The Time Traveler's Almanac

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 Traveler’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

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.