Three Time Travel Texts

 

HG Wells' The Time Machine is a classic of English literature, always in print in multiple editions. Several works by Poul Anderson are direct literary successors of The Time Machine although not generally recognized as such. 

The Time Machine has:

an outer narrator who seems to be identical with Wells - he has an appointment with Richardson, the publisher;

an inner narrator, the Time Traveler. 

There Will Be Time has:

an author, Poul Anderson, who directly addresses his readers in a three-page Foreword;

a first person narrator, Robert Anderson, who is a distant relative of the author;

a central character, Jack Havig, who is a time traveler.

How often does Havig tell Robert Anderson about events that were future to that Anderson but past to the author and his readers? I will not answer that question this evening.

The Time Patrol agent who recruited Manse Everard in New York in 1954 would then have known of Gorbachev but that Russian leader was not and could not have been mentioned in the Time Patrol series until The Shield Of Time was published in 1990. However, the chronology of There Will Be Time is such that some of Robert Anderson's future is our past.