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.
If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.
To the Editors of the Lady’s Book:—
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 hands were whirling around the dial from right to left with inconceivable rapidity.
In this whirl we ourselves seemed to be borne along. Eternities seemed to contract into
minutes while lifetimes were thrown off at every tick.
It would have been reason enough, had there been no other, for abolishing money, that its
possession was no indication of rightful title to it. In the hands of the man who had
stolen it or murdered for it, it was as good as in those which had earned it by industry.
People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is
considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence and disinterestedness
which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which
supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially
anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of
others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise
above a very low grade of civilization.
You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transportation of epochs—and
bodies?
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.
“It goes, of course, at the usual rate. Only the time has to go with it. Hence, if I
move the hands, I change the time. To move them forwards, in advance of the true time, is
impossible: but I can move them as much as a month backwards—that is the limit. And
then you have the events all over again—with any alterations experience may
suggest.”
“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!”
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]
I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off
with a thud.
I sat down. “Give me the potion,” I said. “If the worst comes to the worst it will
save having my hair cut, and that I think is one of the most hateful duties of a
civilized man. How do you take the mixture?”
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.
Although your enemy is within a dozen feet of you, Lumley, he will soon be a whole
century behind, and you will be safe.
Years appeared to pass, slowly. The earth had almost reached the center of the sun’s
disk. The light from the Green Sun—as now it must be called—shone through the
interstices, that gapped the mouldered walls of the old house, giving them the appearance
of being wrapped in green flames. The Swine-creatures still crawled about the walls.
Lord, it is an Ambassador from Witchland and his train. He craveth present
audience."
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.
No vision this! Reality! Empty space, two moments ago. Then a phantom, a moment ago. But
a real tower, now! Solid. As real, as existent—now—as these rocks, these trees!
This book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other an inhabitant of
an age which they would call the distant future. The brain that conceives and writes
these sentences lives in the time of Einstein. Yet I, the true inspirer of this book, I
who have begotten it upon that brain, I who influence that primitive being's conception,
inhabit an age which, for Einstein, lies in the very remote future.
Well, her boss, Dr. X-10, is trying to bring a man to life who’s been dead fifty years!
Think! Think of hearing Lincoln’s own voice delivering the Gettysburg address!
No man or woman of Eos has the authority to direct, check, or in any way influence the
free decision and impulses of another without that other’s full and intelligent
consent. We demand the right to follow the natural inclinations of our characters. We
demand the right to marry.
I believe that when I go back to my house at Berkeley Square at half past five tonight, I
shall walk straight into the 18th century and meet the people living there.
They stand about, little misshapen men with huge heads. But their heads contain only
brains. They had machines that could think—but somebody turned them off a long time
ago, and no one knew how to start them again. That was the trouble with them. They had
wonderful brains. Far better than yours or mine. But it must have been millions of years
ago when they were turned off, too, and they just hadn’t thought since then. Kindly
little people.
I showed her New York. She’d say, “But why do the people hurry so? Is it really
necessary for all those automobiles to keep going and coming? Do the people like to live
in layers? If the United States is as big as you say it is, why do you build such high
buildings? What is your reason for having so few people rich, so many people poor?” It
was like that. And endless.
Ah, yes, you have a mathematical means of expression, but no understanding of that time,
so it is useless. But the last of humanity was allowed to end before the Sun changed from
the original G-O stage—a very, very long time ago.
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.
The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a
member of the race whose outward form it wore, learning as quickly as possible all that
could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.
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.
EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.
But Max Planck with the quantum theory, de Broglie and Schroedinger with the wave
mechanics, Heisenberg with matrix mechanics, enormously complicated the structure of the
universe—and with it the problem of Time.
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.
Padway feared a mob of religious enthusiasts more than anything on earth, no doubt
because their mental processes were so utterly alien to his own.
Most people think of time as a track that they run on from birth to death as inexorably
as a train follows its rails—they feel instinctively that time follows a straight line,
the past lying behind, the future lying in front. Now I have reason to believe—to
know—that time is analogous to a surface rather than a line, and a rolling hilly
surface at that. Think of this track we follow over the surface of time as a winding road
cut through hills. Every little way the road branches and the branches follow side
canyons. At these branches the crucial decisions of your life take place. You can turn
right or left into entirely different futures. Occasionally there is a switchback where
one can scramble up or down a bank and skip over a few thousand or million years—if you
don’t have your eyes so fixed on the road that you miss the short cut.
Evan Zweifel gave me a copy of this magazine as a present!
Wait a minute now—he was under no compulsion. He was sure of that. Everything he did
and said was the result of his own free will. Even if he didn’t remember the script,
there were some things that he knew “Joe” hadn’t said.
“Mary had a little lamb,” for example. He would recite a nursery rhyme and get off
this damned repetitive treadmill. He opened his mouth—
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.
Neither Paradine nor Jane guessed how much of an effect the contents of the time machine
were having on the kids.
I knew grandfather. He would go as far as his machine could take him. I had duplicated
that. He would look around him for a promising site, get out his tools, and pitch in.
Well, I could do that, too.
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.
Normally, we drift with the current and travel downstream and into what we call the
future. Now, if we equip our little boat with a motor, we can speed our passage
downstream into the future or, breasting the current, travel upstream to view again those
selfsame scenes that were passed by humanity ages ago.
Looking backward later, Oliver thought that in that moment, for the first time clearly,
he began to suspect the truth. But he had no time to ponder it, for after the brief
instant of enmity the three people from—elsewhere—began to speak all at once, as if
in a belated attempt to cover something they did not want noticed.
The traitorous Shayson and his illegal federation extended this hypothesis to include
much more detailed and minor acts such as shifting a molecule of hydrogen that in our
past really was never shifted.
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.
Docent: Kindly notice the round hole in the breastplate,
undoubtedly caused by an iron-tipped arrow of the period.
Tomorrow, my tomorrow, is the day of the President’s death.
The discovery of negative entropy introduces quite new and revolutionary conceptions into
our picture of the physical world.
The inhabitants of the future resent you two hiding on a tropical isle, as it were, while
they drop off the cliff into hell. Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know
that others die with them. It is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the
grave. I am the guardian of their collective resentment against you two.
Switch is right. It was about time travel. What we call travel through time. So I took
the tube numbers he gave me and I put them into the circuit-builder; I set it for
‘series’ and there it is-my time-traveling machine. It travels things through time
real good.
It would reach back to win its battles. It would strike at points in time and space which
would not even know that thre was a war. It could, logically, go back to the silver mines
of Athens, to the horse and chariot of Thutmosis III, to the sailing of Columbus.
But it’s a longish story, and you might as well let me in. You will, you know, so why
quibble about it? At least, you always have—or do—or will. I don’t know, verbs get
all mixed up. We don’t have the right attitude toward tenses for a situation like this.
If there was such a thing as a 1990 almanac, and if it was in that package, wild horses
couldn’t get it away from me.
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.
Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!
Your time scale has been altered. A minute in the outer world would be a year in this
room.
I could say that time is an illusion and that all events occur simultaneously.
Dear Mr. Lewis,
We think you should consult a psychiatrist.
Sincerely,
Doyle P.
Gates
Science Fiction Editor
Deep Space Magazine
Esperanto isn’t anywhere. It’s an artificial language. I played around with it a
little once. It was supposed to end war and all sorts of things. Some people called it
the language of the future.
Figuring backward brought him quickly to the equivalence he wanted: one second in ship
time was two hours in Garrard time.
And then the
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.
If you went back to, I would guess, 1946, and worked to prevent your parents’ marriage
in 1947, you would still have existed in that year; you would not go out of existence
just because you had influenced events. The same would apply even if you had only been in
1946 one microsecond before shooting the man who would otherwise have become your father.
He had boarded the kettle in the 575th Century, the base of operations assigned to him
two years earlier. At the time the 575th had been the farthest upwhen he had ever
traveled. Now he was moving upwhen to the 2456th Century.
Oh, I’m no four-dimensional thinker; but, as I understand it, if people could go back
to a more recent time, their actions would affect our own history, which would be a
paradox or contradiction of facts. Can’t have that in a well-run universe, you know.
You are the struback.
Even a cold, a common cold, would wipe out millions now. Resistance to disease has simply
vanished over the past two centuries; it isn’t needed, with all diseases conquered. But
you time-travelers show up loaded with potentialities for all the diseases the world used
to have. And we can’t risk having you stay here with them.
In one hundred years, at ten per cent compounded annually, your gold would be worth
better than 700,000 zecchini.
Denver in 1970 was a very quaint place with a fine old-fashioned flavor; I became very
fond of it. It was nothing like the slick New Plan maze it had been (or would be) when I
had arrived (or would arrive) there from Yuma; it still had less than two million people,
there were still buses and other vehicular traffic in the streets—there were still
streets; I had no trouble finding Colfax Avenue.
Full of fire and energy and force; it was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was
justice, equity, truth and right, the good set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul
maddened by the wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarled, edged and heated, backed with
wrath.
So they have not briefed you? Well, a run is a little jaunt back into history—not nice
comfortable history such as you learned out of a book when you were a little kid. No, you
are dropped back into some savage time before history—
He was a very ugly little boy and Edith Fellowes loved him dearly.
“While I was backing up, I inadvertently trampled and killed a small Pleistocene
insect.”
“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!”
When I opened you, I found a mess. I sent for the Chief of Surgery while I got the baby
out, then we held a consultation with you on the table—and worked for hours to salvage
what we could. You had two full sets of organs, both immature, but with the female set
well enough developed for you to have a baby. They could never be any use to you again,
so we took them out and rearranged things so that you can develop properly as a man.
In the case of a missing man, you were not required to search for him just because a
record somewhere said you had done so. But how else would you stand a chance of finding
him? You might possibly go back and thereby change events so that you did find him after
all—in which case the report you filed would “always” have recorded your success,
and you alone would know the “former” truth.
I know you’ve come from a long way from here . .
. a long way and a long time.
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.
Caswell: I wanna see if there are things out there like you
described to me. Carriages without horses and the buildings that rise to—
Professor Manion: They’re out there, Caswell. . .
. Things you can’t imagine.
When I speak of time, I’m speaking of the fourth dimension.
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 may be able to prevent it: Is that what you mean?
I awoke this morning to some very puzzling incidents. It seemed that time itself had
stopped, or that the whole world had gone into super-slow motion.
Laura! The freshest, most radiant creature God ever created. Eighteen when I married her,
Marty, . . . twenty-five when she died.
Yeah, it takes dopey pictures—dopey pictures like things that haven’t happened yet,
but they do happen.
. . . run backward run. . .
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.
Tel était le but des expériences : projeter dans le Temps des émissaires, appeler le
passé et l’avenit au secours du présent.
English
Now, this computer seems to be able to fake up just about any scene you want to take a
look at. You name it, it sets it up. Chester, we’ve got the greatest side-show
attraction in circus history! We book the public in at so much a head, and show ’em
Daily Life in Ancient Rome, or Michelangelo sculpting the Pietà, or Napoleon
leading the charge at Marengo.
Hard to remember. Some time soon now, I think.
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.
Isn’t it obvious? The war did happen. You never did go back with
your warning.
Dropping the letter, she held her head in her hands, closing her eyes as in the curved
bone of her skull she heard all her possible courses of action jar together, future
lifelines that annihilated each other.
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.
A series of parallel black lines, several inches apart, extended from it, some distance
across the corridor floor. At the head of each was a brief inscription, in no alphabet he
could recognize. But every ten feet or so a number was added. He saw 4950, 4951,
4952. . .
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.
To the Reader: The “science” in this book is mostly scaffolding for the story,
story-telling in the traditional sense. However, the discussions of the significance of
time and the meaning of consciousness are intended to be quite serious, as also are the
contents of chapter fourteen. —from Hoyle’s preface
The door slammed open.
Apart from its stupendous novelty value, the commercial success of slow glass was founded
on the fact that having a scenedow was the exact emotional equivalent of owning land.
The Time Machine is a sphere full of milky fluid in which the traveler floats enclosed in
a rubber suit, breathing through a hose leading into the wall of the machine.
Power: [serious voice] One of the rules
of time travel, Kitty, is to never kill anyone in the past, ’cause it might start a
chain reaction that could indirectly affect your own life.
Spock: Fifty years to go. Forty. Thirty.
We set out basic texts, and we take careful note of the world as it is. If the world
changes, then the texts should change here before our eyes.
Suppose, he thought fretfully, some bureaucrat in Class Seven or Nine or thereabouts had
gone ahead on his own authority, trying to win a quick uptwitch by dynamic action, and
had rounded up a few known hoppers in advance of their departure. Thereby completely
snarling the fabric of the time-line and irrevocably altering the past.
One of his biggest problems here was keeping people from cracking up because there was
too little privacy. Propinquity could be intolerable in a place like this.
On his last mind into the Devonian, when this tragic illness was brewing, he had
intercourse with a young woman called Ann.
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.
Fifi could not understand what on earth he was talking about. Every since leaving
Plymouth, she had been adrift, and that not entirely metaphorically. It was bad enough
playing Pilgrim Mother to one of the Pilgrim Fathers, but she did not dig this New World
at all. It was now beyond her comprehension to understand that the vast resources of
modern technology were fouling up the whole time schedule of a planet.
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).
Well, isn’t it obvious, Manning? The war did happen. We didn’t
get back with our warning.
So Hawksbill’s machine did work, and the rumors were true, and this was where they sent
the troublesome ones. Was Janet here too? He asked. No, Pleyel said. There were only men
here. Twenty or thirty prisoners, managing somehow to survive.
Humans of the 20th century do not go beaming around the Galaxy, Mr. Seven.
History has been changed in the fact that Billy Claiborne didn’t die, but Chekov is
lying there dead.
They cannot hear you, Captain. To their ears, you sound like an insect.
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I
knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew
really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war.
And so on.
Spock! You’re reverting into your ancestors, five thousand years before you were born!
This is Janet’s favorite time-travel novel, in which Finney elaborates on themes that were set in earlier stories such as “Double Take.”
There’s a project. A U.S. government project I guess you’d have to call it. Secret,
naturally; as what isn’t in government these days? In my opinion, and that of a handful
of others, it’s more important than all the nuclear, space-exploration, satellite, and
rocket programs put together, though a hell of a lot smaller. I tell you right off that I
can’t even hint what the project is about. And believe me, you’d never guess.
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.
She said: “It’s a matter of weight, Mr. Chaney. The machine must propel itself and
you into the future, which is an operation requiring a tremendous amount of electrical
energy. The engineers have advised us that total weight is a critical matter, that
nothing but the passenger must be put forward or returned. They insist upon minimum
weight.”
“Naked? All the way naked?”
My thoughts were of myself: I’m coming to save you. I’m coming, Gus. You won’t hurt
any more. . . you’ll never hurt.
Given the power to alter the future, have we the right to use it?
The Timesweep program was a close parallel to the space sweep. The Old Era temporal
experimenters had littered the timeways with everything from early one-way timecans to
observation stations, dead bodies, abandoned instruments, weapons and equipment of all
sorts, including an automatic mining setup established under the Antarctic icecap which
caused headaches at the time of the Big Melt.
I have come unstuck in time.
No, no, no. I suppose it’s simply a logical impossibility to change the past, same as
it’s logically impossible for a uniformly colored spot to be both red and green.
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.
“Yes,” said Jherek. “I have already met the time-traveller. Last night. At the Duke
of Queens’. I was so impressed by the costume that I made one up for myself.”
Now is the time. Look straight ahead and don’t be afraid.
You know, Joe, you are my first reader! A pity you don’t remember my book a little
better!
The instructions were on the back of the clasp—when I touched it lightly, the words
TIMEBELT, TEMPORAL TRANSPORT DEVICE, winked out and the first “page” of directions
appeared in their place.
This sad little lizard told me he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not
laugh, people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them
costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short
supply.
Look, you gotta be kidding. I wanna go back to sleep! If I don't get at least 600 years,
I'm grouchy all day.
Every man has more to live for than every other man. I don’t have a cute chick to sleep
with, but I’d like to see the semi’s rolling along the Riverside Freeway at sunset a
few more times. It’s not what you have to live for; it’s that you want to live to see
it, to be there—that’s what is so damn sad.
“No true Eloi should be able to read or write.” Mr. Wells puffed on his pipe, peering
out of the window.
The Mediterranean floor lay ten thousand feet below sea level. The inflow took most of
that drop within a fifty-mile strait. Its volume amounted to ten thousand cubic miles a
year, a hundred Victoria Falls or a thousand Niagaras.
I had to choose between a panic if the fathead got them to thinking, and a possible panic
from the flash of the gun. But when a 20th gets to talking about his “rights” and
what he is “owed,&rdauo; things can get out of hand.
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).
In the weeks since the whole business of the time changes started, I had not been this
close to being caught since that first day in the cabin northwest of Duluth, when I had,
in fact, been caught without knowing what hit me.
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.
Our passenger is the object of popular cults by now—a focus for finer feelings. In this
way his mere presence has drawn the world’s peoples closer together, cultivating
respect and dignity, pulling us back from the brink of war, liberating tens of thousands
from their concentration camps. These cults extend from purely fashionable
manifestations—shirts printed with his face, now neatly shaven in a Vandyke style;
rings and worry-beads made from galena crystals—through the architectural (octahedron
and cube meditation modules) to life-styles themselves: a Zen-like “sitting quietly,
doing nothing.”
Maybe it takes gently crazy people and simpletons and dogs to do things we can’t do.
Maybe they have abilities we don’t have.. . .
Well, in principle, it utilizes a electromagnetic force field to molecularly reconstruct
the space-time continuum.
Fact then: Somehow, my travels crossed time as well as distance. Another fact: The boy
was the focus of my travels—perhaps the cause of them.
Ninety years ago I was a freak; today I am an amateur.
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
Sharpie, you have just invented multiperson solipsism. I didn’t think that was
mathematically possible.
Suppose your grandfather’s right. What happens to free will? If you can send
information backward through time, you can tell me what I did even before I get around to
doing it. So suppose I choose not to?
Today is December 7, 1941. I’m sure we are all aware of the significance of this date
in this place in history. We are going to fight a battle that was lost before most of you
were born. This time, with God’s help, it’s going to be different. . . . Good
Luck.
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.
Come back to me.
Is it all ready? Right. Come on then. Back to creation. We mustn’t waste any more time.
They’ll think I’ve lost control again and put it all down to evolution.
Until the moment of my departure, you see, my life had been a slide show of dreams
divided one from another by many small darknesses of wakeful dread and anticipation.
Physicians listened to heartbeats that dragged on, lonely and deep, for over a minute
per. They worried over eyes that refused to blink, yet remained somehow moist. They
despaired over encephalograms whose spikes could be counted in single neuron flashes,
adding up to a complex pattern that was . . .
normal!
You shot it. What a bunch of dumb sons of bitches. You shot it—a machine, you
butt-heads!
Ray, help! Larry! It’s me!
Navy owes me 40 years back pay.
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, . . .
Kyle: [to Sarah at the Tech-Noir Club]
Come with me if you want to live.
Greetings to the council. As you may have gathered, I have survived the pathetic trap set
by Trooper Deth on Mecon 7. For twelve long years, you have hunted my disciples like
dogs. Now, my day of vengeance is at hand. I’ve synthesized a time drug, and in a
moment shall retreat down the dark corridors of history. Know that it is I who is solely
responsible for your demise. One by one, your ancestors shall be murdered, and you, their
progeny, shall cease to exist. Then shall I return, join my legion, and claim the seat of
power for my own. Adieu . . . adieu . . .
Next Saturday night, we’re sending you . . . back to the future!
Now that sounds like we’re dealing with a time-space warp.
Horace, the hardheaded, practical lout, the organizer, the schemer. Emma, the moaner, the
keeper of our consciences. Timothy, the student. Enid, the thinker. And I, the loafer,
the bad example, the one who makes the others feel virtuous.
This is totally rad. You’re like my big little brother.
Well, Mr Snelgrove, I happen to know that in the future I will not have the slightest use
for algebra, and I speak from experience.
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.
McCoy: You realize that by giving him the formula you’re
altering the future.
So he hadn’t died. Somehow, the realization didn’t thrill him, just as his earlier
assumption of death had failed to strike him with dread.
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.
What if Cole came back to set off a chain of events that would eventually destroy the one
man who stood in his way?
One city attempted to escape their onslaught by unraveling the secrets of time and
travelling back in a desperate search for a safer age . .
. they succeeded and time was their friend until the arrival yet
again of their relentless enemy.
His age, his century, his civilization—they were all gone. This
was now his universe. The fact was irreversible. So be it. I will
adjust.
Think how much power you’d need for all that!
Most excellent!
Harry bought a pair of socks, thick gray wool, for 89 cents. When the man took his
dollar, Harry held his breath: each first time made a little pip in his stomach. But on
one ever looked at the dates of old bills. He bought two oranges for five cents each, and
then, thinking of Manny, bought a third. At a candystore he bought G-8
and His Battle Aces for fifteen cents. At The Collector’s Cozy in the other time
they would gladly give him thirty dollars for it. Finally, he bought a cherry Coke for a
nickel and headed towards the park.
If you build it, they will come.
For one thing, paradoxes can occur. Say you build a time machine, go backwards in time
and murder your father when he was ten years old. That means you were never born. And if
you were never born, how did you build the time machine? Paradox! It's the possibility of
wiping out your own existence that makes most people rule out time-travel. Still, why
not? If you were careful, you could do it.
The time-traveling is just too dangerous. Better that I devote myself to study the other
great mystery of the universe—women!
Doc: [blowing train whistle] I’ve wanted to do that my whole
life!
The truth is that nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing whatever appeared to happen and yet I experienced a feeling of elemental terror so great that
I lost all sense of who, or what, or where I was. I was in the heart of chaos, and no
power of mind or body was of use against it.
The T-800: [to Sarah at the Pescadero State
Hospital] Come with me if you want to live.
My friends and I—everyone who belongs to America Will Break—come from a hundred and
fifty years in your future.
This is my boom-stick. It’s a 12-guage, double barreled Remington—S-mart’s
top-of-the-line. You’ll find them in the sporting goods department.
So this will be the last time we do Groundhog together.
Barry: Oh my God. It’s twelve o’clock.
That plane got sucked back there. Landed in the heart of Nazi Germany.
I can’t tell you anything. He’ll send somebody back to wipe out my grandparents.
It’ll be like I’ve never existed. My mother, my father, my wife, my kids, my fucking
cat.
If you can’t change anything because it’s already happened, you may as well smell the
flowers.
. . . if you go mad, do you know you’ve gone mad? If you
don’t, how do you know you’re not mad?
All of history was available, it seemed, and yet Pastwatch had barely scratched the
surface of the past, and most watchers looked forward to a limitless future of rummaging
through time.
Assimilate this!
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.
The current president was a Nazi; his opponent in the 1960 election had been Strom
Thurmond, and the paper seemed to be in hysterics about Thurmond the “sore loser”
having the termerity to criticize the government that had won the election. Their
reference to him as an “ultra-liberal crazy” came very close to making me laugh out
loud. . . I suppose context is everything.
She might have said more except that at that moment the sky darkened above us; a
passenger dirigible was coming in. I wondered how Chrys was reacting to all this; I knew
her home civilization was spacefaring,but after some roaming around in the timelines you
realize that’s a bit like knowing that a civilization uses counterpoint in music or the
arch a lot in architecture—it isn&rsquyo;t the fact that they use it, but what they do
with it, that really matters.
The bicylce had wooden spoked wheels, but the tires were pretty obviously rubber. The
“chain” was a knotted rope, which ran through large wooden pin gears, and it didn’t
look like they’d developed the coaster brake yet, which may have explained why the
helmet had a number of prominent dents.
Will Robinson, I will tell you a joke. Why did the robot cross the road? Because he was
carbon bonded to the chicken.
I want you to hide that wallet someplace where nobody’s gonna find it for thirty years.
In this temple as in the hearts of the apes for whom he saved the planet the memory of
General Thade is enshrined forever
The rotting carcass of an apatosaurus blocked the intersection of Highway 9 and Needham
Road.
You built your time machine because of Emma’s death. If she had lived, it would never
have existed. So how could you use your machine to go back in time and save her? You are
the inescapable result of your tragedy, just as I am the inescapable result of you. You
have your answer. Now go.
We’re mostly just ordinary.