Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (5 page)

In
an
age
like
ours,
when
yesterday's
axioms
become
today's
fallacies,
it
behooves
us
not
to
cling
too
firmly
even
to
the
evidence
of our
own
eyes;
tomorrow
may
show
us
that
we
are
not
seeing
truly— and
there
is
always
another
tomorrow
beyond
that.

Even
the
reader
who
refuses
to
have
any
part
of
the
story
of
the
two English
schoolteachers'
visit
to
the
Versailles
of
1789
or
who
dismisses Dunne's
premonitory
dreams
as
sheer
coincidence
may
still
enjoy
the purely
fictional
tales
printed
here.
The
desire
to
master
time
is
an exceedingly
old
one
that
antedates
the
invention
of
the
clock
itself. We
all
remember
the
ancient
fairy
tale
of
the
princess
who
slept
in a
castle
where
time
stood
still
for
a
hundred
years
until
her
predestined
lover
came
to
awaken
her
with
a
kiss.
Two
of
the
earliest short
stories
in
American
literature,
Washington
Irving's
"Rip
Van Winkle"
and
William
Austin's
"Peter
Rugg,
the
Missing
Man,"
both deal
with
shifts
in
time.
And
Mark
Twain's
A
Connecticut
Yankee
in King
Arthur's
Court,
which
was
first
published
in
1889,
is
a
clear-cut example
of
time
travel.
But
it
is
with
H.
G.
Wells's
The
Time

Machine,
published in 1895, that the modem literature of the subject really begins.

Wells
was a young man when he wrote the story. In later years he professed to regard
it as "a very undergraduate performance," but he wrought better than
he knew, for the fantasy has become a minor classic which may outlast its
author's more ambitious works. It is the most perfect of all tales of time
travel, a parable of the far future of the human race written by a man who
fought all his life for progress and then died—in the beginning of the second
year of the atomic era—despairing of mankind's eventual fate. His people of the
future, the Eloi, who represent the happy, indolent children of light, and the
Morlocks, who are the underground dwellers in darkness, exemplify a division of
humanity that has persisted since earliest times and that conceivably may grow
more pronounced. And his nameless Time Traveler, the brilliant young scientist
who rides off fearlessly on his strange contraption to explore unknown eons of
time, is the prototype of a character that has already become standard in
fiction of this kind. Just as Poe invented the eternal detective in C. Auguste
Dupin, so did Wells create the eternal scientist in his Time Traveler.

After
Wells had shown the way, tales about time, which had hitherto been written
rather infrequently, became fairly common. The turn of the century marks the
beginning of writers' interest in them. It is not difficult to understand why.
The famous Michelson-Morley efforts in the 1880s to measure the speed of light
experimentally, Roentgen's discovery of X rays in 1895, Becquerel's discovery
of the radioactive nature of uranium in 1896 and the Curies' discovery of
radium in 1898, the announcement of Planck's Quantum Theory in 1901, and
Einstein's first statement of the theory of relativity in 1905 were bringing
about radically new and different conceptions of matter, space, and time. After
1905, when Einstein pointed out that man's previously held ideas of space and
time were purely metaphysical and were not supported by the observations and
experiments of physics, the comforting notion that time flows on forever and
everywhere at a fixed and unvarying rate could no longer be maintained by any
thinking person.

The
implications of the new physics were so overwhelming that they struck writers'
imaginations forcefully. Time stories began to be written, and they have been
written ever since. Most of them, however, have little to do with the
scientific aspects of relativity, for few writers possess either the training
or the patience to master so abstruse a theory. They usually just take it for
granted that a shift in time might occur and go on from that to show the effect
it would have on the lives of their characters.

More English writers than American have been
impressed with the possibilities of the time theme. J. B. Priestley admits that
J. W. Dunne has had a profound influence upon his work. Several of Priestley's
plays are concerned with time, notably Time and the
Conways
and
I
Have
Been
Here Before. Barrie's
Dear Brutus and Dunsany's If both deal with what might have happened if a man
had had the chance to go back and live his life over again. In the American
theater such plays as Maxwell Anderson's The Star-Wagon, John Balderston's
Berkeley Square (inspired by Henry James's unfinished novel, The Sense of the
Past), and Paul Osbom's dramatization of Lawrence Watkin's novel, On Borrowed
Time, are based on shifts in time.

The time theme has been less popular in
novels than in plays or short stories. Nevertheless, there are quite a few
full-length novels dealing with time. Robert Nathan's Portrait of Jennie is
one of them; John Buchan's The Gap
in the
Curtain
and Warwick Deeping's The Man Who Went Back are others; and Dorothy Macardle
has made use of precognition in her recent The Unforeseen.

The
literature of seriously written time fiction is not large, but it is large
enough to enable the editor, in his search for stories for this collection, to
choose only those which he thought had genuine literary merit. Good writing is
essential to fantasy, for fantasy, at its best, approaches poetry, and, like
poetry, requires the mind of a disciplined artist to cope with it. When the
imagination is allowed to soar unchecked, it may fall, like Icarus,
ignominiously to earth, where it will meet with inevitable ridicule.

Writers
of the lurid tales printed in pulp magazines have, of course, done the time
theme to death. Their stories are ingenious enough-some of them are, in fact,
miracles of inventiveness—but mere ingenuity is not enough. Too much
complication or too much novelty can be as ruinous to fantasy as too little.
And the art of fiction still holds for fantasy as well as for realism. Depart
too far from the norm of human experience and you bore the adult reader, who
will no longer care what happens to your characters once they have stepped
through
a
dozen
dimensions
of
time
and
are
consorting
with
twelve-sided green
monsters
somewhere
in
interstellar
space.
The
true
artist,
who knows
how
to
deal
with
elusive
material,
is
more
likely
to
work
his tricks
right
in
your
own
living
room,
where
the
reality
of
familiar things
lends
strangeness
to
whatever
he
may
conjure
up.

Here,
then,
are
twenty-four
tales
of
time,
an
appropriate
number, one
for
each
hour
of
the
day.
As
you
read
them,
you
may,
if
you listen
carefully
enough,
hear
the
beating
of
man's
restless
wings
as
he tries
desperately
to
move
about
in
a
medium
that
has
always
held
him fast.
And
from
your
reading
of
them
you
may
even
obtain
the
one thing
we
can
hope
to
seize
from
time's
all-devouring
grasp—a
little pleasure,
that
ingenious
human
device
which
enables
man
to
find delight
rather
than
terror
in
the
awe-inspiring
spectacle
of
the
night sky,
where
time
itself
undergoes
strange
alterations
as
it
whirls
madly through
the
vastness
of
space.