A group of letters from the late 20th century found their way to Samuel Madden, who rushed to publish them in this volume, but then destroyed most of the copies.

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:

In her Ph.D. dissertation, Dierdre Ní Chuanacháin suggests that the reason for the suppression was the “ politicaland literary milieu” of the times. Nevertheless, at least one copy of the work survived and is hailed as the first literary work to actually write of the future (albeit as a satire and criticism of 18th century Great Britain) and possibly the first to contain time travel (via an unexplained method). Those two aspects led us to classify the work as a forerunner of science fiction.

According to my Grandpa Main’s notes (which formed the basis of the first version of the ITTDB), he struggled with what he called the Carol Question as long ago as 1916. Is there actual travel through time in “A Christmas Carol” or not? It’s easy to see why the Carol Question is central to the ITTDB. On the one hand, Scrooge does take a clear trip to the past:

Now if that’s not time travel, what is? Ah . . . “Not so fast!” says Ghost!

Even Ghost Himself admits there’s no interaction with the past. Observation is permitted, but not interaction. They might as well be watching a movie! In general, if you can’t interact with the past and the past can’t see you, then there’s no actual time travel!

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:

The answer is critical to whether time travel occurs. The difference between things that May Be and things that Will Be is like the difference between Damon Knight and Doris Day: Both are quite creative, but (as far as I know) there’s only one you go to for a rousing time travel yarn. Future Ghost never clear answers the question, and moreover, Scrooge appears intent on not having the future he sees come true. So, I want to say that Scrooge saw only a prediction or a prophecy or a vision of a possible future—which is, at best, debatable time travel.

Thus speaketh the ITTDB.

A young man and his cousin inherit a clock that takes them back to the siege of Leyden at the start of October 1574, where they affect that time as much as it has affected them. This is travel in a machine (or at least an artifact), but they have no control over the destination.

Mad scientist Don Sindulfo and his best friend Benjamin take off in Sindulfo’s flying time machine along with Sindulfo’s niece, her maid, a troop of Spanish soldiers, and a bordelloful of French strumpets for madcap adventures at the 1860 Battle of Téouan, Queen Isabella’s Spain, nondescript locales in the eleventh and seventh centuries, 3rd-century China, the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, and a biblical time shortly after the flood.

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.

After his first fictional foray into time travel (“The Chronic Argonauts”), Wells anonymously published a series of seven fictionalized essays in The National Observer that contained the genesis of what was to come.

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

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

[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).[/*]
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In 1898, Copernicus Droop has a flying time machine drop into his lap from the year 2582, whereupon he hatches a plan to take Rebecca Wise and her sister, Phœbe, back to 1876 where he can invent all kinds of modern things and Rebecca might convince her younger self to marry that fine young Joe Chandler—but instead they go rather further back to Elizabethan times where capricious capers (but no time paradoxes) ensue.

In the first story, Hawkinson receives a manuscript written in the hand of his friend Cannes and detailing how to build a time machine, which he does in order to send Cannes into the future to learn how to build a time machine and, thus, send the manuscript back to Hawkinson. More paradoxes (not to mention Martian plans to blow up the Earth) abound in the two sequels.

Mathematician and physicist Anton Brookhurst takes a trip 1,000,000 years into the future in a machine that was inspired by H. G. Wells and explained (in this story) by a series of official-looking equations, but, unlike in The Time Machine, Brookhurst’s machine resides in an airplane, and Brookhurst himself examines various paradoxes, such as: Would he have been brave enough to embark on the journey had he not first seen himself safely return?

Four men and a woman travel from 2030 to 1930, hoping to advance civilization, but everyone believes that the resulting newspaper stories of their arrival are all fakes.

James Bell invents a time machine, sees the end of mankind in the near future, travels further to see man’s successor, returns to mankind’s end to save the species, and visits the Mesozoic, anticipating Bradbury’s Butterfly Effect.

Bob Wilson, Ph.D. student, throws himself 30,000 years into the future, where he tries to figure out what began this whole adventure.

Evan Zweifel gave me a copy of this magazine as a present!

By my count, this was Asimov’s fourth foray into time travel, but his first as Dr. Asimov. In the story, the dead Elmer Tywood also had a Ph.D. and a plan to translate a modern chemistry textbook into Greek before sending it back in time to inaugurate a Golden Age of science long before it actually occurred.

When the revolution finally comes, the dictatorial leader Hradzka escapes to the past in a time machine, but he overshoots his target and ends up in the first decade after the discovery of atomic power.

In the first of a long series of hallowed stories, former military engineer (and noncomformist) Manse Everard is recruited by the Time Patrol to prevent time travelers from making major changes to history. (Don’t worry, history bounces back from the small stuff.)

A 25-year-old man, originally born as an orphan girl named Jane, tells his story to a 55-year-old bartender who then recruits him for a time-travel adventure.

In a panic, Professor Bob Bottman calls his wife from the Waldorf where he’s hiding out from dozens of other Bob Bottmans (and possibly just as many of Professor Dunbar’s cats).

Patrolman Keith Denison uses some sketchy tactics (sketchy to the Patrol, that is) to track down his partner Keith Denison, who’s disappeared in the time of the Persian King Cyrus the Great,

Reluctant college student Danny Eakins inherits a time belt from his uncle, and he uses it over the rest of his life to come to know himself.

Addison Doug and his two fellow time travelers seem to have caused a time loop wherein everyone is reliving the same events with only vague memories of what happened on the previous loop.

As part of an crew assigned to crew to observe the filling of the Mediterranean from the Atlantic in the late Micene, Patrolman Tom Nomura breaks the rules to use time travel to rescue Feliz a Rach when she’s swept over the falls.

I propose that all writers of time travel fiction should be required to read certain articles, and this is the first. Deutsch and Lockwood do an admirable job of describing the well-known Grandfather Paradox and the lesser known paradox of the causal loop (in which, for example, an art critic brings a book of famous paintings back to the artist before the time when the paintings were painted, and this book then inspires those very paintings, leaving the question of who created the paintings).

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.

If you have only one reference book on your shelf—on any topic—this must be it. Get the second edition.

In the third Harry Potter book, (among other things) Harry’s friend Hermione uses a time-turner amulet to travel short distances in time so she can attend more classes, and the device also proves useful when Harry and friends must rescue Sirius and Buckbeak.