Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine
Page 1
Timelines
Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells’
The Time Machine
Wells Unleashed Series
Book 2
Edited by
JW Schnarr
Northern Frights Publishing
In the Great White North, Blood Runs Colder…
www.northernfrightspublishing.webs.com
Also Available from Northern Frights Publishing
Shadows of the Emerald City
Wells Unleashed Series
Book One: War of the Worlds: Frontlines
Book Two: Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’
The Time Machine
Watch for these titles coming soon from NFP!
Fallen: An Anthology of Demonic Horror
Things Falling Apart by JW Schnarr
Wormfood Island by Ken La Salle (2011)
The Blackest Heart by Vince Churchill (2011)
Pandora by Vince Churchill (2011)
Symphony for the Quiet Ones by Michael Scott Bricker (2011)
Alice and Dorothy by JW Schnarr
Wells Unleashed Series
Book 3: Bloodlines: The Diaries of Dr Moreau (2011)
Book 4: Sightlines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’
The Invisible Man (2011)
Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’ The Time Machine
© 2010 by JW Schnarr
Wells Unleashed SeriesTM 2010 by JW Schnarr
This edition of
Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’ The Time Machine
© 2010 by Northern Frights Publishing
Timelines: Stories Inpsired by HG Wells’ The Time Machine
Edited by JW Schnarr
Cover Art and Design © 2010 by Gavro Krackovic
Interior Layout and Design © 2010 by JW Schnarr
All stories © their respective authors. Northern Frights Publishing reserves the right to publish Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’ The Time Machine in perpetuity.
Northern Frights Publishing is proudly Canadian.
This book is a collection of stories inspired by the Herbert George Wells novel The Time Machine. No paradoxes were made during the creation of this book. If you or someone you know was altered or erased from the Timeline as a result of purchasing this book, take heart. NFP now accepts returns from book sellers!
This book is a collection of stories based on the Public Domain work of Herbert George Wells and his novel The Time Machine. The characters, names, and places of some of the stories are derivatives of the original work.
For everything ever taken away from us,
And for everything we wish we could have taken back.
Acknowledgements
In no particular order, as always, thanks go out to my sister Janice for her contuinued support of NFP and everything that happens therein; A big thank you and lots of love to my daughter Aurora for making me want to be more than I am, and thank you to my great friends, who continue to buy NFP books and give me encouragement.
Of course, this collection would ber nothing without the artists and authors who contributed to make it so special; and to you, the reader, goes the biggest thanks of all.
Table of Contents
Foreword By Paul J. Nahin
The End Of The Experiment By Peter Clines
Love And Glass By Michael Scott Bricker
Perpetual Motion Blues By Harper Hull
Rocking My Dreamboat By Victorya
Spree By John Medaille
The Time Traveller By Vincent L. Scarsella
Correspondence By Ruthanna Emrys
The Woman Who Came To The Paradox By Derek J. Goodman
Midnight At The End Of The Universe By Eric Ian Steele
Happiness Everlasting By Gerald Warfield
Professor Figwort Comes To An Understanding By Jacob Edwards
One One Thousand By William Wood
Doxies By Brandon Alspaugh
Conditional Perfect By Jason Palmer
By His Sacrifice By Daliso Chopanda
Wikihistory By Desmond Warzel
Written By The Winners By Matthew Johnson
Sunlight And Shadows By JW Schnarr And John Sunseri
Xmas By Douglas Hutcheson
Time’s Cruel Geometry By Mark Onspaugh
Kelmscott Manor: In The Attics By Lynn C. A. Gardner
Cast Of Contributors
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”
The Holy Bible Ecclesiastes (ch. III, v. 1-8)
“Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.”
Michichio Kaku, Wired Magazine, Aug. 2003
“At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for The Time Traveler; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveler vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.”
Herbert George Wells, The Time Machine
Foreword
by Paul J. Nahin
University of New Hampshire
“It is so full of invention and the invention is so wonderful…it must certainly make your reputation.”
- from a September 1894 letter to H. G. Wells from
the editor of the New Review, where The Time Machine
first appeared, in serial form, the following year
Could there be a reader of this book who hasn’t read H.G. Wells’ masterpiece, The Time Machine, or seen the 1960 movie (with Rod Taylor as the Time Traveller) based on the novella? I very much doubt it, and so there is little I can say about the story itself that would be new. But what of Wells, the man himself? He offers me much fresher ground to plow; the scientific background of the man whose genius inspired the tales in this new anthology of time travel tales is a story not nearly so well known.
Wells’ great contribution with The Time Machine was to make the science part of ‘science fiction’ important. He commented on this, himself, in the Preface to a 1934 collection (Seven Famous Novels, Knopf). There he wrote that while all previous attempts at writing fantastic stories depended on magic – or sleeping into the future as in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (published in 1888), or traveling into the past via a knock on the head from a crowbar as in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, or by some other equally curious mechanism – his did not: “It occurred to me that instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted.” The ‘scientific patter’ in The Time Machine is that of the fourth dimension.
The idea of time as the fourth dimension entered the popular mind in 1895 with the publication of the first of Wells’ ‘scientific romances’ (his term; the modern term of science fiction was still decades in the future). Wells’ The Time Machine has never been out of print, and is now recognized as one of the modern classics of th
e English language. But it didn’t arrive at the printer without some effort. Wells was at first uncertain on just how well he had done in presenting his revolutionary new work, and wrote to the editor at the New Review for an opinion on the opening chapter. Back came a letter (from which I’ve taken the opening quotation), and no one who has read the Time Traveler’s story can doubt that Wells’ editor was right.
The novella opens with the Time Traveler (he is never named) expounding during a dinner party on a recondite matter to a group of his friends. As he asserts, “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.” When asked to say more about the fourth dimension, he replies “It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and it is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly – why not another direction at right angles to the other three? – and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb [a Canadian-born American mathematician and astronomer who was quite famous at the time] was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month ago.”
And so he was. Wells was a trained scientist (B.Sc. with first-class honors in zoology and second-class in geology in 1890 from the Royal College of Science), and he quite clearly kept up with technical developments. Certainly he read the British science journal Nature (one of his college friends at the Normal School in South Kensington, Richard Gregory, eventually became editor of Nature, and one of their teachers, Norman Lockyer, was Nature’s first editor), and Wells found Newcomb’s complete address of December 28, 1893 to the New York Mathematical Society (during which he called four-dimensional space “the fairyland of geometry”) reprinted in the magazine (you can look it up for yourself, in the February 1, 1894 issue). In this same talk Newcomb hinted at the modern idea of parallel universes when he said “Add a fourth dimension of space, and there is room for an indefinite number of Universes, all alongside of each other, as there is for an indefinite number of sheets of paper when we pile them upon each other.”
This commentary wasn’t a momentary amusement for Newcomb; he continued to think about the fourth dimension for years. In his 1897 Presidential Address to the American Mathematical Society, for example, Newcomb concluded with the words “We must leave it to posterity to determine whether…the hypothesis of hyperspace can be used as an explanation of observed phenomena.” It was less than two decades later that Einstein did precisely that, explaining gravity in terms of a curved four-dimensional hyperspace (spacetime).
Professor Newcomb’s talk of the fourth dimension influenced Wells well beyond The Time Machine, in fact, and he used Newcomb’s imagery as inspiration for two of his other novels; The Wonderful Visit (1895) and Men Like Gods (1923). In the first novel there is explicit mention of multiple worlds “lying somewhere close together, unsuspecting, as near as page to page in a book,” and in the second novel he speaks of one parallel universe being rotated into another.
Newcomb’s 1893 talk struck a responsive chord in Wells, making him rethink the issue of time as a fourth dimension along which one could travel at will. Only weeks after its appearance in Nature, he published what would be the opening to The Time Machine as an unsigned essay in the March 17, 1894 issue of the National Observer, under the title of “Time Traveling. Possibility or Paradox?” This date is of great interest because it firmly establishes (along with the date of Newcomb’s address) that the Time Traveler’s dinner party must have taken place either in January or February of 1894. (This wonderful party did not occur in the perfectly awful 2002 remake of the 1960 film, directed by Wells’ own great-grandson Simon Wells. And that was just the first of young Simon’s missteps, the next being to place the story in America rather than England and the next to declare the Time Traveler’s name to be—of all things—Alex! If H.G. could come back from the dead he’d give Simon a good Victorian thrashing on his bottom! And a well deserved thrashing it would be, too.)
Wells, I should tell you, had been aware of the idea of the four dimensions for a decade before he read Newcomb’s address in Nature, but he had thought it no more than a whimsical fantasy. In his 1934 Experiment in Autobiography he wrote “In the universe in which my brain was living in 1879 there was no nonsense about time being space or anything of that sort. There were three dimensions, up and down, fore and aft, and right and left, and I never heard of a fourth dimension until 1884 [when Wells was eighteen] or thereabout. Then I thought it was a witticism.” He had, in fact, said this even earlier. In a 1931 edition of The Time Machine (Random House), for which he wrote the Preface, Wells revealed the origin of his novella: “It was begotten in the writer’s mind by students’ discussions in the laboratories and debating society of the Royal College of Science in the eighties and already it had been tried over in various forms by him [that is, by Wells] before he made this particular application of it.”
Ah, now there is a provocative statement! Wells wrote a time travel story before he penned The Time Machine? What he was almost certainly thinking of was his attempt, in 1888, at a story with the unintentionally hilarious title of The Chronic Argonauts. That first work so embarrassed Wells that he later called it “imitative puerile stuff,” “clumsily invented, and loaded with irrelevant sham significance,” and “inept,” and he hunted down and destroyed every copy of it that he could find. Unlike in The Time Machine, the time traveler in that earlier tale is named—Dr. Moses Nebogipfel—a name which is perhaps better left forgotten! On this issue of naming (or not) The Time Traveler, Wells did include one tantalizing passage in The Time Machine: as the Time Traveler explores a museum of ‘ancient artifacts’ in the Palace of Green Porcelain, he reveals (to his dinner companions after returning from his first trip into the future) that “yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.” Thus, the Time Traveler has given his name but, alas, his signature exists in the future in a museum of the past that is yet to be built. We’ll just have to wait – perhaps for a very long time—to learn The Time Traveler’s identity!
To enjoy the thrills and the dangers of chronomotion experienced by The Time Traveler, however, you do not have to wait. Just turn the pages that follow and read the new stories of time travel in this book, stories inspired by The Time Machine, and similar heart-stopping adventures will be yours right now.
Enjoy.
The End of the Experiment
by Peter Clines
“Jon!” Chris launched herself over the threshold and into his arms. He returned the hug, and everyone pretended not to notice that she hung on just a bit longer than he did. Jon reached around the perky blonde to shake Will’s hand. Sylvester clapped him on the back in a manly way as he walked past and Tom just gave their host a smile over the double-stack of pizza boxes.
Jon guided them all past the wall of family photos and into his flat. It wasn’t a huge place by normal standards, but for a grad student living alone it was gigantic. Sylvester slid a stack of physics books across the coffee table to make space for the pizzas Tom was setting down. Will flopped into a well-worn easy chair. Chris grabbed the opener from the little fridge before rolling over and onto the couch.
Tom opened the top box for a moment and bent his bald head, taking a deep sniff of cheese, garlic, and hot oil. “So where the hell have you been, mate?”
“Working,” said Jon, cracking open a beer. “Working on what may be the greatest invention of all time.”
Will raised an eyebrow. “Better than the tri-fection bong we built last year?”
“Much better.”
“Liar! Nothing short of cold fusion could beat that.”
“Better be worth it,” said Sylvester, popping the cap off his own bottle. “Professor Herbert’s going to
give you the sack if you skip any more of your undergrad classes. Doesn’t look good, his only Yank being AWOL for so long.”
“It’s worth it,” Jon assured them. Five bottles chimed against each other over the pizza. “You guys are still covering for me, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, and he’s noticed,” said Tom. “Which means you’d better get a move on before he gives us the sack us as well.”
“So,” said Chris, “what is the mysterious it you’ve been working on, then?”
“Everyone have at least two beers first. This is a lot easier to deal with if you’ve got a buzz going.”
Tom’s lips twisted. “Does this mean we’re not watching a movie?”
“No movie,” said Jon. “Beer and talking.”
“I thought we were going to see a movie,” grumbled Tom. He drowned his sorrow with another swig of beer.
“Can we eat,” said Sylvester, “or will that upset your master plan somehow?”
“I’ll just toss out the warning that I was sick to my stomach for a while when I figured this whole thing out.”
The first box flipped open and five slices of pizza slid off onto five plates. Tom grabbed an extra slice while Chris reached for a packet of hot peppers. They worked their way through the first pizza and into the second six-pack, talking about tutoring jobs and papers that needed grading and bad campus bands. Jon bit his tongue for almost an hour.
At last he couldn’t contain himself any longer and leaped back to his feet. “Okay, boys and girl,” he said. “Now that you’ve all got some food and alcohol in you, we’re going to have a history lesson, then show and tell, and then finish up with physics class.”