Sunday, 20 February 2022

Transpositions And Anticipations

There Will Be Time, VII.

Wallis contacted other time travelers in the nineteenth century by hiring agents to place ads which would attract attention from fellow mutants without using the phrase, "time traveler." Of course they did not use that phrase. The terms, "Time Machine," "time travelling" and "Time Traveller," were coined by HG Wells at the end of that century. I read parts of Mark Twain's turgid A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court if only to find out what terminology he had used: "transposition of epochs."

I would like to have read one of Wallis's ads and also to know how he had explained them to the young Englishman who wrote them for him. He chose someone late in the century to avoid "anticipations." We know that Wallis did share the time travel idea with this hired ad-writer. We also notice a similarity between their names.

"Time Patrol" opens with the ad that drew Manse Everard into the Time Patrol.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Now that you mentioned it, I too would have liked to have seen one of Wallis' ads.

And you beat me to mentioning the ad which drew Manse Everard to the Time Patrol!

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

The Time Patrol ad wasn't aimed at people who were or who wanted to be time travelers; it was aimed at a certain type of -personality- who, when informed of the choices, would want to join the Time Patrol.

Wallis was aiming at people who were already time travelers and knew it.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

But we do see mention of the Patrol acting as a police force, or to assist law abiding time travelers. It seems to have acted openly, in the future, in those eras where time traveling was actively known about.

What you said about Wallis, I agree.

Ad astra! Sean