Time Travel. A History

The first true futurist in Asimov’s sense of the word was Jules Verne. In the 1860s, as railroad trains chugged across the countryside and sailing ships gave way to steam, he imagined vessels traveling under the sea, across the skies, to the center of the earth, and to the moon. We would say he was a man ahead of his time—he had an awareness, a sensibility, suited to a later era. Edgar Allan Poe was ahead of his time. The Victorian mathematician Charles Babbage and his protégé Ada Lovelace, forerunners of modern computing, were ahead of their time. Jules Verne was so far ahead of his time that he could never even find a publisher for his most futuristic book, Paris au XXe siècle, a dystopia featuring gas-powered cars, “boulevards lit as brightly as by the sun,” and machine warfare. The manuscript, handwritten in a yellow notebook, turned up in 1989, when a locksmith cracked open a long-sealed family safe.

The next great futurist was Wells himself.

We are all futurists now.

*1 Per the Oxford English Dictionary. One precursor, though: in 1866, an English travel writer concluding a railway journey through Transylvania mused in the Cornhill Magazine, “This charm of traveling would become perfect if we could travel in time as well as in space—…take a fortnight in the fifteenth century, or, still more pleasant, a leap into the twenty-first. It is possible to accomplish this object more or less in imagination.”

*2 Of course the century was turning only per the Christian calendar, and even so, in 1800, the consensus was barely firm. France, still in the throes of its revolution, was running on a new calendar of its own, le calendrier républicain français, so it was the year 9. Or 10. This Republican year had a neat 360 days, organized into months with new names, from vendémiaire to fructidor. Napoleon dispensed with that shortly after being crowned emperor on 11 frimaire, year 13.

*3 Evidently it was not easy to translate. Current Literature magazine in New York reported in 1899, “The ‘Mercure de France’ is about to begin publishing a translation of Mr. Wells’ Time Machine. The translator finds the title difficult to put into French. ‘Le Chronomoteur,’ ‘Le Chrono Mobile,’ ‘Quarante Siècles à l’heure,’ and ‘La Machine à Explorer le Temps’ are some of the suggestions….”

*4 Jarry explains: “The Present is non-existent, a tiny fraction of a phenomenon, smaller than an atom. The physical size of an atom is known to be 1.5 x 10^–8 centimeters in diameter. No one has yet measured the fraction of a solar second that is equal to the Present.”

*5 “May God us keep / From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!”

THREE

Philosophers and Pulps

“Time travel?! You expect me to believe such nonsense?”

“Yes, it is a difficult concept, isn’t it.”

—Douglas Adams (“The Pirate Planet,” Doctor Who, 1978)

TIME TRAVEL AS DESCRIBED by Wells and his many heirs is everywhere now, but it does not exist. It cannot. In saying so, it occurs to me that I’m Filby.

“But the thing’s a mere paradox,” says the Editor.

“It’s against reason,” says Filby.

Critics of the 1890s took the same view. Wells knew they would. When his book was finally published in the spring of 1895—The Time Machine: An Invention, sold in New York by Henry Holt (75¢) and in London by William Heinemann (2/6)—reviewers admired it for a good tale: a “fantastic story”; “shocker of no ordinary kind”; “tour de force of ghastly imaginings”; “distinctly above the average of such fanciful works”; and “worth reading if you like to read impossible yarns” (that last from the New York Times). They noted the apparent influence of the Dark Romantics, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. One sniffed, “We have some difficulty in discerning the exact utility of such excursions into futurity.”

Only a few paid Wells the compliment of analyzing his fantastic notion logically. They found it illogical. “There is no getting into the Future, except by waiting,” wrote Israel Zangwill in the Pall Mall Magazine, wagging a stern finger. “You can only sit down and see it come by.” Zangwill, himself an occasional novelist and humorist, soon also to be a famous Zionist, thought he understood time quite well. He admonished the author: