Saturday, 29 March 2025

Through Space And Time

One kind of sf narrative involves successive jumps through space, through time or through space-time. Thus, the author is free to create several novel destinations as opposed to just a single fictional setting. We can start with HG Wells' Time Traveller who watches architectural and environmental changes speeding past the Time Machine, spends a few days in 802,701 AD, visits some further futures, culminating in the end of life on Earth, then returns to his starting point in the late nineteenth century. (This means that our twentieth and twenty-first centuries are completely bypassed.)

In Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever," the time projector, like the Time Machine, remains stationary on the Earth's surface so that the jumps are only through time. Both vehicles arrive back in a slightly different position because they were moved in the future. The Time Machine is at the other side of the laboratory whereas the time projector is down the hill. The projector remains stationary not only on Earth but also at a point in space corresponding to that position on Earth as it moves not back but forward around the circle of time to 1973.

In Anderson's The Avatar, not a temporal vehicle but a spaceship moves backwards or forwards in time and across galactic or intergalactic distances in space by rotating around a T machine. 

Read Wells, then Anderson.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Dang! I'm not only reading Dostoevsky's THE POSSESSED but I'm thinking of rereading Kipling's early collection LIFE'S HANDICAP. Some of Kipling's most famous early works were nearly contemporaneous with Wells' THE TIME MACHINE.

Ad astra! Sean