The Man Who Never Grew Young
by Fritz Leiber
The story is soft-spoken but moving, and for me, it was a good complement to T.H. White’s backward-time-traveler, Merlyn.
The story is soft-spoken but moving, and for me, it was a good complement to T.H. White’s backward-time-traveler, Merlyn.
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?
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).
Tim and I saw this on Fathers Day Eve in 2012.
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.