"Most people think that, if you are struck by lightning, it'll kill you. If you read science fiction, you know that a far more likely result will be that you will be flung into some period of the past. Which period depends on three factors: your weight, measured in pounds; the voltage in the lightning; which period the author has been mugging up on."
We know of time travel as an accidental freak of nature in works by Mark Twain, L. Sprague de Camp and Poul Anderson.
HG Wells introduced technological time travel and was followed by many, preeminently by Anderson.
A few fictional beings time travel without technological assistance. Superman used to do it by flying faster than light while rotating either clockwise or anticlockwise. The mutants in Anderson's There Will Be Time time travel by an act of will while remaining on the Earth's surface.
The T machine idea combines time travelling with space travelling: Anderson's The Avatar.
As ever, Poul Anderson is in every category.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
It's probably my loss, but I never read Twain's A CONNECTICUTT YANKEE AT KING ARTHUR'S COURT. But I have read De Camp's LEST DARKNESS FALL plus Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early." I think he meant that story to caution readers that we should not always expect modern people flung into the past to succeed in changing that past.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I disliked YANKEE and did not read it all the way through.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Why did you dislike that book by Twain? And I did enjoy LEST DARKNESS FALL. After Wells, De Camp was a major pioneer in writing time travel/alternate worlds SF.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
As far as I remember -
Twain becomes tiresome about the unpleasantness of life in the Dark Ages.
He implausibly has the Yankee running a 20th century military academy completely off-stage and somehow producing anachronistic WWI-style weaponry.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Got it, altho life was all too often very unpleasant in the Hobbesian sense for most people not that long ago, historically speaking. But excessive dwelling on unpleasantness can get tiresome.
That second point was an even more damaging criticism. Both Anderson and Stirling laid stress on how difficult it can be to change the past. I recall as well how Stirling's Arthur/Artorius discussed how innovations could be either Type A or Type B, with the latter being far more difficult.
Ad astra! Sean
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