The Time Traveller's Almanac Read online

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  About this Book

  About the Editors

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

  Preface

  Rian Johnson

  Introduction

  Charles Yu

  Top Ten Tips for Time Travellers

  EXPERIMENTS

  Richard Matheson

  Death Ship

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  Ripples in the Dirac Sea

  Robert Silverberg

  Needle in a Timestack

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

  Alice Sola Kim

  Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters

  Eric Schaller

  How the Future Got Better

  Michael Moorcock

  Pale Roses

  William Gibson

  The Gernsback Continuum

  C.J. Cherryh

  The Threads of Time

  Michael Swanwick

  Triceratops Summer

  Steve Bein

  The Most Important Thing in the World

  Cordwainer Smith

  Himself in Anachron

  H.G. Wells

  The Time Machine

  Douglas Adams

  Young Zaphod Plays It Safe

  Stan Love

  Time Travel in Theory and Practice

  REACTIONARIES AND REVOLUTIONARIES

  Ray Bradbury

  A Sound of Thunder

  Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore

  Vintage Season

  John Chu

  Thirty Seconds from Now

  Harry Turtledove

  Forty, Counting Down

  David Langford

  The Final Days

  Connie Willis

  Fire Watch

  Kage Baker

  Noble Mold

  George R.R. Martin

  Under Siege

  Steven Utley

  Where or When

  Ellen Klages

  Time Gypsy

  Garry Kilworth

  On the Watchtower at Plataea

  Rosaleen Love

  Alexia and Graham Bell

  Kage Baker

  A Night on the Barbary Coast

  Elizabeth Bear

  This Tragic Glass

  Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud

  The Gulf of the Years

  Max Beerbohm

  Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties

  Genevieve Valentine

  Trousseau: Fashion for Time Travellers

  MAZES AND TRAPS

  Edward Page Mitchell

  The Clock That Went Backward

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Yesterday Was Monday

  Kim Newman

  Is There Anybody There?

  Joe Lansdale

  Fish Night

  Gene Wolfe

  The Lost Pilgrim

  Peter Crowther

  Palindromic

  Karin Tidbeck

  Augusta Prima

  Barrington J. Bayley

  Life Trap

  Greg Egan

  Lost Continent

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The Mouse Ran Down

  Langdon Jones

  The Great Clock

  David I. Masson

  Traveller’s Rest

  Vandana Singh

  Delhi

  Tony Pi

  Come-From-Aways

  Dean Francis Alfar

  Terminós

  Norman Spinrad

  The Weed of Time

  Eric Frank Russell

  The Waitabits

  Jason Heller

  Music for Time Travellers

  COMMUNIQUÉS

  Isaac Asimov

  What If

  Tanith Lee

  As Time Goes By

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  At Dorado

  Karen Haber

  3 RMS, Good View

  Harry Turtledove

  Twenty-one, Counting Up

  Bob Leman

  Loob

  Tamsyn Muir

  The House that Made the Sixteen Loops of Time

  Gene Wolfe

  Against the Lafayette Escadrille

  Carrie Vaughn

  Swing Time

  Richard Bowes

  The Mask of the Rex

  Nalo Hopkinson

  Message in a Bottle

  Adam Roberts

  The Time Telephone

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Red Letter Day

  Rjurik Davidson

  Domine

  E.F. Benson

  In the Tube

  Molly Brown

  Bad Timing

  Pamela Sargent

  If Ever I Should Leave You

  Charles Stross

  Palimpsest

  Acknowledgements

  About this Book

  About the Editors

  About the Non-Fiction Contributors

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  Extended Copyright

  PREFACE

  “I gave a party for time-travelers, but I didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came.”

  Stephen Hawking (from an interview with Ars Technica)

  Time travellers, as you will soon discover, are often too busy to attend parties – and the parties they attend are only those they know in advance are going to be good ones. Just because you travel through time does not mean that you can take time out from saving the universe, preserving history, finding your true love or hunting dinosaurs just to confirm a famous physicist’s theories. Indeed, the shadowy Preservationists Guild*, founded in 2150, would argue that the worst thing for time travellers would be to show up at such a party.

  Thus, most of us are left with the stories, the speculations – some of them based on facts and personal experiences – offered up by a variety of fiction writers. Which is not such a bad place to be. Because one thing we chrononauts know for sure: for more than a century, readers have been enthralled by time travel stories with classics from writers like H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and Isaac Asimov becoming fixtures of modern fiction. Whether thrilling, cautionary, or adventurous, these imaginative what-if tales transport us to other worlds, most often right here on our own planet.

  Today, time travel is as familiar a concept to readers as space travel. Such stories are more popular than ever, including such recent bestsellers as Stephen King’s 11/22/63, Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife attest. The resurgence of iconic TV series like Doctor Who has fed into this trend. In addition, time travel often incorporates elements of such hot subgenres like steampunk and historical fiction, further extending its appeal. Time travel has also been popular with teens ever since the publication of such classics as Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, extending to the present-day and such popular youth novels as When You Reach Me by Newberry winner Rebecca Stead. Meanwhile, movies like The Terminator, Back to the Future, Time Bandits, Donnie Darko and Safety Not Guaranteed have shown the cinematic range of such tales.

  Oddly, however, never before has there been an anthology that demonstrated the full depth and breadth of the time travel story. Perhaps this has something to do with the Preservationist Guild’s Fifth Dictum: “Diffuse, disguise, confuse, obfuscate, deny.” Most prior attempts have zeroed on excellent yet decidedly science-fictional tales in which the focus has been on the dreaded “
time paradox” – otherwise known as either “And Then I Found Out I Was My Own Father” or “Will I Be Kissing My Grandmother By Mistake?” That may be the bedrock of time travel fiction, but there is so much more: tales of fantasy and horror that involve travel through time like Kim Newman’s “Is Anybody There?,” E.F. Benson’s “In the Tube,” and Rick Bowes’ “The Mask of the Rex,” – in addition to such truly strange science fiction as “Traveller’s Rest,” by David Masson, “Loob” by Bob Leman, and “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim.

  Not all effective stories of time travel focus on epic consequences or seismic shifts in the course of history, either. What would you do if you could go backwards or forwards in time? Perhaps you might do what Christine does in Karen Haber’s “3 RMS, Good View” – use that ability to find a better apartment. Maybe you’d use it to escape a war-torn country, as in Greg Egan’s “The Lost Continent.” Perhaps you’d even try to use it to get better grades in school (“The Most Important Thing in the World,” Steve Bein), win an election (“The Final Days,” David Langford), or, for that most delicate and yet powerful of reasons, for love (“If Ever I Should Leave You,” Pamela Sargent).

  You don’t even need a time machine, believe it or not. Time machines are expensive to build and notoriously unpredictable – jury-rigged and perhaps even tampered with by the Preservationist Guild. That dial you spin to pick an era is always either stuck or spinning too fast or subject to variation from the slightest encounter with a paradox pebble while in the space-time corridor. You might wind up exiled forever making fungi spaghetti for yourself and a squirrel-like distant ancestor in a lonely shale cave at the butt-end of the Cretaceous Period if you’re not careful.

  So, no time machine? That’s okay. You can time travel via the Devil’s Intent, like Enoch Soames in Max Beerbohm’s accurate historical account of the same name or by eating a special plant like Dr. Phipps’ patient in Norman Spinrad’s “The Weed of Time.” You might even travel by means of magic, as in Tamsyn Muir’s “The House That Made Sixteen Loops of Time.” That might not seem very scientific, but you should see what the propaganda wing of the Preservationist Guild calls “magic” as opposed to “science.” But the ways are myriad, and the Guild’s members finite – they cannot be everywhere, suppress everything. Black holes, the telephone, mutation – any of these might suffice to move you from the twenty-first century to, say, Leonardo Da Vinci’s bedroom as he secretly dressed up and painted himself in the mirror for Mona Lisa.

  Obviously, the sheer variety of time travel stories has created some organizational challenges. Therefore, we have divided The Time Traveller’s Almanac into four distinct sections, each corresponding to some major strand of time travel endeavor. (Each section is also bookended with nonfiction: educational palate-cleansers for your enjoyment.)

  • Experiments – Stories in which individuals or organizations are experimenting with time travel or are subjects of experimentation.

  • Reactionaries and Revolutionaries – Stories in which people are trying to protect the past from change or because they are curious tourists or academicians and want to accurately document different times.

  • Mazes and Traps – Stories in which the paradox of time travel is front-and-center, and characters become trapped in those paradoxes.

  • Communiqués – Stories about people trying to get a message to either someone in the past or in the future – out of their own time.

  These categories may seem stable and grounded in time-honored tradition. But we must, as a public service, point out that time travel stories are devious narratives. While we have managed to lock each tale into a particular category, we cannot guarantee that some anomaly or future temporal attacks by rival anthology editors will not mean that the copy you hold in your hands fails to match up exactly. There may even be wormholes and rifts that warp the very nature of the pages. (We cannot recommend the eel-skin 2040 edition, for example, nor the “cheese cloth” edition of 2079.)

  For this reason, we hope you will dive deep in these sections, but do so while attached to a rope or bungee cord. Because some of these stories will pull you into other times and other places so immersively that you may find it hard to get back to your era after reading them.

  Because the truth is, fiction is one of the most effective time travel machines in the universe and always has been.

  Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

  Tallahassee, Florida, 2013 and 2150

  * For those of our readers from 2150 and beyond: any and all comments about the Preservationist Guild herein are not actionable by twenty-first-century law; therefore, the editors cannot be extradited to the future under any current and future time-travel statutes.

  INTRODUCTION

  Rian Johnson

  Let’s time travel. Right now. Are you ready?

  After this paragraph I’m going to type a symbol that is a sort of hidden Easter egg on the Mac keyboard, and after you see it, once your brain absorbs its contours and angles, a metaphysical displacement will occur and in the space between two beats of your heart we will both be transported through time. Alright. Let’s do this. Here we go.

  We have now hopped into the near future, and you have already read a good chunk of this book.

  How am I certain of this? Oh, subtle changes in the room. An almost imperceivable ghosting of dust on the desk. A different charge to the ions in the air. A shift in the quality of the light. But most of all, I am certain that you have already read a big chunk of this book because nobody in their right mind would pick up this volume filled with some of the best science fiction writing from the last one hundred and fifty years from the greatest writers the genre has known on the most beguiling and thematically rich topic sci-fi has produced, nobody would pick this up and read the “Introduction by Rian Johnson” first. Hell, just looking over the table of contents, I want to flip ahead myself. (Go ahead and flip at any time, by the way. I encourage it. It seems fitting.)

  The stories in this collection span across the past century and a half, from the nascent beginnings of genre itself in Edward Page Mitchell’s pre-Wells “The Clock That Went Backward” (1881) through those gilded golden years of the 1950s with (my own personal favorite) Bradbury, into the cultural cross-currents that sci-fi charted for our generation in the late twentieth century, and finally forging into some of the best and brightest voices in the genre today.

  As a broad survey it’s invaluable, and in one way this book can be seen as a cultural almanac. Charting how we’ve used this infinitely malleable tool of time travel to engage with the changing landscape around us is a tempting method for mapping our recent history. A back-to-back reading of Wells’s “The Time Machine” with Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” makes your stomach drop, as within a few quick pages we plunge from the scientific advancements of the late 1800s that were opening the world up for mankind to those of the 1950s that were threatening to bring the sky down onto his puny head. Flip a few more pages into Reagan’s 1980s in Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” in which the enemy (and focal point of the story) is no longer technology at all but a vision of a utopian society rising from the mythologies of the past to crush what makes modern man human.

  Sci-fi attracts armchair tinkerers. I know that I’m one myself. It makes sense that the take-it-apart-and-see-why-it-works (or if-it-works) instinct is drawn to this impossibly broad realm of fiction whose one unifying element is some degree of world-building. The one thing you know when you pick up a science fiction story is that there will be some sort of geared mechanism at its core that you can take apart and analyze, whether it’s a PKDish thought puzzle or an Asmovian interplanetary society. If you’re denying your healthy (and encouraged!) flipping instinct and are still reading this introduction in a few paragraphs I’ll passionately argue that this is not the essential appeal of great sci-fi, but it’s a biggie. When it comes to time travel stories this tinkering instinct kicks up into a higher gear, but is also (to badly mix b
ad metaphors) a double-edged sword.

  On the one hand, the pleasure of time travel dissection is a beautiful and necessary thing. If someone hands you a kinked-up slinky, what do they expect you to do with it? Turn it over in your hands and appreciate the beauty of the tangle? Nuts to that. “Let’s see if we can untangle and make sense of this thing” is part of its purpose, and a good time travel story will have an interior logic that encourages and stands up to untangling, and smoothly slinks down the stairs when you’re finished. However, with time travel stories there’s also a unique danger to this untangling. There is, I believe, a right and a wrong way to do it, and the wrong way can very easily lead to becoming “that guy.” You know the guy I’m talking about. He’s the guy who can talk to you for an hour at a party (in a tone pitched between the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons and a Whit Stillman character) about why this or that slinky is well tangled or isn’t, but doesn’t seem to actually enjoy playing with them.

  When we’re talking about whether or not a story’s “time travel logic” makes sense, it is important to remember that every story builds its own framework for its own logic. In that sense, time travel is more of a fantasy-based story element than a science-based one. Time travel does not exist in the real world, and any broadly accepted rules for how it can and can’t work were derived from a bunch of “that guys” talking about time travel fiction. There is no “makes sense” in the universal sense – that is to say, criticizing a time travel story because its rules do not line up with rules in the real world is akin to dismissing the Harry Potter books because the conductive properties of wood could never sustain the energy required for spell casting.