"'Long ago I had a vague inkling of a machine -'
"'To travel through Time!' exclaimed the Very Young Man.
"'That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space or Time, as the driver determines.'"
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 1, p. 11.
Despite this original conception, the Time Machine does not travel through space although Christopher Priest wrote a sequel called The Space Machine.
Other space-time vehicles include:
the Doctor's TARDIS;
the Time Patrol timecycles;
the T machines in Poul Anderson's The Avatar.
Thus, The Avatar elaborates a premise propounded in The Time Machine, not just time travel but space-time travel. I imagined the Time Traveler redesigning his Time Machine accordingly in "Time Travel Villains," here.
Notice the evocative phrase "Long ago...," which Lewis Carroll uses in his epilogue to Alice In Wonderland. It seems appropriate that a long time has elapsed between the inkling and the contraption. Wells was a long time writing The Time Machine before it reached its finished form.
This blog often returns to Wells who is foundational to Andersonian sf.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I know you have not read many of the works of Jules Verne, but he too was a co-founder of modern SF. Esp. that kind of science fiction we call "hard SF." Science fiction that pays attention to real science and possibly real changes or advances in technology. Poul Anderson excelled in writing that kind of science fiction as well. I'm sure he read such Verne classics as 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, and FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON with appreciation.
One problem with Jules Verne's stories is that too few of them has been satisfactorily translated into English. Which tends to lessen the impact they might have had on Anglo/American SF.
Sean
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