Fictional Time

We all experience time and can experience nothing without time. That makes time a universal feature of human experience. Everyone who has ever lived has experienced memory, duration and anticipation. Another universal feature is space. If there were no distance between self and other, then there would be no difference between them and thus no self-other relationship. A timeless, spaceless point equals nothing.

The Time Traveller gets his dinner guests to think as if for the first time about these universal features of their experience. Any narrative has to be about temporally enduring and spatially distinct subjects and objects of consciousness. HG Wells and Poul Anderson then apply fiction to this four-dimensional framework. Our space happens to be three-dimensional and time can be thought of, at least in some respects, as a fourth dimension.

An author can write a nostalgic novel about past decades or an equally nostalgic novel about someone from the author's present able to revisit those decades. Fantasy, sf and mainstream fiction exist along a spectrum.

An author can conceive of a time traveller visiting the future and returning to the present or can simply recount the history of humanity as it advances through future centuries. Even if a time traveller does not accompany future humanity, we the readers do. Time travel and future histories are two aspects of a single imaginative process. Poul Anderson focuses this process by writing a history of the Maurai Federation and then incorporating that history into a highly condensed time travel novel.