Abstract
In 1888, the brilliant working class English youth Herbert George Wells was 21 years old when he invented the notion of a powered machine that might convey its inventor into the future or the past and back home again. The serialized but unfinished short story where he displayed this idea was titled The Chronic Argonauts (published in The Science Schools Journal of the Royal College of Science) and later reviled by Wells for its amateurish crudity. He even “went to the length of buying up and destroying the back issues of the Science Schools Journal where its three instalments appeared…” In the next 7 years, as he developed as a writer of both fiction and what we now call “pop-science,” Wells toyed with this fecund theme and finally published its first mature expression, the short novel (just 32,600 words in length, so strictly a novella) titled The Time Machine.
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Notes
- 1.
What is a chance (and rather spooky) coincidence is the name of a pivotal young woman representing one of two possible futures in my 1982 novel The Judas Mandala: she is Sriyanie, rather too close to Sorainya for my comfort. However, her name was slightly modified from the given name of an Asian co-worker of my then-partner some forty years ago, when I had not yet read Williamson’s novel.
- 2.
And others earlier and later, listed in the magisterial online third edition of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia at http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/time_viewer
- 3.
Citations from the Kutter/Moore collection Two-Handed Engine (Centipede Press, 2004).
- 4.
Personal email from Mr. Malzberg, November 15, 2018, cited here with permission.
- 5.
Citations from the Anderson collection Past Times (Tor, 1984) and to Anderson’s work throughout granted by The Trigonier Trust.
Fiction Works Discussed, Plus Suggested Reading
Poul Anderson “Flight to Forever” 1950
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Broderick, D. (2019). The First Half Century (and a Bit). In: The Time Machine Hypothesis. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16178-1_5
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