Мартин Гринберг - The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century

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’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.

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.