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| Themes: Time Travel - Time Control - Time Warp | |||
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| 2932 books in this theme | ||||
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| About this theme | ||||
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Sadly, I confess, I do not believe in time travel. That doesn't stop me from day dreaming about it. Which would you choose if some god offered you a time machine or a spaceship? I'd pick the time machine because it could answer so many more questions about the mysteries of the universe. I think H. G. Wells understood that when he wrote The Time Machine in 1895. Imagine being able to travel forward in time, stopping every century for millions of years, to see how the evolution of man progressed! Or jump back into history. A lot of mysteries could be solved, and a lot of speculation could be answered. Time travel stories easily fall into two camps: travel into history or explore the future. The current trend is to have time travelers from the far future visit our past, like Doomsday Book by Connie Willis or In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker. It's easier to believe those smarty future people could build time machines. In the golden age of science fiction, writers back then expected people of our present day would be smart enough to build time machines. They were too hopeful. So current writers expect only people in the far future to have the technological skills for constructing time machines. Most time travel stories like to put a modern person in the past. People love history, and a good many time travel stories are really historical fiction. The past is full of exciting characters, exotic settings, intriguing plots and unsolved mysteries. Writers know there are plenty of people like me or you who would love to visit the past, or at least think they would. I personally would stick to time periods with toilets, showers and preferable air conditioners, or cooler climates. Most time travel stories have some kind of gimmick to throw a modern human backwards in time. Mark Twain didn't need a machine for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. A dream, drugs, hypnotism, gods, gases, magic, or any other writer's slight of hand will do. The important aspect of the story is not how you get to the past, but what you do when you get there. You have to admit, when Wells came up with the Time Machine, that was a damn good writer's device. H. G. Wells owns the concept of time travel. Hell, if I had a time machine, he would be one of my destinations. If time travel truly existed, I bet Herbert's house would be a main attraction for temporal traveling tourists. In a way, modern people do visit H. G. by a standard method of time travel: the book. Many sequels have been written to The Time Machine. My favorite is The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter, a novel that feels like something Wells would have written in 1995. A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright is a new one that I'm looking forward to reading. Another that I would like to track down is, The Man Who Loved Morlocks (1981) by David J. Lake. In Mindswap by Robert Sheckley, his character discovers the theory of searches, which states there are optimal places where if you wait long enough, you will meet anyone you are hoping to find. I think the same would be true if you wanted to find time travelers. There are optimal time events to meet time travelers. Golgotha must be covered with them if time machines exist. And if moving through the fourth dimension was possible, probably every passenger on the Titanic would be from another time period. By Jim Harris, 2000 | ||||
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