Cosmic Travellers

Characters in sf narratives can find imaginative ways to travel through the cosmos, not always needing a vehicle. Three examples: HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon preceded sf cliches whereas Poul Anderson creatively reworks but also transcends the cliches.

The narrator of Stapledon's Star Maker leaves Earth as a disembodied consciousness which joins a composite consciousness that traverses all of space and time from the conscious nebulae to cosmic dissolution, surveying galactic empires, the Martian invasion of Earth, the Terrestrial invasion of Venus, the Venerian invasion of Neptune and the Star Maker's experimental universes up to and including the ultimate cosmos to which ours is a single particle. Then the narrator returns to the time and place on Earth from which he had departed so did any of it happen?

The psychotechnician in Anderson's "The Chapter Ends" remains embodied and does not become composite but nevertheless traverses thirty thousand light-years in ten days without a spaceship because his artificially mutated brain enables him to fly FTL while holding heat and air around him. (How does he navigate?)

Wells' Time Traveller sits not in but on a vehicle and remains on the Earth's surface where he is:

"...attenuated...slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances!"

-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 4, p. 26.

Perhaps the three most imaginative descriptions of cosmic travel.

The Time Machine is the literary ancestor of Anderson's Time Patrol timecycles which merely disappear and (re)appear, growing instantly from zero volume.