s Analogs at the end of my tricycle trip to Seattle.
With
Dickens, we always want to know whether Scrooge actually time travels or merely observes
the past and present. In this case, none of the spirits explicitly explain one way or the
other, but if you watch carefully when Scrooge and Jiminy arrive in the past, you’ll
spot Scrooge definitely interacting with a physical object the past when he’s unable to
see the festivities inside Fezzywig’s. Verdict: probably time travel!
This cartoon was based on a 1972 audio musical entitled Disney's A Christmas Carol, although the cartoon is not a musical.
The 2014 release of the book includes new material.
The story has a classic self-defeating act: The Terminator goes back in time to kill Sara Connor, causing Kyle Reese to follow and become romantic with Sara Connor, causing John Connor to be born and eventually lead the revolution, causing the Terminator to go back in time to kill Sara Connor, . . .
Please let me know if you know of other episodes!
An extended director’s cut also expands the story of one of their heartthrob-esse, an Amazon named Astriaha[/ex], but we don’t know the details of its release or whether an English-subtitled release of the film exists.
Perhaps Ralph was meant to be a ghost bully, perhaps the curly haired boy is young Charlie, perhaps Charlie switches bodies with his own son, or perhaps there’s time travel invovled. We doubt that even Captain Kirk could sort out all those perhapses in this TV version of Ray Bradbury’s story starring William Shatner. But clarity can be had if you read the original story, which takes about the same amount of time as watching the TV episode but shows the rich inner life of Charles Underwood and leaves no ambiguity about what’s up with “Ralph.”
And a little bone to pick, not with this story, but with Harry Turtledove, editor of The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, which includes this story. I suppose he’s just marketing the book with a title that he supposes will sell, but I would like a clear distinction drawn between alternate history (What if the South won the war?), time travel (such as this story), and true history (such as the true story of how Asimov met Campbell).
One night when we were playing duplicate bridge, Bryan Campbell told me that this was the favorite time-travel series of a friend of his, which goes to show that just because my rating of a story is low, doesn’t mean that you (or Bryan’s friend) won’t enjoy it.
“You are absolutely right, Sir Conrad! What is socialism?”
I saw this in the theater with Deb Baker and Jon Shultis during a winter trip to Pittsburgh for a small computer science education conference.
Note: A dissertation by Гулиус Наталья Сергеевна [Gulius Natalya Sergeevna] notes that this story is part of Bitov’s Teacher of Symmetry Cycle, which consisted of a series of avant-garde stories purportedly written by an obscure Englishman named Э. Тайрд-Боффин [A. Tired-Boffin] and loosely translated to Russian by Bitov. The English version of “Fotografiya Pushkin (1799–2099)” was said to have been called “Shakespeare’s Photograph” (or possibly “Stern’s Laughter” or “Swift’s Pill”), and presumably it was about Shakespeare rather than Pushkin.
Sergeevna explains that all this artistic mystification was part of an extensive footnote to “Fotografiya Pushkin (1799–2099),” but up in the ITTDB Citadel, we’ve yet to track down the footnote. Perhaps it was part of the 1987 publication in Знамя [Znamia / ], or maybe it did not appear until the story was published along with the rest of the cycle in Bitov’s 1988 collection, Человек в пейзаже [ Chelovek v peyzazhe / Man in the landscape]. It is not listed in the table of contents of Преподаватель симметрии ] [Prepodavatelʹ simmetrii / ] (2008), which was translated to English as Symmetry Teacher (2014).
Spoiler: At the end, I believe that Georgia uses her time crystal to send Scott back for a do-over on the day of his family’s death. This is disappointing since up until that point, the film has set up a perfect example of a single, nonbranching timeline.
Janet and I bought our first color TV for these episodes, a Sony of course.
I’ve yet to find a good guide to these stories and where they can be obtained. The first story, “The Jukebox Man’ appeared in 1987 in a sister magazine to The Twilight Zone Magazine. Here’s a list of the other stories that I know of, although the only one I’ve read so far is “Jukebox Gifts’:
(as there was in the first story of the cycle, Фотография Пушкин (1799–2099) | Fotografiya Pushkin (1799–2099) | Pushkin’s phtograph).According to Fantlab[/b] and , this is the central story of Bitov’s Teacher of Symmetry Cycle, which consists of 16 of avant-garde stories by an unknown English author, A. Tired-Boffin (1859–1937). Bitov purportedly found and translated some of these stories to Russian.
Among other places, the story takes Ruth Brandon to the 1970 total solar eclipse in Miahuatlán; and quite by coincidence, I first read the story when I happened to take the July 1987 issue of Asimov’s with me on our road trip to Scottsbluff to see the Great American Coast-to-Coast eclipse of 2017. The stars (and the Moon) move in mysterious ways.
I watched the movie through to the end(!), but spotted only one explicit small item to indicate that the Key might transport through time as well as space: When Skeletor’s minionette locates the copy of the Key, she says that they can find it within a “parsec-eon,” which kind of sounds like a space-time measurement. In addition, those who know the He-Man franchise tell me that he is a far-future descendant of Earth humans on the planet of Eternia, which means that the trip back to current-day Earth was through time. So it is a time-travel movie(!) but that fact has no bearing on the movie’s plot.
After Smith’s death in 1966, the story was completed by his wife, Genevieve Linebarger, and sold to Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Vision, but that anthology was endlessly delayed. So in 1987, a translated version of the story was published in a French collection of Smith’s stories, and that was the first published version (although we’ve listed it as an English story, since that’s how it was written). The English version was finally published in Smith’s 1993 complete short science fiction collection by NESFA. By then, Ellison’s rights to the story had expired, although that didn’t stop him from suing NESFA.
This was the first book that I read in the rare books room of the University of Colorado library from the Brian E. Lebowitz Collection of 20th Century Jewish American Literature.
Apart from Dark Shadows (which, as we all know, was more than a soap opera), this is the first time travel that I’ve spotted in a soap.
Thanks to Marc Richardson for sending this one to me.
The story has a nice bootstrapping paradox.
Mikey: [waving] Bye-bye!
Time travel and alternate histories often overlap, usually when some incident of time travel to the past creates the alternate timeline. This story is an intriguing alternative where a supposedly alternate past history is discovered through the two-way transmission through time, but the origin of the alternate timeline remains a mystery.
Paul Eisenbrey introduced me to this author in college, but I found Mixed Doubles on my own some years later.
Eckles: So?
Also in November of 1989, Jody Lynn Nye (with help from McCaffrey) released The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern. No dragonreader should leave home without it.
The story continues in a 1990 sequel, Times Change.
If he dug it up now and carried it back to his ship, it would not be there for him to find on that high summer day in the twenty-third century. And if that was true, how could he be here, in this time, to dig it up at all?
The film did a good job of bringing Brian Aldiss’s book’s premise to the screen, with a better pace than the book, but the short dream sequences were ineffective for me and Dr. Frankenstein is more of a clichéd villain than in the book.
Of course, all these movies are set in different times, but is there any actual time travel? The final scene gives a definitive answer, when Sarah meets James Westborn, after the verdict of her trial.
“Went in the pantry,’ Fred grunted.
Jack studied the picture of the odd-looking creature soaring through the sky.
“Ahhh!” screamed Annie.
“What?” said Jack.
“A monster!” Annie cried. She pointed out the tree house window.
“Yeah, right. Now get the hell out of here!”
“Don’t shoot! Is that a gun?”
That gave me pause; it was a flashlight.
At least one Brisco time traveler from 5502 appears naked a la the terminator, but (as of 2015) Harlan Ellison hasn’t sue Brisco over the time-travel requirement.
As with the Warners in other Animaniacs episodes, it’s not always clear whether Pinky and the Brain are traveling through time or merely acting out a drama set in a different time period. Such is life within four walls.
The article then tries to unwind these paradoxes in classical physics, where there is but one universe. In this universe, a time traveler who returns to the past can do nothing except that which was already done. For example, the traveler simply cannot kill his or her own grandfather before Grandpa meets Grandma because we know (by the birth of the traveler) that that didn’t happen. So, something in the universe must stop the murder. Things must happen as they happened.
But, say Deutsch and Lockwood, this conspiracy of the universe to preserve consistency violates the Autonomy Principle, according to which “it is possible to create in our immediate environment any configuration of matter that the laws of physics permit locally, without reference to what the rest of the universe may be doing.” In other words, if it’s physically possible for the traveler to point a gun at Grandpa, then the fact that elsewhen in the universe Grandpa must knock up Grandma cannot interfere with the traveler’s ability to pull the trigger.
Deutsch and Lockwood use the Autonomy Principle to reject something, but it’s classical physics they reject, not time travel. In a similar way, for stories that rely on a Causal Loop Paradox, Deutsch and Lockwood ask: Just where did the original idea of the paintings come from? They reject that the paintings might have come from nowhere (TANSTAAFL!), and again they reject classical physics.
Personally, I hope that time travel writers don’t fully embrace the Autonomy Principle and TANSTAAFL, because I want more wonderful stories where, in fact, there is but one history of events, the future and past may both be fixed, free will is an illusion, and free lunches exist. Hooray for “—All You Zombies—”!
But with classical physics banned, what else is there? Deutsch and Lockwood turn to Everett’s Many Worlds model wherein each collapse of the quantum wave function results in a new universe. When a time traveler goes to the past, they say, the arrival of the traveler creates a new multiverse, and this multiverse does not need to act the same as the original. Grandpa can die! The artist can be given inspiration from an artist doppelgänger in the original universe!
Notably, though, Deutsch and Lockwood never discuss how time travel might cause the same kind of universe splitting as the collapse of the wave function, but never mind. What they do discuss is how the new universe must respond to changes, and many stories where changing the past is possible fall down on this account. For example, if you change the past so that the reason for your trip to the past no longer exists, then when you return to the present you should find a new version of yourself who never considered traveling to the past. Multiverse time travelers should read this article just to understand that the present they return to may very well have another version of themselves. Two Marties McFly!
One final note: Of course we don’t live in a classical physics universe. That's clear from the many experiments that support quantum physics. But living in a quantum world doesn’t immediately imply Many Worlds. Could time travel exist in a single quantum universe? Or does it? For thoughts on that, check out the online Scientific American article “Time Travel Simulation Resolves Grandfather Paradox” by Lee Billings.
I wish I knew more about when this aired. The first episode was definitely “Imhotep,” since that is where A.J. meets his crew; it might have aired as early as 3 Dec 1984.
The adventure was originally published in sixty chapters of Sho̅jo Comic starting in early 1995. The chapters were collected into 28 volumes for book publication, also starting in 1995. For me, it’s unique enough that I’ll break the rule of no-post-1969 comic book time travel.
Please send me a note if you know the date of the first Sho̅jo, or better yet, please send a scan of the cover!
In addition to the wonderful Neal Adams art, I’m also intrigued by the ChromaDepth® 3D glasses in which different wavelengths are shifted left or right a differing amount in the two eyepieces to create a 3D effect. If I understand it right, this means that Adams could draw the comic normally, and the 3D effect is added in the coloring process.
My birthday wish.
After Tara tripped me and I fell on my cake, I wished I could go back in time and start my birthday all over again.
Somehow my wish came true.
Wow! I thought. This is kind of cool.
This is the first tree house story where the kids’ desitination might be in the present time, although there is still some time travel since the tree house always returns to the same time that it left, presumably so The Parents don’t worry. In any case. we’ve decided to mark this type of possibly-present-day story as having debatable time travel to distinguish this kind of destination from those in the past or future.
I liked these last two stories, especially the character of Haru, but I longed for more development beyond what Sandy had already shown us of their common universe.
If you don’t get knocked out by the giant Star Truck hammer, you’ll briefly spot Pinky and the Brain in this satire. That pair had their own chrono-atypical adventures in separate episodes of Animaniacs and their own show.
N.B. the Warners often visited movie or TV sets in different times in which it wasn’t clear whether the other characters knew that they were actors in a dramatical production. In Star Truck the Warners could well be in the future, but in other episodes (e.g., Hercules Unwound, which costars Pinky and the Brain), the fourth wall is shattered.
I was lucky enough to meet Jack McDevitt at Jim Gunn’s workshop in Lawrence. He was always encouraging, kind, insightful and upbeat—for me, the best of the resident writers at the workshop.
One of the reasons this show appealed to me is the occurrence of a strong, introverted lead character, which is a rarity in all fiction.
I classify the Timeline Wars as alternate history (or timelines) more so than time travel, but within those timelines, Mark does travel to different epochs.
In 2012, the first of the Company stories co-authored with Kathleen Bartholomew appeared.
Filby: Yes, but what does this have to do with geometry, John?’
The Traveller: Everything, Filby, everything.
P.S. I just stumbled across another time travel story that is an actual palindrome! The Palindrome Paradox.
Mrs. Streichman twisted into the space next to her. “That was just a rehearsal. The reviews are incredible. And you wouldn’t believe the waiting list. Years. Centuries! I’ll never have tickets again.” She took a deep, calming breath. “At least you’re here, dear. That’s something I couldn’t have expected. That makes it very real. vb]. . .[/vb”
Tim liked the Animorphs even more than their earlier cousin, the Goosebumps books, and I agree. But I asked him recently why the books needed to introduce time travel. Weren’t there enough fantastical elements already? But he pointed out that without time travel, Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel, Tobias and Ax couldn’t turn into dinosaurs.
On the other hand, I love stories that tell us what truly happened in another well-known story, and Lake handles that well, telling us in the voice of the original narrator about what truly happened to the Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) after he first returned to 1891 and subsequently set out to rescue Weena.
As one of the winners of the Writers of the Future contest, Dave Wolverton was asked to write this novel based on a full-length comedy screenplay that Hubbard wrote before his death. The result is a definite departure from Battlefield Earth.
Turtledove tells the story twice: once from the Justin-21’s point-of-view and once from that of Justin-40. Together, the stories form a short novel-length work that can be read in either order.
Now, if only we could get Mr. Bean into a time machine.
Tim and I watched this at Lake Cushman during a trip to the northwest in 2003, and I was as surprised as anyone about how much we laughed at Tim Allen’s parody.
At least two later time-travel stories were also produced.
The manga comic was adapted into 193 anime episodes in two series (InuYasha and InuYasha: The Final Act, both of which were dubbed in English. I do wish that the translation of the quote shown below had been more true to Dorothy’s line from The Wizard of Oz.
“What else?” F’lessan asked, right behind her, hauling Tai along beside him.
“How else could we do what is to be done?” T’gellan added as he dragged his weyrmate into a near run. “Yes, Ramoth just confirmed it to Monarth.”
“But what do we do first?” Mirrim demanded in a scared voice.
“Monarth’s bespeaking Talina’s Arwith. I’ve told her to take four wings at once to Monaco Bay, to warn Partmaster Zewe and to start moving people to safety.”
The two Oates stories (“May Be Some Time” in the April 2001 Analog and “Tiptoe on a Fence Post” in the Jul/Aug 2002 Analog) were combined and expanded for the 2009 novel, Revise the World.
This is the first story in Future Imperfect, a 2001 anthology of 12 original time-travel stories, co-edited by the prolific anthology Martin H. Greenberg (1941-2011) who was also a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay.
In 1987, Marvel’s own Roy Thomas was one of the founders of Hero Comics which sported a title called Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt, but the 1960s timing for the comic book of this story makes it more likely to be modeled after The Mighty Thor who premiered in Journey Into Mystery 83 (Aug 1962).
As you can tell from the comic book image, I’d say that the comic book Sissy was after in this trip was based on Giant-Size X-Men 1.
Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch, an avid geologist and writer, died of breast cancer shortly after this story was published.
This first novel, Any Time at All: The Lives and Time of Roxanne Bonaventure, was expanded into Here, There & Everywhere and followed by three more books.
Despite the characters’ belief that they can change history (e.g., “If they succeed, there won’t be any Worldcity.”), up in the ITTDB Citadel, we all agreed that the characters are an unreliable source and this is a carefully crafted plot in a single static timeline.
Robert Reed is my favorite prolific short story author from around the turn of the millennium.
As with several of the Magic Tree House stories, the kids’ destination in this one might be in the present time.
My favorite is the Wilson version (3rd edition), which has a steampunkish Eerie Comics feel and an extended stand-alone version with ten additional pages. My
After the pilot, the Cartoon Network picked up the show for 26 new episodes.
The two-part German TV movie was based on the book Jesus Video by Andreas Eschbach with some significant changes to the ending. It was released in the US with a quality English dubbing in 2006.
“No,” Charlie said quickly. “I’m sorry.”
His uncle hadn’t finished. “Henry’s parents mourned him, just as they mourned poor little Daphne. James was their only child and, as a result, he was probably spoiled. His father died in the war and his mother left everything to him, including her lovely cottage by the sea. You can’t change that, can you?”
To me, the story owes a lot to one of F.M. Busby's stories (“If This Is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy”)—a debt that Niffenegger might be acknowledging in the quote below.
Despite my reservations, fellow-indexer Tandy, a martial arts afficionada, enjoyed the movie a lot (only partly because she’s in love with Jason Scott Lee), and it is true that even my favorite time-travel movies have some of the same plot holes as this one. In the end, it was a fun romp even for me.
Hannah gave me the DVD of the first season for Christmas, and it took a few episodes for the show to grow on me. I was hooked about halfway through the season, with the introduction of Jack Harper and the suggestions of an overarching plot.
“Yes, they do, I saw Dask do it,” Kindan corrected.
Gabe shook his head. “It happened this morning.”
Each of those storms take the entire ship, including Italian citizen Vittoria Pellini, further and further into the future.
Florescent lights beat down on her, and the familiar voices of a call center surrounded her. None of this was possible. She was back at her old workplace. It was a workday, late afternoon, judging by the angle of light. Ultimata Insurance had laid her off months ago, yet here she was.
I suppose the military uniforms of 2204 all look like Axis Powers uniforms because the movie was originally made in Italy. It was first released in Russia in 2004 and made it to the states by 2009. Of course, none of that explains why the timeship looks like a 1978 Battlestar Galactica castoff.
Fourteen years ago (or maybe sixteen, the director is not quite sure), teenaged Bobby Jones was convicted of a murder that he remembers nothing about. Fortunately, he escapes, and during the escape he finds himself transported back to his hometown on the day of the murder.
By the way, I interpret the story as more than just a dream because of the incident where young Bobby is injured and old Bobby immediately develops a scar.
Somber M’hall startled at the sound of his own voice coming to him. “You’re from the future?”
Janet found this for me at the library in 2010.
The story is loosely based on Jack London’s The Star Rover, although London’s protagonist travels through the stars and into past lives. Using future information to change the present was never part of London’s story.
For me, the premise is original and was explored in a thoughtful (though sometimes farcical) way.
I recognized the theory—it’s the one on which time travel is based, even though we’ve never discovered time travel, at least not in any useful way, and researchers all over the universe discourage experimentation in it. They prefer the other theory of time travel, the one that says time is not linear, that we only perceive it as linear, and to actually time travel would be to alter the human brain.
But what Squishy is telling me is that it’s possible to time travel, it’s possible to open small windows in other dimensions, and bend them to our will.
“Wait,” Danny called out soFTLy and although the creature was obviously too far off to hear, and lacked ears besides, it immediately paused long enough for the chip to free itself and join the others.
I watched to the end (where there is about five minutes of song that tries to explain it all), but I won’t claim to understand the movie. One reviewer says that the spooky girl was abducted and subjected to government time travel experiments, and that the movie is populated by characters who are only in her mind as she travels through time (possibly people from the clippings). If so, then perhaps Meghan is the little girl’s imaginings of her own older self.
Although I haven’t seen a second novel, a sequel novella called “Unburning Alexandria” featured Sierra chasing around 410 A.D. Alexandria.
You’d think by now that I would have learned not to rent movies where the director and writer are one and the same, but I keep holding out hope.
Somber M’hall startled at the sound of his own voice coming to him. “You’re from the future?”
As for the quote “Here stood . . .,” you’ll have to watch the cartoon yourself to find out what stood there, ’cause we’re not spoiling it.
I enjoyed talking about this show with my friend John Kennedy before he died of cancer on 18 Mar 2009.
Oh, who’s kidding whom? We all know these scientists never stop at mere viewing. I would have given more personal stars to this action movie if I could have figured out how Doug could live in a world where after the girl washes up dead, she is there to bandage him and answer the phone.
None of the theories or what she had thought or even currently believed mattered. She know with every fiber of her being that Malcolm was the medieval laird of Dunroch.
So, why were the dead passengers and one copy of the plane blown into yesterday? I never did figure that out; it had no bearing on the movie, except perhaps the filmmakers were Donnie Darko wannabes, and it provided a cheap wrap-up at the end.
The title suggests that the things Linda sees are just premonitions, but to me they felt more like travel through time with no ability to alter events.
He’s Teddy P. Brains,
bop-bop-bop, Teddy P. Brains, bop-bop-bop!
Traveling through history, to unravel
mysteries,
He’s Teddy P. Brains, bop-bop-bop, Teddy P. Brains, bop-bop-bop!
“P” is his middle name, adventure is his game.
He’s Teddy P
Brains . . . ♫
She wondered what he was thinking. Was he plotting his terrible attack on the Church?
Many small things were just that little bit off for me, such as the initial introduction of the uncertainty principle.
No, I won’t attempt writing any more one-sentence summaries in Spanish, but I wanted to practice. In English, I’ll tell you that this movie is full of wonderful contortions, horror and fatalism.
According to those who know, the movie doesn’t follow the book that it’s based on (the second book of Susan Cooper’s, The Dark Is Rising Sequence), but I got some enjoyment from the innocence and soppiness of Will, his sister Gwen, his infatuation with the town’s pretty girl, and even Will’s stereotypical brothers. But the horror and fantasy parts of the film were as formulaic as the fact that Will is the seventh son of a seventh son; and Will’s ability to step through time is incidental to the story.
He scanned the line, looking for someone who might answer.
“We were on an important mission,’ J’trel said finally. The others looked at him and nodded in relief.
“Very important,” K’nad added with a confirming nod.
“So important that I didn’t know about it?” J’lantir asked in scathing tones.
K’nad gave him a confused look and was about to answer when J’trel nudged him, shaking his head.
“He said he wouldn’t believe us, remember?” J’trel whispered to K’nad in a voice not so quiet that J’lantir didn’t hear him.
Also in need of some help is the model of time travel in the story, which is a mishmash of popular representations that no person at age eleven or elsewhen should be exposed to. Specifically, I would have enjoyed an attempt to square the Branching Timeline implied by the hole in floor with the single nonbranching, static timeline and Ex Nihilo paradox hinted at by the time-travel device. I truly liked that ex nihilo paradox, and wish it had been explicitly dealt with rather than swept under the carpet.
Author Eoin Colfer does a masterful job presenting a single nonbranching, static timeline, complete with three consistent causal loops (further described in our tag notes for this story). But really, Eoin, you missed the shuttle on “the kiss”! With the help of N°1, Artemis can time travel, so if you're intent on his first romantic kiss coming from Holly Short, couldn’t N°1 have brought Holly’s actual fourteen-year-old self into the story? Might have even presented an opportunity for a fourth causal loop: Fourteen-year-old Holly kissees fourteen-year-old Artemis, but only because fifteen-year-old Artemis had already told thirteen-year-old Holly that they would enjoy it.
That’s just for starters. Yet to come are changes to the past and subsequent changes to change those changes back, all with no sensible model of time travel.
Unfortunately, the U.S. DVD movie mash-up omitted the bit where Amanda Price serenades Mr. Darcy, Mr. Binley, and Miss Bingley with Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” Damn those cheapskates who won’t pay for music rights! So, head straight for the full miniseries on Hulu!
I gotta take a leak.
The despair that gripped the Weyrleader was palpable. Egremer looked for some words of encouragement to give him but could find none. It was K’lior who spoke next, pulling himself erect and willing a smile back on to his face.
“We’ll find a way, Lord Egremer,’ he declared with forced cheer. “We’re dragonriders, we always find a way.” He nodded firmly and then said to Egremer, “Now, if you’ll excuse me. . .”
“Certainly!” Egremer replied. “I’ll see you out. And don’t worry about those weyrlings, if it’s too much bother. Having them would only save us time.”
K’lior stopped so suddenly that Egremer had to swerve to avoid bumping into him.
“Time!” K’lior shouted exultantly.
I didn’t get around to watching this until it appeared on Amazon Prime after the series finale. It’s a little too violent for my taste, but the three main characters have become favorites of mine just as much as Myca, Pete and Artie on that other show; and as I watched into the first half of season 3, it became more and more addictive. By the time it reached the middle of season 4, it became my favorite long love story ever.
The first glimpse of time travel was in Episode 10, when Walter tells of the time travel machine that he built to save Peter as a boy, although that episode didn’t see any actual traveling.
After its original Swedish publication, this story was translated to English and widely reprinted, including Weird Tales, Lightspeed and The Time Traveler’s Almanac. Artistic stories tend to be hit-or-miss with me (mostly miss). This one hit, but I never seem to be able to say why.
Dr. Tom: I love that movie.
Erica: If I change the past, if I don’t get drunk, won’t that cause, like, World War III in the present?
Dr. Tom: Or is it possible that your alcohol consumption, though very important to you, might not play a role in influencing world events?
It had survived the fire, untouched and unscarred; his wife, who had powerful magic, had not.
“No!” He leaped into time.
I must look it up sometime. I knew Mack, too, visited him in Mexico in 1966. Odd how the mind works.
Tim and I saw this reboot in the theater on opening day.
Although I didn’t connect strongly with this book, I did enjoy meeting Mette, a friendly young mother who reads and writes all the time when she isn't spending time with her family. That meeting was at Orson Scott Card’s writing boot camp in Orem, Utah, in the summer of 2002.
I suspect that the title of this book is a nod to one of my favorite Card stories, also called “The Princess and the Bear,” although there is no other connection between the two stories.
The cinematographer, Dillon Morris, posted the film on his Vimeo channel in May of 2009 and indicated that it was his senior thesis project at Chapman University.
I wish that it had been clear at the end whether Lloyd remembered anything of the encounter, but even without that, there were pieces I enjoyed.
The movie has a high enough silliness quotient that it can only be truly appreciated en español (especially preferable if you are not a Spanish speaker).
(It’s an antinepotism measure, they’ll tell you, nodding, not unkindly. And a test of your ruthlessness and determination. And besides, we all did it when it was our turn.)
Because the episodes are periodically released short episodes that tell one continuous story, we classify the Ctrl web series as a single serial—like the old-time movie serials—rather than a TV series. Including the aforementioned first episode, there were ten episodes.
I watched this one with Harry on my short visit to Scotland in the summer of 2010.
And speaking of long periods of time, more than a quarter century passed between this Paul Holt time-travel story and his previous one in a 1983 issue of Asimov’s, which is a feat that deserves high congratulations!
Cork was standing at the railing pointing at his bell bottoms. “People are looking at me funny,” he said. “Nobody else is wearing these.” Their pre-migration research indicated people did, but they could have been a couple of years off.
This one had several British actors that another indexer—British Janet—likes, including Maggie Smith, Pauline Collins and Alex Etel.
Later, in season 2, another of the misfits travels back from the future.
The younger shellheads come from an alternate 1987—the original incarnation of the cartoon—but I figure it’s still the past. In addition, perhaps all the turtle universes are splinters from the original Turtle Prime which that bad guy targets.
And in an episode that Janet called me in to watch just before Hannah’s wedding, “The Time Travelers” (s08e20), Ted goes down to the bar where he meets Barney, Twenty-Years-from-Now Barney, Twenty-Years-from-Now Ted, Twenty-Hours-from-Now Ted, and Twenty-Minutes-from-Now Barney—not to mention two versions of Twenty-Months-from-Now Coat-Check Girl.
Normally, I don’t like suicides in stories because I feel that the topic is often approached in a shallow manner, but in this case, Shields’s hero has a hobby of tracking and trying to understand teen suicides while he philosophizes about the alternate universes created by time travel.
“The early Cretaceous. One hundred twenty million years ago,” Peter said.
Sometimes real smart people can be a little dense.
The actress Naka Riisa has another connection to time-leaping girls: In the first sequel to the original novel, , a 2006 anime adaptation, Riisa voiced the lead character, Makoto, who was Kazuko’s niece. So if I have this right: The original leaper is Kazuko; Kazuko’s niece Makoto is the leaper in the 2006 anime; and Kazuko’s daughter Akari is the leaper in the 2010 live-action movie. So in some sense, Riisa is her own cousin.
In any case, thank you to the kind librarian at the Norlin Library who made an electronic copy for me when we couldn’ttrack down a hard copy of the journal.
Although the film was made and initially released in Korea, it had a simultaneous, elaborate English production of the audio with an intention to release the work simultaneously in the US. In watching it, I wondered whether the animation software may have produced two versions of the lip movement for the two different languages, but I haven’t found any discussion of that. I guess I just don’t know the real details.: maybe the original was only English audio with Korean subtitles. The film does have both native English and native Korean writers and directors. With all that, it seems to be an example of a multiple-language version film, and we decided to list the Korean version as the primary with the English as a variant. Please fill me in if you can!
The English version was released as Dino Time around the same time as 다이노 타임 (a phonetic rendering of Dino Time). For some reason, though, the planned US release was delayed until 2015, when it was retitled Back to the Jurassic.
I found the idea of how time travel changes the timeline in a piecemeal manner, leaving behind inconsistencies, to be thought-provoking, although for me, the story’s ending was incomplete.
The original publication of this story is followed by a Shane Tourtellotte article, “Tips for the Budget Time-Traveler,” about the economics of trading through time.
I’m surprised that this movie never made it to the theaters in the states. It generated good tension for a Fugitive-type police-don’t-the-protagonist type of story. On the other hand, the ending shows zero comprehension of the grandfather paradox or universes that split upon time travel, but never mind.
Even though I didn’t see this released until 2011, it is set in 1998 and 1988, and I think the writing predated the identically named and similarly plotted 2002 TV show. In any case, I’m glad that Denver resident Jeff Kirvin released this story on Kindle.
A common form of time travel is when the traveler goes back in time and a new reality branches off. That’s the form of time travel I see in Source Code, and from my reading of an interview, perhaps the director sees it that way, too. This view fits better than the parallel worlds postulate of the inventor, because each time the captain goes back, he is in exactly the same moment, with the same passengers, same comment coming from future girlfriend, same woman about to spill coffee, etc. If he were shifting to a parallel universe, then perhaps some things would differ before he arrives. So, I see it as branching-worlds time travel, with the twist that the mechanism to do the time travel is to pop the traveler’s consciousness inside the head of a dead person at about eight minutes before the death. I believe that the original world where the traveler came from (and usually returns to) continues along its original path (as evinced by the fact that after one return in which he saved girlfriend, there was no record of her being saved).
Ian and his cohorts have a reprise in “Ian, Isaac and John” (Nov 2011), where a descendant of David Bowe comes back to 1975, purportedly to improve the mix on a Bowe track, but quite possibly with additional motives involving John Lennon. And there are more stories to come, all in Analog.
I found this book in the ship library on a cruise of my own (no, not the Titanic, though we did see some icebergs. The first book, on the Titanic, was followed by two others.
Apparently, people in early 20th-century Cambridge espouse many wise thoughts about time, parallel universes that encompass every possible combination of events again and again, and something about every decision every made creating a branch point. In the end, it's difficult to make a cohesive model of time from the plotline of Dimensions, but we tried our best to do so in our plot notes.
Lauren Struck, one of the producers, sent me a press kit and an invitation to stream the film in May of 2012, precisely 35 years after my first press-kit-and-invitation-to-a-fan-to-see-an-sf-movie-preview—that other one being from a little-known producer named George something, of course, so Lauren is in excellent company. (Thank you, Lauren.)
Fellow ITTDB indexer Janet found this one on the web, and we watched a daily installment with tea during my first September up in the ITTDB Citadel.
Janet and I saw this for our 32nd anniversary. What a wife!
“Let’s do a movie of Lost,” said one. “It’s a big hit.”
“No, we can’t do Lost,” said another. “We don’t have the rights.”
“Then let’s find some old sci-fi thing—you know, by one of those old French dudes—and rewrite it so that it’s like Lost with time travel.”
“Wait, didn’t Lost have time travel?”
“Maybe, but not with Civil War dudes and hot chicks in a crashed plane.”
Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem were the writers-in-residence at the 2014 Odyssey Writers Workshop which I attended with many wonderful students and two remarkable writers-in-residence. Melanie died the following spring, and we all miss her wisdom and kindness greatly.
The vast majority of these figures appeared to be ordinary people engaged in ordinary activities—fixing or eating dinner, housecleaning, working in offices, factories, on farms—but occasionally he’d see something indicating that an unusual event was occurring or had recently occurred. A man lying on his back, people gathered around, some attending to the fallen figure but most bearing witness. A couple being chased by a crowd. A woman in obvious anguish, screaming in a foreign language. A blurred figure in freefall from a tall building.
Tim and I saw this on Fathers Day Eve in 2012.
The eight-volume English version of the manga appeared in 2017-18 with the title Erased.
Even then, though, I almost put the whole thing into the it’s-only-in-his-imagination category, but what could possibly be more real than a kid’s imagination?
If you have a nice girlfriend or boyfriend and you are trying to crack time travel, please take this short film as a warning.
I loved meeting Alex. He is kind and mentoring to new writers!
But it made for a good story.
The work comes across as dated, but still, I enjoyed seeing the latest work from my childhood friend, Paul Chadwick.
In the fun second story, Travis, an HR man for the company that imports laborers from other times, begins recruiting radicals throughout time—such as Suze and her gang in 1995 Nebraska—but he and Suze soon discover that avoiding The Sound of Thunder is more difficult than killing Hitler.
Although the book involves wormholes and scientists, it’s really a quantum fantasy, wherein an ordinary fantasy has the word “quantum” scattered throughout in key places, typically before the word magic, magician, or wormhole. Nevertheless, we’ve listed it as science fiction to match its publicity material.
For me, the dark aspects of the movie were nothing but forced melodrama, although it did have great special effects, terrific casting of the principles, and fun Trekker jokes. Those positives, though, weren’t enough to cover up the plot holes and Kirk’s questionable decisions. Good grief, just blast the bad guy with a photon torpedo rather than blasting your way through a bunch of Klingons (who never harmed you) to give the guy a fair trial. And if you don’t do that, at least blast him to bits on the bridge of that dreadnaught.
I swallow hard. “When I went back on my birthday. . . I touched stuff while I was there. I helped people. I know I can do this. I know.” I shrug. “I think I’m special.”
No, damn it! It couldn’t be.
But it was, and her young life ended like that.
But only in one timeline.
Two later stories continue the love triangle.
Later stories in the series continue the love triangle.
Janet and I watched this on Christmas Day in 2015, shortly after watching Rachel Stuhler’s similar but later movie, Back to Christmas.
The rest of the series has two more novels and two interregnum novellas.
Here’s the problem: Heinlein’s story “—All You Zombies—” was the last word on one specific kind of time travel story: The story is which there is but one timeline. If you travel to the past and do something, it is because you traveled to the past and did that thing. But the Spierig brothers completely missed this point by introducing an older version of the Unmarried Mother who has newspaper clippings of other timelines that he has changed. The nice closed sexual loop is still present in the movie, but that wasn’t enough to stop my disappointment at the drubbing that the central story idea took. I wasn’t so hot on the music either (except for “I’m My Own Grandpa”), but the relationship between the Barkeep and the Unmarried Mother was spot on as was the depiction of time travel and the foreshadowing.
The gang up in the ITTDB Citadel showed this five-minute film to me on my first prime birthday of the 2010 decade.
Although I enjoyed the romantic parts of the story and the adult being back in her childhood body, I felt that the walking through of well-trod genre ground didn’t display full understanding of the grandfather paradox: The paradox is presented as being the problem that the time-traveling grandfather-killer cannot return to his own future because he won’t exist. The actual paradox is deeper than that.
For me, Makeisha’s story suffered from having no sustaining characters outside of Makeisha herself, although I did enjoy the idea.
I was fortunate to meet Cat Webb at the 2015 Campbell Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, where she cheerfully talked to me and Rob Maslen about anything and everything during the week leading up to the announcement of Harry August as the winner of the 2015 Campbell Award for the best novel of the year. Yay, Cat (and yay for your friendliness and wry sense of humor)!
Morgan’s unshakable belief that Gabe is a good man slowly chisels away the walls he’s built around himself. As he comes to terms with living in the future, he must decide if losing his heart is worth more than holding on to the life he’s led in the past.
Joe: Wait—the what, now?
Barry: If you travel back in time to change something, then you end up being the causal factor of that event.
Cisco: Like . . . Terminator.
Joe: Ah!
Wells: Or is time plastic? Is it mutable, whereby any changes in the continuum could create an alternate timeline?
Cisco: Back to the Future.
Joe: Ah, saw that one, too.
It also meant something else very, very important. If we used quantum particles to think, we must be entangled with quantum particles somewhere else. Of somewhen else. Suddenly the whole doomed Project offered up a small ray of hope, but in an entirely new direction. We would never be able to send a person back in time, but I might be able to send information back.
Verdict: no actual time travel.
“The present!”
“When do we want it?”
“NOW!”
For me, the characters, acting, writing, and plot arcs were well below that of Warehouse 13, although the setup was nice.
Janet and I watched this movie on Black Friday, and at the 23:00 mark, she predicted how it would end!
By the end of the first season, one principal character has seemingly been trapped in the 2043, and Cole is stuck in 2015, having just gone against fate in a major way, but with a third principal character poised to spread the virus via a jet plane.
P.S. Whatever you do, whether in narrative time or elsewhen, don’t bring up this adaptation as dinnertime conversation with Terry Gilliam (but do watch it if you can set aside angst over a lack of a consistent model and just go with Cole’s flow).
—from “Splinter” [s01e01]
Based on the trailer, I thought it was a fun premise with promise, but in the execution, the movie couldn’t decide what it wanted to be: David Raskin, Boy Genius (and scientific hand-waver), or Ferris Bueller and the Time Machine, or The Blair Time Travel Project, or maybe The Butterfly Effect IV. Whichever it was, none of the different directions could support a plot for me, none had a consistently worked-out model of time travel, and none had reliable continuity in the filmmaking.
I noticed that the time machine’s name, anachronopede, is nearly that of El Anacronópete, so I wrote to Nino Cipri to ask whether Gaspar’s novel was an inspiration. It was, said Nino, writing to me: “It is indeed a reference to El Anacronópete. I was researching time travel in fiction while writing that story, and it was the earliest mention of a time machine I could find. Plus, the name is so great.”
Although there were some science terminology slips, the story was enjoyable for me, particularly the second half when the writing was more about the story and less about amusing interactions with your older self. On the other hand, Emily’s notion of what it meant to “make something of yourself” didn’t ring true to me.
I’ve heard of this happening before, but this is the first time that I've actually seen a combination of writing and acting that’s so bad I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
Alyx Dellamonica says that this story is just the start of a longer work that she originally conceived but hasn’t yet developed. I would like to see the longer piece and have a better understanding of the psychological effects of time travel in Dellamonica’s universe.
Amy: How does that work?
Amy plus Six: I don’t know! How does electricity work? You just pay for it. Now listen, five-years-in-the-future-you is gonna come back and talk to you.
Amy: Wait, I thought you were from the future.
Amy plus Six: I’m six-years-in-the-future-you. Five-years-in-the-future-you has bangs. Now, she’s gonna come and she’s gonna tell you—
Amy: If I should get bangs or not?
Amy plus Six: No! Shut the fuck up! She’s gonna tell you not to move in with Travis.
Amy: (devastated) Why not?
Amy plus Six: Because he cheats on you; he gives you gonorrhea and bed bugs. It’s a nightmare.
Amy: Oh, God, I’ve never had bed bugs before. I won’t move in with him.
Amy plus Six: Oh, no no no. You have to move in with him, okay? It turns out that by being warned to break up with Travis that things in the future get really screwed up, and California is now in the ocean.
Horace Browne Fyfe, Jr., was a prolific author, one of Campbell’s stable from 1940 (at age 22) through 1967. He died in 1997, so it would be interesting to hear how the editors of the Megapack ebooks tracked down this story of his, which is listed in the third time travel Megapack as previously unpublished.
For me, Künsken’s earlier novella of aliens and time dilation (“Schools of Clay”) was a realistic, character-driven, multi-layered story worthy of a Hugo, but this second novella was less engaging, even though it does involve actual time travel.
Writer and director Terry Jones acknowledges H. G. Wells’ “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” as inspiration for the story.
There was a way back.
P.S. to Jennifer Campbell-Hicks and the Nature editors: The number one is not considered prime, probably because that would cause prime number factorization to not be unique, but since we don’t know the cause of the total number of dads always being prime, we can overlook that issue.
I liked the story’s atmosphere, but felt that the author needed better research about prices in the 60s. By my calculations, that red Mustang must have held about 70 gallons of gas—leaded gas, that is—given the price they paid for a fill-up. And back in hippie days, teen talk should have been peppered with “cool” far more than “like.”
In this first story, Martin (sans Artie) and a countess from a different timeline butt heads over whose timeline they should try to recreate.
The pilot gets one extra half star for playing The Captain and Tennille when the gang visits 1975 and another plus half star because the swollen-headed Rip got belted by both Hawkgirl and the White Canary; but it lost a half star for Rip’s own soppy background story. Beyond the pilot, though, the explanations about changes to the timeline are just whacked.
Handy Hint: The movie is eminently more watchable in a late-night group where everyone shouts “Great Scott!” whenever a character spews a sequence of pseudoscientific quantum mumbo jumbo that vaguely resembles an English sentence.
And my interpretation is that the ending involves a brief bit of time travel, back to an alternate world that has returned to the start of Three-Arm’s trial.
Oh, and Dave’s grandfather had a plot to go back and kill Hitler, but that’s not really relevant to Zelda (and Cassie and Walter and John and Charlie).
Wood creates some likeable characters, but there is no consistency in his model of time travel.
1. Take Lucy, for example. She and her pals go back in time and change something so that when they return to the present, the previously sistered Lucy no longer has a sister, Amy. And everyone except the travelers remember the Amyless version. That Lucy is quite a different Lucy, complete with a fiancé. So what happened to that Lucy?
2. When they discover that evil Garcia Flynn has gone back to some time in history, they inevitably rush to get there quickly. Why are they rushing? And why don’t they consider going back to before Flynn’s arrival in the past to be ready for him when he arrives?
But, yeah, I like the show and their cool timeship.
“I’m not saying you are,” Dr. Flynn said. “But there is a problem with your memory and there are people at Pinewood who may be able to find out wht it is.”
Note: On the DVD, the English scenes may be viewed with German subtitles and vice versa.
The model of time travel was particularly troublesome in that I never did understand why H.G’s first trip took him to the museum.
And for my friend Shane, this is the first admixture of time travel and LIDAR!
As you might guess, we enjoyed Far and his friends, but the thing that sealed an Eloi Bronze Medal was the fact that when a particular timeline actually managed to branch (not an easy feat) and the traveler then jumped to the future, she found her another self—the her that was born on that timeline—waiting for her. Most branching timeline stories ignore this issue entirely.
Parts of Philip K. Dick’s original story are gone, such as the original ending, which must have been corny even in 1953; and part of the ambiguous revised plotline can be interpreted as time travel, although I suspect that adapter/director David Farr had a different meaning in mind. Regardless, I found Farr’s characters moving.
And just for fun . . . we get to see a flying pig three times! [Sadly, we have no Flying Pig tag. —the curator]
I know this to be the case as Ruby informed me that the “girls” in Year 6 would be attending the school library to get their hair and make-up done on Monday afternoon while the “boys” are going to Bunnings [hardware store].
* The other, of course, is Paul J. Nahin’s Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction, Second Edition.
(P1) If backward time travel were possible, it would be possible to perform a self-defeating act.
(P2) It is impossible to perform a self-defeating act.
(C) Backward time travel is impossible.
Through it all, Oates presents sufficient glimpses of a garden variety dystopian world and social science fiction to classify her novel as science fiction with YA leanings, although doing so ignores the first-person story’s ending that places everything before it into question. For a take on this terminal ambiguity, check out Paul Di Filippo’s insightful review at Locus Magazine—but don’t say I didn’t warn you that after reading his review, you’ll need to read the whole darn book over again.
This was Zone 9—of course. This was my Exile. I must accept my Exile, and I must adjust. Yet—
The horror swept over me: this was eighty years into the past, and more. I had not yet been born. My parents had not yet been born. There was no one in this world who loved me, no one who even knew me. No one who would claim me. I was utterly alone.
Ramazan: Assuming no one else had gone back and changed things before he did.
For me, the depiction of Nora’s suicidal ideation and eventual killing of herself were dismissive of those who face depression every day, and the outcome was fictionally romanticized in a way that may induce suicide rather than showing understanding and encouragement to seek out help when life is dark. I don’t see this as intentional by the author.
The audio is mostly Telugu, but there are subtitles in broken English.
Suffice it to say that when all the Librarians up in the Citadel woke from their sleeps and returned from their treks, we had a celebration that was strident enough to raise Lazurus Long himself from the dead (if he is dead, that is).
<spoiler!>One reviewer suggested that the story would have been better told from Margaret’s point of view. Certainly she has an interesting story of her own—one of loss so intense that it stops her world and kidnaps Mark. And yet, for me, Mark’s story is both compelling and well told, and I’m glad the author told his story. He is sensitive and lost and looking for his way in an upended world. He’s not particularly aware of how others feel, but maybe he’s getting there, and somehow Margaret grounds him and provides room to grow to the point where he can offer unconditional friendship to her (and to others) exactly when it’s needed. Is that a corny, uplifting story about tiny, perfect hypercubes that were meant to be? Yes, enjoyably so. I also enjoyed the nods to other popular-culture time travel escapades, though not so much the handwaving attempt at grounding things in science with Mark’s algebra teacher.</spoiler!> Sorry. Sometimes I feel a compulsion to drop into critic mode myself.
Sadly, the story comes close to being a slick static timeline, but alas, the writers could not follow through.