This may be the earliest use of something akin to a “wheel of time.”
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.
“My husbands.” She shook her head dolefully. “To find five more difficult men would be positively Martian.”
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.