Time Travel. A History

*5 Her odd and grandiose wish was granted: she persuaded the Capitol to put the safe in a storeroom under the east steps, and in 1976 the chief magistrate—Gerald R. Ford—was happy to pose for photographers while receiving Mrs. Diehm’s offering.

*6 “Izlel je Delyo Haydutin,” or “Delyo the Hajduk Has Gone Outside.”

*7 “Once again I was walking alone down endless corridors, corridors that continually branched out and converged, corridors with dazzling walls and rows of white, gleaming doors….An endless white labyrinth lay in wait out there, I knew, and an equally endless wandering. The net of corridors, halls and soundproof rooms, each ready to swallow me up…the thought made me break out in a cold sweat.”

TEN

Backward

There are no compasses for journeying in time. As far as our sense of direction in this unchartable dimension is concerned, we are like lost travellers in a desert.

—Graham Swift (1983)

IF YOU COULD take one ride in a time machine, which way would you go?

The future or the past? Sally forth or turn back? (“Right then, Rose Tyler, you tell me,” says the Doctor. “Where do you want to go? backwards or forwards in time. It’s your choice. What’s it going to be?”) Do you prefer the costumed pageant of history or the technomarvels to come? It seems there are two kinds of people. Both camps have their optimists as well as their pessimists. Disease is a worry. Time traveling while black or female poses special hazards. Then again, some people see ways to make money at lotteries, stock markets, and racetracks. Some just want to relive past loves. Many back travelers are driven by regret—mistakes made, opportunities lost.

You may wonder about the rules of this game. Is safety guaranteed? Can you take anything with you?^*1 At the very least, presumably, you carry your awareness and your memories, if not a change of clothing. Will you be a passive observer or can you change the course of history? If you change history, does that change you, in turn? “History makes you what you are,” says an armchair philosopher in Dexter Palmer’s 2016 novel, Version Control. “And if you traveled back in time you wouldn’t get to be you anymore. You would have a different history, and you would become someone else.” The rules keep changing, it seems.

Wells, though he later published not one but two histories of the world, had no interest in sending his Time Traveller backward. He plunged forward, then forward again, on to the end of time. But it didn’t take long for other writers to see other possibilities. Edith Nesbit, a friend of Wells’s, was a forward-looking, free-thinking fellow socialist, but when she got her chance, the past was the place for her. Writing under the gender-free name of E. Nesbit, she was commonly said to be an author of children’s books. Generations later, Gore Vidal took issue with that categorization: he said children were the heroes of her books, but don’t be fooled, they are not her ideal readers. He compared her to Lewis Carroll: “Like Carroll, she was able to create a world of magic and inverted logic that was entirely her own.” He thought she should be more famous.

Credit 10.1

Wells often visited the household over which she presided with her husband, Hubert Bland. “The quicksilver wife” is how he perceived her, alongside “the more commonplace, argumentative cast-iron husband.” He thought Hubert was something of a fraud, not as bright as Edith, unable to support the family (she did that, with her writing), and a “Seducer”: “The astonished visitor came to realize that most of the children of the household were not E. Nesbit’s but the results of Bland’s conquests…”^*2 E. Nesbit became one of the first English writers to explore the new possibilities of time travel. She did not bother with science. There is no machinery, only magic. And where Wells looked forward, she looked back.

Her strange tale The Story of the Amulet, written in 1906, begins with four children—Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane—moping through a long summer holiday. They have been left alone in London with old Nurse. Father is in Manchuria and mother in Madeira. They are deprived of liberty and primed for adventure.