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.”
And then I stumbled upon Jacques Rigaut’s century-old gem that managed all that and more in under 1,000 words more than a century ago.
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 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.
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: They’re out there, Caswell. . . . Things you can’t imagine.
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?
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.”
This is Janet’s favorite time-travel novel, in which Finney elaborates on themes that were set in earlier stories such as “Double Take.”
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
Note: A dissertation by [ex=bare]Гулиус Наталья Сергеевна | Gulius Natalya Sergeevna[/ex] 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 [ex=bare]Э. Тайрд-Боффин | A. Tired-Boffin[/ex] 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 [ex=bare]Знамя || Znamia[/ex], or maybe it did not appear until the story was published along with the rest of the cycle in Bitov’s 1988 collection, [ex=bare]Человек в пейзаже | Man in the landscape | Chelovek v peyzazhe[/ex]. It is not listed in the table of contents of [ex=bare]Преподаватель симметрии ] | | Prepodavatelʹ simmetrii[/ex](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.
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.
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. [. . .]”
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.
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.