Abstract
Best known (mostly to his chagrin, I imagine) for his invention of Star Trek’s furry tribbles, David Gerrold (b. 1944) wrote what his publisher called “The Last Word in Time Machine Novels.” There have been many additional sf novels and words about time machines in the subsequent 45 and more years, but that boast carried conviction in 1973 and to some extent still does.
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Notes
- 1.
Readers and viewers might also recall his semi-autobiographical 2002 novel The Martian Child: A Novel About a Single Father Adopting a Son, based on his adoption of an autistic child and the boy’s development under his care. It became the basis of the John Cusack movie The Martian Child in 2007.
- 2.
Such alphanumeric names were an early prediction in sf, from Hugo Gernsback’s 1925 serial Ralph 124C 41+ to Ayn Rand’s cast in Anthem (1938), such as Equality 7-2521, and Asimov’s non-humans in “Nightfall” such as Theremon 762. On the cusp of the third decade of the twenty-first century, such apparent absurdities seem disturbingly predictive of gladly embraced hash (#) tags, Twitter and Facebook, and email identifiers such as B1lly54321@WTF.com
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- 4.
Randall Kenan, Callaloo, A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 14.2, 1991, 495–504; accessible at https://www.jstor.org/stable/2931654 I am grateful to Caribbean writer Gabrielle Bellot for this link and her perceptive Literary Hub article https://lithub.com/octavia-butler-the-brutalities-of-the-past-are-all-around-this/ October 17, 2017.
- 5.
See, for example, the four-volume set of now-declassified documentation from the two decades-long US government program on applied and theoretical paranormal capacities in Drs. Edwin May and Sonali Mawaha, eds, The Star Gate Archives (McFarland, 2018–2019). It is true, though, that so far such investigations have failed to transport humans to the past or future, nor to interpenetrate solid walls (luckily).
- 6.
Published in the same year although an extract (“Cambridge, 1:58 A.M.”) had been included five years earlier in the hefty original sf anthology Epoch, co-edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg.
- 7.
Gary Wolfe, NATURE|Vol 448|5 July 2007.
- 8.
It won both the Nebula award and the John W. Campbell award in 1981.
- 9.
This approach is discussed in detail in my Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science (Greenwood Press, 2000).
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Broderick, D. (2019). Time’s Up. In: The Time Machine Hypothesis. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16178-1_8
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