Time Travel Short Stories, page 1
This is a FLAME TREE Book
Publisher & Creative Director: Nick Wells
Project Editor: Laura Bulbeck
Editorial Board: Catherine Taylor, Josie Mitchell, Gillian Whitaker
Thanks to Will Rough
Publisher’s Note: Due to the historical nature of the classic text, we’re aware that there may be some language used which has the potential to cause offence to the modern reader. However, wishing overall to preserve the integrity of the text, rather than imposing contemporary sensibilities, we have left it unaltered.
FLAME TREE PUBLISHING
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First published 2017
Copyright © 2017 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd
Stories by modern authors are subject to international copyright law, and are licensed for publication in this volume.
PRINT ISBN: 978-1-78664-463-3
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-78755-244-9
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Contents
Foreword by David Wittenberg
Publisher’s Note
Tourmalin’s Time Cheques
F. Anstey
The Meaning that You Choose
Bo Balder
Looking Backward (chapters I–III)
Edward Bellamy
The Gap in the Curtain (part I)
John Buchan
Shaping Things to Come
Dominick Cancilla
Hilda Silfverling
L. Maria Child
The Shape of My Name
Nino Cipri
A Christmas Carol (chapter IV)
Charles Dickens
Hostage
Kate Estabrooks
Try, Try Again
K.L. Evangelista
All for Bellkins
Tony Genova
Murder or a Duck
Beth Goder
Cattail Heart
Kate Heartfield
Eternity and the Devil
Larry Hodges
Wireless
Rudyard Kipling
Before Adam (chapters I–V)
Jack London
The Panchronicon (chapters I–V)
Harold Steele MacKaye
Two Children Reported Missing
Scott Merrow
The Clock that Went Backward
Edward Page Mitchell
A Dream of John Ball (chapters I–IV)
William Morris
Striking Light
Samantha Murray
Armageddon – 2419 A.D.
Philip Francis Nowlan
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
Edgar Allan Poe
Ouroboros
Chris Reynolds
The Berlin Doctrine
Anton Rose
Omnipunks
Brian Trent
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (chapters I–IV)
Mark Twain
A Brain, A Heart, A Home, The Nerve
Valerie Valdes
This Door is Locked
Adam Vine
The Time Machine (chapters I–V)
H.G. Wells
The Sleeper Awakes (chapters I–VIII)
H.G. Wells
Biographies & Sources
Foreword: Time Travel Short Stories
It may surprise readers to know that the sorts of spectacular time travel plots one typically encounters in contemporary science fiction, full of multiplied time lines, paradoxes, revisions of history and butterfly effects, are a late innovation of the genre. In its earliest forms, time-travel fiction was nearly always a subsidiary feature or motif of other types of literature. Sometimes, as in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’, it was a catalyst for personal reflection or self-criticism – in other stories, such as L. Maria Child’s ‘Hilda Silfverling’ or Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, time travel was a means to construct a fable with a credible political edge.
When the genre of utopian romance burgeoned in the second half of the nineteenth century, providing time travel with its first real heyday, time travel narrative still functioned chiefly as a tool for political prognostication. By the 1880s, and especially following the success of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, utopian writers were increasingly anxious to depict social progress in as scientific and realistic a way as possible. Time travel was a convenient means for doing just that – after all, a centuries-long coma gets your narrator more plausibly to a future that represents the direct outgrowth of this social present than any fantastical dream-vision or accidentally discovered subterranean kingdom. Even the most famous prototype of science-fictional time travel, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, is primarily a story about politics, with Wells using his machine to show us the future evolution and eventual disintegration of British culture and class society.
It was not until the 1930s, well after the language of relativity and quantum physics had become entrenched in the popular imagination, that time travel fiction became a standalone literary type. Only then did authors begin regularly to play with time itself in their stories, giving free rein to the causal loops, historical reversals, retro-eradications of characters and events, and paradoxical multiplications of plot lines that are now standard fodder for the genre. Much literary richness was gained with this proliferation of narrative experimentation in later time travel fiction. Arguably, no other type of popular literature has been so free to contemplate and manipulate the very structures of storytelling, history and causality, or even to engage directly with the philosophy of space and time.
But with these new developments in science fiction time travel, a great deal was also lost. By the 1930s, the sociopolitical emphasis so integral to older time travel narrative, when its devices still served as means for utopian or existential speculation, was gone save for remnants and echoes. Looking back through the classic time travel stories in this anthology, the reader can perhaps appreciate the very direct engagement of these early authors with politics both present and future, and their simultaneous aspirations toward scientific social theory and persuasive literary realism.
There are sporadic moments that anticipate later time travel fiction in its more obviously science-fictional mode, for instance the fourth-dimensional navigation of Wells’s time machine, the hints of reverse causality in Edward Page Mitchell’s ‘The Clock That Went Backward’, and the comical pseudo-physics of Copernicus Droop in Harold Steele Mackaye’s The Panchronicon. But the most genuine pleasure of reading these classic stories may be in observing their deeply ethical conviction that the purpose of time travelling is to help us draw clear-eyed, realistic portraits of society, industry, progress and conflict – a conviction that, like utopianism and realism themselves, eventually gave way to the more narratively complex but less politically self-reflective time travel of twentieth- and twenty-first-century science fiction.
David Wittenberg
Publisher’s Note
Stories of travelling through time bring us ancient and future civilizations, terrifying visions, dreamlike utopias and cautionary tales. Time travel comes in a variety of forms, and within this volume you’ll find it all: from the time machines of Edward Page Mitchell and H.G. Wells, to cross-time communication in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Wireless’ or cryopreservation in L. Maria Child’s ‘Hilda Silfverling’. As our collection of books grows, so too does the task of finding new classic fiction. In order to create what we believe to be a truly good stand-alone Time Travel collection, we have included a small number of classic stories which appear in some of our other anthologies – these were tales we felt it would be detrimental to leave out, and we wanted to make sure there’s a great mix of classic fiction on offer. Every year the response to our call for submissions seems to grow and grow, giving us a rich universe of stories to choose from, but making our job all the more difficult in narrowing down the final selection. We’ve loved delving into so many realms of possibility, and ultimately chose a selection of stories we hope sit comfortably alongside each other and with the classic selection, to provide a fantastic Time Travel book for all to enjoy.
Tourmalin’s Time Cheques
F. Anstey
The Prologue
MR. PETER TOURMALIN was sitting, or rather lying, in a steamer-chair, on the first-class saloon-deck of the P. and O. ship Boomerang, which had not been many days as yet on the voyage home from Sydney. He had been trying to read; but it was a hot morning, and the curry, of which he had partaken f
He wanted distraction of some sort, but he could not summon up sufficient energy to rise and pace the deck, as his only acquaintance on board, a Mr. Perkins, was doing with a breezy vigor which Tourmalin found himself feebly resenting.
Another alternative was open to him, it is true: not far away were other deck-chairs, in which some of the lady passengers were reading, writing, and chatting more or less languidly. There were not very many on board – for it was autumn, a time at which homewardbound vessels are not apt to be crowded – but even in that small group there were one or two with whom it might have seemed possible to pass a little time in a pleasant and profitable manner. For instance, there was that tall, graceful girl in the navy-blue skirt, and the striped cotton blouse confined at her slender waist by a leathern belt. (Tourmalin, it should be mentioned, was in the habit of noticing the details of feminine costume.) She had regular features, gray eyes which lighted up whenever she spoke, and an expression of singular nobility and sweetness; her fair hair was fastened up in loose gleaming masses under her highly becoming straw hat.
Peter watched her surreptitiously, from time to time, from behind the third page of Buckle. She was attempting to read a novel; but her attention, like his own, wandered occasionally, and he even fancied that he surprised her now and then in the act of glancing at himself with a certain interest.
Near her was another girl, not quite so tall, and darker, but scarcely less pleasing in appearance. She wore a cool-looking pink frock, and her luxuriant bronze tresses were set off by a simple white flannel cap. She held some embroidery in her listless fingers, but was principally occupied in gazing out to sea with a wistful and almost melancholy expression. Her eyes were soft and brown, and her features piquantly irregular; giving Peter, who considered himself no mean judge of female character, the impression of a highly emotional and enthusiastic temperament. He thought he saw signs that she also honoured him by her notice.
Peter was a flat-headed little man, with weak eyes and flaxen hair; but even flat-headed little men may indulge these fancies at times, without grossly deceiving themselves.
He knew, as one does learn such things on board ship, that the name of the first young lady was Tyrrell, and that she was the daughter of a judge who had been spending the Long Vacation in a voyage to recruit his health. Of the other, he knew no more than that she was a Miss Davenport.
At present, however, he had no personal acquaintance with either of them, and, in fact, as has already been said, knew nobody on board to speak to, except the energetic Mr. Perkins, a cheery man with a large fund of general information, who was going home on some business connected with a banking house in Melbourne.
And yet it is not difficult to make acquaintances on board ship, if a man cares to do so; accident or design will provide opportunities in plenty, and two or three days at sea are equivalent to at least as many weeks on shore. And Peter being quite aware of these facts, and by no means indifferent to the society of the other sex, which, indeed he considered more interesting than that of his own, it would seem that he must have had some strong reason for having kept studiously apart from the social life on board the Boomerang.
He had a reason, and it was this: he was an engaged man, and on his probation. A bachelor, still under thirty, of desultory habits which unfitted him to shine in any profession, he had a competency – that refuge of the incompetent – which made him independent.
Some months previously he had had the good fortune to meet with a lady somewhat his junior in years, but endowed with charms of mind and character which excited his admiration and reverence. He recognized that she supplied the qualities in which he felt himself deficient; he was weary of the rather purposeless life he had led. He wanted a wife who would regulate and organize his existence; and Miss Sophia Pinceney, with her decision and her thoroughness, was eminently the person to do it. So it was not long before he took courage and proposed to her.
Miss Pinceney, though she had been highly educated, and possessed a considerable fortune of her own, was by no means inclined to look unfavourably upon such a suitor. He might not be quite her intellectual equal, but he was anxious to improve his mind. He was amiable and amenable, and altogether likely, under careful guidance, to prove an excellent husband.
But she was prudent, and reason told her that the suddenness of Peter’s passion was no guarantee of its enduring qualities. She had heard and seen too much of a rather catholic susceptibility in his nature, to feel it safe to incur so grave a risk as marriage until she had certain proof that his attachment to her was robust enough to bear the severest test; and to that test she was determined to submit him.
She consented to an engagement on one condition, that he was to take a long voyage. If he returned in the same mind, she would be sufficiently sure of his constancy to marry him as soon as he wished: if he did not, her misgivings would be amply justified. There was very little sentiment about Sophia; she took a practical and philosophical view of the marriage union, as became a disciple of Ibsen.
“I like you, Peter,” she told him frankly; “you have many qualities that endear you to me, but I don’t feel that I can depend upon you at present. And from what I know of you, I fear it is only too probable that absence and the attractive society of a passenger-ship may lead you to discover that you have mistaken the depth of the feeling you entertain for me.”
“But look here, Sophia,” he had expostulated; “if you’re afraid of that, why do you make me go?”
“Because,” she had replied, with her admirable common sense, “because, if my fears should prove to be unhappily only too well-founded, I shall, at least, have made the discovery before it is too late.”
And, in spite of all his protests, Peter had to go. Sophia sought to reconcile him to this necessity by pointing out the advantages of travel, the enlarging effect it would have upon his mind, and the opportunities a long sea-voyage afforded for regular and uninterrupted study on the lines she had already mapped out for him; but despite these consolations, he went away in low spirits. When the moment came for parting, even the strong-minded Sophia was seized with a kind of compunction.
“Something tells me, Peter,” she said, “that the ordeal will prove too much for you: in spite of your good resolutions, you will sooner or later be drawn into some flirtation which will make you forget me. I know you so well, Peter!”
“I wish you could show a little more confidence in me,” he had answered in a wounded tone. “Since I met you, Sophia, I have ceased to be the butterfly I was. But as you seem to doubt me, it may relieve your mind if I promise faithfully that, while I am away from you, I will never, under any inducement, allow myself to overstep the limits of the most ordinary civility toward any woman with whom I may be brought in contact. I swear it, Sophia! Are you satisfied now?”
Perhaps he had a secret prevision that a time might come when this oath would prove a salutary restraint upon his straying fancy, and it certainly had an immediate and most reassuring effect upon Sophia.
Tourmalin had gone out to Australia, had seen something of the country during his stay in the colony, and was now, as we have seen, on his return; and during the whole time his oath, to his great credit, had been literally and faithfully kept.
During the voyage out, he had been too persistently unwell to be inclined to dally with sentiment; but in his subsequent wanderings, he had avoided, or rather escaped, all intercourse with any Colonial ladies who might by any possibility affect his allegiance to Sophia, whose image consequently still held undisputed possession of his heart.
In case he should feel himself wavering at any time, he had been careful to provide himself with a talisman in the shape of a photograph, the mere sight of which would be instantly effectual. But somehow, since he had been on board the Boomerang, the occasions on which he had been driven to refer to this photograph had been growing more and more frequent; while, at the same time, he had a tormenting consciousness that it took an increasingly longer time to work.
