Saturday, 12 May 2018

Time Travelers On The Moon

HG Wells wrote The Time Machine and The First Men In The Moon. Is it possible to combine a story about time travel with a story about travel to the Moon?

Yes. Poul Anderson's Carl Farness travels from Earth in 302 to the Moon in 2319.

Is it possible to devise a story with a plot equally dependent on travel to the Moon and on time travel? Yes. Larry Niven's "Wrong Way Street" was collected both in a "first man on the Moon" anthology and in a time travel anthology. One of the astronauts exploring an alien base on the Moon gets the aliens' time machine to work and thus becomes the first man on the Moon!

Sorry, folks. Saturday evening and time to go for a Chinese or Indian takeaway.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And, in "The Light" Poul Anderson wrote a "first man on Luna" story about how the "first men" on the Moon discovered someone else had been there centuries ago. And how did that first Moon explorer get there before modern technology?

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
And "The Light" is included in a collection called PAST TIMES, mainly about time travel.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Correct, I have a copy of PAST TIMES as well. And it was amusing how Anderson showed the first person narrator of the story as being more interested in strictly cultural things like the arts than was generally the case among astronauts.

Sean