CONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction Harry Turtledove
Theodore Sturgeon
YESTERDAY WAS MONDAY
Henry Kuttner
TIME LOCKER
Arthur C. Clarke
TIME’S ARROW
Jack Finney
I’M SCARED
Ray Bradbury
A SOUND OF THUNDER
Richard Matheson
DEATH SHIP
L. Sprague de Camp
A GUN FOR DINOSAUR
Poul Anderson
THE MAN WHO CAME EARLY
R. A. Lafferty
RAINBIRD
Larry Niven
LEVIATHAN!
Joe Haldeman
ANNIVERSARY PROJECT
Jack Dann
TIMETIPPING
Connie Willis
FIRE WATCH
Robert Silverberg
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM
John Kessel
THE PURE PRODUCT
Charles Sheffield
TRAPALANDA
Nancy Kress
THE PRICE OF ORANGES
Ursula K. Le Guin
ANOTHER STORY OR A FISHERMAN OF THE INLAND SEA
Permissions
About the Editors
ANTHOLOGIES EDITED BY HARRY TURTLEDOVE WITH MARTIN H. GREENBERG
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
WE’RE ALL TIME TRAVELERS, whether we know it or not. We go into the future at a steady rate of one second per second, and we leave the past behind. New things come along. Old things are forgotten. My own lifetime—neither especially long nor especially short these days—has seen the rise of antibiotics, AIDS, space travel, television, CDs, videotape, DVDs, Richard Nixon (twice), civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, cell phones, the computer, and the Internet. It’s seen the fall of Communism, segregation, records, smallpox (we hope!), polio, Richard Nixon (twice), the Twin Towers, and the idea that smoking is cool. It’s seen hula hoops, stuffing phone booths and Volkswagen Bugs, and streaking. Some things, of course, remain constant. The Chicago Cubs haven’t been in a World Series since before I was born. They haven’t won one since Teddy Roosevelt was president.
Toward the end of his long life, L. Sprague de Camp would give a presentation at science-fiction conventions called “Memoirs of a Time Traveler.” Sprague, who was born in 1907, had seen much more come and go than I have (he was even around the last time the Cubs won a Series). Making other people see how much that he took for granted as a child and a young man had changed since was thought-provoking, to say the least.
But what if we weren’t limited to that steady one second per second progression? What if we could go against the normal flow of time from past to future instead of being trapped in it? H. G. Wells, who was—among many other things—the first great science-fiction writer to use English, published The Time Machine in 1895. He gave us the name for the device and the bones of one kind of time-travel story: go to the future, take a look at what’s there, and come back and tell the present about it. Other writers have been exploring and expanding the concept ever since.
Traveling into the future is relatively safe. Traveling into the past starts generating paradoxes. What if you killed your own grandfather? Or, less bloodily, what if your journey into the past changed things so that your mother married somebody else? Would you disappear? (Yes, that’s the one the Back to the Future movies look at, but you can also do it without a DeLorean.) What if you changed some important past event? Would you change its future—your own present? That particular line of time-travel stories forms one part of the spectrum of alternate history tales, some of which Del Rey recently collected in The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century.
Dealing with the paradoxes—or not dealing with them—challenged the ingenuity of writers throughout the last century. Writing as Anson MacDonald, Robert A. Heinlein wrapped up all the problems of one man’s existence in “By His Bootstraps.” Close to twenty years later, Heinlein took another shot at it in “All You Zombies,” which tightens his protagonist’s gene pool—and the inherent paradoxes—even more. His novel The Door into Summer also looks at time travel in a situation where the traveler has an exactly even chance of going into the past or the future.
Isaac Asimov is better known for his Foundation stories and his tales of the Three Laws of Robotics, but he also wrote a thought-provoking novel of time travel both into the past and across varying realities in The End of Eternity—which, in a way, serves as the underpinning for all the other tales.
L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall is a time-travel novel not in the school of The Time Machine, but rather of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: one that drops a modern man with all his modern knowledge into a medieval setting and challenges him to make the best of it. Unlike Twain’s protagonist, de Camp’s Martin Padway really is in sixth-century Rome, and establishes an alternate history by his success. De Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur” and the other tales of Reggie Rivers collected in Rivers of Time exploit one of the time-travel story’s favorite themes: using a time machine to go back into the past to look at and even to hunt animals extinct by the time humanity evolved. In Genus Homo, de Camp and P. Schuyler Miller used suspended animation as a time-travel device by which modern men could visit the future.
Poul Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early” is another variant on the theme of a modern man trying to make the best of things in the past. Unlike the Twain and de Camp stories to which it is related, though, it is marked by Anderson’s strong sense of the tragic. Anderson, always a writer with a strong sense of history, used time travel in his novels The Corridors of Time (a sort of science-fiction companion to the fantasy Three Hearts and Three Lions) and The Dancer from Atlantis.
Perhaps the bawdiest time-travel novel ever written is Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line. Silverberg notes that, as time travel becomes feasible for a longer and longer period, more and more travelers from the future will crowd back in time to visit such events as the Crucifixion, the opening of Hagia Sophia, or the Black Plague. Why, then, don’t these historical events grow ever more crowded with observers from their futures? His answer is that they do, though just what the locals do about this is not always quite so clear.
One time-travel theme that has perhaps never quite been successfully brought off is a reversal of the time stream, so that it begins to flow from future to past rather than the other way around. Fritz Leiber’s “The Man Who Never Grew Young” perhaps comes closest; several others have tried at novel length, also with results less than they might have hoped. The challenge there remains for writers yet to come.
Time travel as a vast, secret government project intended not just for exploration but also to change the past for the benefit of the government doing the sponsoring is a common theme of these stories, and has perhaps grown more common as governments have grown larger and less easily controlled by the people they rule. One of the best of these tales is Jack Finney’s Time and Again, which seems only to have grown more relevant in the generation and a half since it appeared. It is beautifully written, beautifully researched, beautifully illustrated, and very well thought through. Its sequel, From Time to Time, unfortunately does not quite measure up to the high standard it set.
Another novel with a related theme, though much grittier and more cynical, is Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered. Because of his indoctrination and training, the protagonist has a great many sins indeed to remember. The book, which dates from near the time of the Watergate scandal, is a devastating indictment of those who do things allegedly for other peo
ple’s good.
Another theme often used in time-travel tales is that of the time traveler from the future who comes back to the present for his or her own nefarious purposes and has to be thwarted by moderns with technological resources small compared to those of the villain. A good recent example is S. M. Stirling’s Drakon, which springs from his series of Draka alternate-history novels. His heroine finds herself in the late twentieth century of our timeline because of an experiment gone awry, and proceeds to do her best to remake it to her—nasty—heart’s desire. If the poor hapless moderns didn’t also have assistance from the future, things would turn out even worse. And, as there is room for a sequel to the novel, they may yet.
Clifford D. Simak’s The Goblin Reservation takes time travel out of the sphere of big politics and puts it in a far less consequential arena: that of academia. He has a great deal of gentle fun with the theme. Simak’s cast of characters includes a moonshining Neanderthal brought up to his future present and rechristened Alley Oop; a saber-toothed tiger; as well as elves, dwarves, a banshee, and the ghost of a prominent seventeenth-century English playwright—the only problem being, the ghost isn’t sure whose ghost he is at first, so when the authentic Will Shakespeare (who turns out, in this book, not to be the playwright in question) is brought forward, alarming, and very funny, consequences ensue.
Simak’s book is unquestionably science fiction, despite the trappings of both fantasy and popular culture that hang on its coattails. Larry Niven takes a different course in his series of time-travel stories collected in The Flight of the Horse. To Niven, a hard-headed rationalist, time travel is impossible. This does not keep him from writing time-travel stories, but does turn the stories he writes about it from science fiction to fantasy. His time traveler, a certain (often, much too certain for his own good) Svetz, is a bit of a bungler, and never realizes that when he travels back into the past, he’s not exactly traveling back into the past with which his world is familiar. Problems with a roc, a leviathan, and too many werewolves immediately spring to mind.
Time travel through magic or other fantasy device is less commonly written of than time travel through time machine or other science-fictional device. Just why this should be so is puzzling, as time travel by either means seems equally impossible and equally implausible, but it does appear to be so.
One time-travel novel that leans more toward fantasy than sf is Household Gods, by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove, from an idea that the late Fletcher Pratt had but did not write up before his death. Despite the fantasy trappings, the novel springs from the school of A Connecticut Yankee and Lest Darkness Fall. It drops a modern American woman dissatisfied with her life and with bumping her head against the glass ceiling into an ancestor’s body in a town on the Danube frontier of the Roman Empire in the late second century A.D., just in time for a series of Germanic invasions and devastating plagues. Nicole Gunther-Perrin has the chance to see whether the glass at the end of the twentieth century is half full or half empty.
Roger Zelazny’s Roadmarks straddles the line between fantasy and science fiction. Its protagonist is traveling down the Road of Time with a pickup truck full of automatic weapons to help the Greeks beat the Persians at Marathon. The Road, and the various characters, nasty and less so, he meets along the way are shown with Zelazny’s characteristic wit and splendid writing. The Road is a concept a little reminiscent of that in Anderson’s The Corridors of Time, but far more mutable.
These are some of the more interesting time-travel novels the field has produced over the years—not a complete list, certainly (you will want to get on to the stories themselves, after all!), but a few of the highlights. The short fiction collected here looks at similar ideas and some wildly different ones. The pieces speak for themselves; anything I say about them, I fear, would only get in the way. The only thing I can be fairly sure of is that you’ll like most of them. Enjoy!
THEODORE STURGEON
Theodore Sturgeon’s (1918–1985) fiction abounds with ordinary characters undone by their all-too-human shortcomings or struggling in unsympathetic environments to find others who share their desires and feelings of loneliness. Sturgeon began publishing science fiction in 1939, and made his mark early in both fantasy and science fiction with stories that have since become classics. “Microcosmic God” concerns a scientist who plays God with unexpectedly amusing results when he repeatedly challenges a microscopic race he has created with threats to their survival. “It” focuses on the reactions of characters in a rural setting trying to contend with a rampaging inhuman monster. “Killdozer” is a variation on the theme of Frankenstein in which a construction crew is trapped on an island where a bulldozer has become imbued with the electrical energy of an alien life form.
Fiction Sturgeon wrote after World War II showed the gentle humor of his earlier work shading into pathos. “Memorial” and “Thunder and Roses” were cautionary tales about the abuses of use of nuclear weapons. “A Saucer of Loneliness” and “Maturity” both used traditional science-fiction scenarios to explore feelings of alienation and inadequacy. Sturgeon’s work at novel length is memorable for its portrayals of characters who rise above the isolation their failure to fit into normal society imposes. More Than Human tells of a group of psychologically dysfunctional individuals who pool their individual strengths to create a superhuman gestalt consciousness. In The Dreaming Jewels, a young boy discovers that his behavioral abnormalities are actually the symptoms of super-human powers. Sturgeon is also renowned for his explorations of taboo sexuality and restrictive moralities in such stories as Some of Your Blood, “The World Well Lost,” and “If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” His short fiction has been collected in Without Sorcery, E Pluribus Unicorn, Caviar, and A Touch of Strange. The compilations The Ultimate Egoist, Thunder and Roses, A Saucer of Loneliness, The Perfect Host, Baby Is Three, The Microcosmic God, and Killdozer, edited by Paul Williams, are the first seven volumes in a series that will eventually reprint all of Sturgeon’s short fiction.
Traveling into the past only to discover that the past isn’t there any more is a popular conceit of the genre. “Yesterday Was Monday,” one of his most-often reprinted tales, is one of the early time-travel stories that were published after the pulp era, where the emphasis wasn’t on science yet so much as strangeness, evoking a surreal feeling that this story embodies perfectly. Making the protagonist of the story an everyday person waking up in his own past instead of a scientist or an inventor only adds to the unusual blend of time travel and fantasy.
YESTERDAY WAS MONDAY
THEODORE STURGEON
HARRY WRIGHT ROLLED over and said something spelled “Bzzzzhha-a-aw!” He chewed a bit on a mouthful of dry air and spat it out, opened one eye to see if it really would open, opened the other and closed the first, closed the second, swung his feet onto the floor, opened them again and stretched. This was a daily occurrence, and the only thing that made it remarkable at all was that he did it on a Wednesday morning, and—
Yesterday was Monday.
Oh, he knew it was Wednesday all right. It was partly that, even though he knew yesterday was Monday, there was a gap between Monday and now; and that must have been Tuesday. When you fall asleep and lie there all night without dreaming, you know, when you wake up, that time has passed. You’ve done nothing that you can remember; you’ve had no particular thoughts, no way to gauge time, and yet you know that some hours have passed. So it was with Harry Wright. Tuesday had gone wherever your eight hours went last night.
But he hadn’t slept through Tuesday. Oh no. He never slept, as a matter of fact, more than six hours at a stretch, and there was no particular reason for him doing so now. Monday was the day before yesterday; he had turned in and slept his usual stretch, he had awakened, and it was Wednesday.
It felt like Wednesday. There was a Wednesdayish feel to the air.
Harry put on his socks and stood up. He wasn’t fooled. He knew what day it was. “What hap
pened to yesterday?” he muttered. “Oh—yesterday was Monday.” That sufficed until he got his pajamas off. “Monday,” he mused, reaching for his underwear, “was quite a while back, seems as though.” If he had been the worrying type, he would have started then and there. But he wasn’t. He was an easygoing sort, the kind of man that gets himself into a rut and stays there until he is pushed out. That was why he was an automobile mechanic at twenty-three dollars a week; that’s why he had been one for eight years now, and would be from now on, if he could only find Tuesday and get back to work.
Guided by his reflexes, as usual, and with no mental effort at all, which was also usual, he finished washing, dressing, and making his bed. His alarm clock, which never alarmed because he was of such regular habits, said, as usual, six twenty-two when he paused on the way out, and gave his room the once-over. And there was a certain something about the place that made even this phlegmatic character stop and think.
It wasn’t finished.
The bed was there, and the picture of Joe Louis. There were the two chairs sharing their usual seven legs, the split table, the pipe-organ bedstead, the beige wallpaper with the two swans over and over and over, the tiny corner sink, the tilted bureau. But none of them were finished. Not that there were any holes in anything. What paint there had been in the first place was still there. But there was an odor of old cut lumber, a subtle, insistent air of building, about the room and everything in it. It was indefinable, inescapable, and Harry Wright stood there caught up in it, wondering. He glanced suspiciously around but saw nothing he could really be suspicious of. He shook his head, locked the door and went out into the hall.
On the steps a little fellow, just over three feet tall, was gently stroking the third step from the top with a razor-sharp chisel, shaping up a new scar in the dirty wood. He looked up as Harry approached, and stood up quickly.
“Hi,” said Harry, taking in the man’s leather coat, his peaked cap, his wizened, bright-eyed little face. “Whatcha doing?”
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