HG Wells' Time Traveler and Poul Anderson's Caleb Wallis are two nineteenth century time travelers. Compare their achievements. The Time Traveler travels to 802,701 A.D. and the further future and returns. Wallis makes his fortune, helps his younger self, contacts and recruits other time travelers, influences Wells, establishes a base in the twenty-first century, checks the two hundred year history of that base and some of the further future, then lives through those two hundred years, time hopping forward so that he is an old man by the end of that period.
Thus, of both men, it is true to say that they travel into the future but what a difference. Wells could not have proceeded directly to a plot as complex as Anderson's. Anderson could not have written as he did except on the basis of previous time travel fiction.
Both men are lost in time at the end of their respective narratives.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Exactly! Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were the pioneers of modern science fiction. Wells opened the way to speculations about time travel, but he could not have thought of all the possible implications and consequences about that idea. Later writers, like Poul Anderson, further extended and developed such ideas.
Ad astra! Sean
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