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Worlds Without End Blog

Reading the Pulps: Time Travel Posted at 3:35 PM by James Wallace Harris

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I came across a wonderful website the other day, The Big List of Time Travel Adventures created by Michael Main. What Michael has done is gathered as many time travel stories as he could find and organized them by the year they appeared. The header of his site allows visitors to pick a year and see what time travel stories were published that year. Each entry has a graphic, usually the cover of the pulp magazine in which the story appeared, a short synopsis, and a quote. Michael also awards Master Traveler citations to writers and Eloi gold, silver, and bronze medals to stories.

I especially love Michael’s “ALL YEARS” page that produces one long list of time travel stories beginning with “Memoirs of the Twentieth Century” from 1733 and ending with all the time travel stories from 2017. Michael is working a new version of his site that will be database driven and allow users to input stories. And it will catch up with stories from 2018.

I wish there were other sites devoted to other sub-genres of science fiction. Wikipedia does have some pages that do that. Here’s their page for Time Travel in Fiction. It’s excellent, but not as fun as Michael’s pages,

And here’s Wikipedia’s page for Artificial Intelligence in Fiction. That’s the topic I would work on if I created such an SF sub-genre site. It breaks the topic down into different subjects, which is great, but I’d rather see things listed by year. I love following the evolution of an idea as it develops over time. I’ve also wanted to mind map a sub-genre.

I stumbled onto The Big List of Time Travel Adventures when I was researching “Barrier” by Anthony Boucher. I discovered “Barrier” when I was reading The Great SF Stories 4 (1942) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. “Barrier” first appeared in the September 1942 issues of Astounding Science-Fiction.

Boucher is evidently the first person to ask, “Where are all the time travelers” in the same way the question “Where are all the space travelers” was asked when wondering why we’re apparently alone in the universe. If time travel is possible shouldn’t we have time traveling visitors?

“Barrier” from 1942 is a complicated time travel story that reminds me of “By His Bootstraps” by Robert A. Heinlein from 1941. I have to wonder if Boucher read Heinlein’s story and thought he could top it.

Brent is a time traveler visiting the year 2473. First, he has trouble with the language. Boucher imagines in the future incorrect speech can get you killed. The’s reason behind that absurdity that makes sense. Brent has landed in a time period that believes it’s a utopia. Because this society thinks it’s a perfect society it also assumes that changes are a threat. Their fear of altering their ways extends to fearing time travelers. So they erect barriers to block time travelers from both the past and the future. Unfortunately, Brent got in before the barrier was complete, and can’t get out. And, it turns out, he isn’t the only time traveler trapped inside the barrier. Because this story was written in 1942, this future repressive society has Nazi ancestry.

Last week seemed like my week for time travel stories. Because “Barrier” was so complicated I wanted to read what others thought about it and jumped on Google. That’s how I discovered The Big List of Time Travel Adventures. While clicking around on that site I saw this cover:

Could you resist reading “When Time Was New” after seeing a guy climb inside the head of a triceratops? I couldn’t. It was a fun story and I mentioned it to my discussion group for The Great SF Stories about how I always liked reading Robert F. Young stories back in the day. The group asked, why isn’t Young remembered today, so I looked up his bio on Wikipedia. Two things caught my eye. One, he had been a school janitor and wrote over 200 science fiction stories, and second, his most popular story was “The Dandelion Girl” first published in the April 1, 1961 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. That’s quite an accomplishment for a science fiction writer.

I wish I had that issue of The Saturday Evening Post to see how “The Dandelion Girl” was presented and illustrated. Also, I would have been curious how mundane readers reacted to a romantic time travel story.

“The Dandelion Girl” is a lovely tale about a man from our time meeting a young girl from the future. “When Time Was New” is about a man from our time meeting a young girl 79 million years ago while observing dinosaurs. There is a symmetry between these two stories. Young was in his forties at the time and I have to assume he was feeling old and daydreaming a lot about young women.

“When Time Was New” had a wonderful complication. Carpenter, the main character travels back in time 79 million years and discovers two kids in a tree. That’s a pretty cool start for a story. He assumes they have time traveled too. But they haven’t. They are from that time Mars. They were kidnapped and their kidnappers were hiding out on Earth. This is rather unbelievable, but the story is still fun. I immediately wonder if Young is going to suggest that people of Earth are long ago immigrants from Mars.

I can’t say too much about these three stories without ruining their plots. But I was intrigued by how each used time traveling for its plot. I was also entertained by jumping around in time to research each story. Boucher was using time travel to comment on his current politics by imagining a future society, Young was using time travel to for adventure and romance. H. G. Wells used his famous time story to explore human and astronomical evolution. Heinlein wrote several time travel stories just to push the envelope on plotting stories. And course, most writers use time travel to get modern people into historical periods. The possibilities are endless, or are they?

If you read enough time travel stories you sense the limitations of the sub-genre. I’m confident that actual time travel is impossible. But that’s also one of the fun components of the theme, how traveling in time would cause endless problems. One thing I’ve learned from reading time travel stories is they need precise limitations or they ruin the plot of their story.

It’s fun for me to see how a science fictional concept evolves over time, which explains why I admired Michael’s site so much. Be sure to check it out. Go use his time machine, set a destination year, and then read the time travel stories from that year.

 

 

 

2 Comments

Michael Main   |   24 Jul 2018 @ 19:12

Hi, Jim! And many thanks for your visit to the Big List of Time Travel Adventures and for your kind words here. I love your thoughts about the particular stories that you’ve given here–especially about Robert F. Young and “The Dandelion Girl,” which (thanks to you), I’ll be adding to the Big List as soon as the new version of the database is up. It was nice to hear that you found value in the chronological arrangement of the stories–I was really hoping that it would lend some context to the sub-genre, sort of like reading all the works of a single author in chronological order.

And you’ve drawn me into the idea of creating databases for other sub-genres–I think that the new community-based database design can be taken without changes and used for any other sub-genre of speculative fiction. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the database design once Version 0.1 is ready for review.

Naturally, the second database (after Time Travel) will be The Big List of A.I. Stories!

Many thanks again!

Jim Harris   |   25 Jul 2018 @ 16:05

Michael, your site deserves more attention. And if you add other themes it will be even more interesting.

I’ve always wanted to do an SF theme site, but it’s always easier to Tom Sawyer someone else. Ha-ha. Plus, you’ll do it better than me.

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