Apologies for the delay! Life is life-ing at me pretty hard right now. But here is the next installment in my mini series on time travel narratives. This week I’m talking about a great short story collection. Next week I’ll share a big Recommended Reading/Viewing List to wrap things up.

The Time Traveler’s Almanac is a short story anthology, published in 2013, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, that collects 65 short fiction pieces as well as 5 nonfiction essays on the subject of time travel.

This collection contains (among much else): an excerpt from HG Wells’s novel, The Time Machine, Ray Bradbury’s famous short story “A Sound of Thunder,” and Connie Willis’s novelette “Fire Watch” – which introduced the time traveling history department of Oxford University which later became the central focus of her novels Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Blackout/All Clear. Many well-known and critically acclaimed short stories are featured in this anthology, as well as  a large number of lesser-known works that are unique and entertaining takes on the genre. One of the strengths of this collection is the breadth and diversity of its selections. The short fiction covers a range of authors, time periods, and subject matter including but not limited to: sexuality, ethnicity, immigration and refugee status, love overcoming adversity, and all the usual science fiction trappings of fate, inevitability, and the mind-bending possibilities of time loops and paradoxes.

A couple of my favorites from this anthology include “The Clock That Went Backwards” by Edward Page Mitchell, “The Gernsback Continuum” by William Gibson.

“The Clock That Went Backwards” (which I mentioned briefly in a previous post) is one of the earliest time travel narratives that features a mechanical/scientific means of time travel (rather than a magical/spiritual one). This short story, published in 1881, predates H.G. Well’s The Time Machine by more than 10 years, and was a major stepping stone in the development of time travel narratives as a genre. In this story, the narrator recounts his childhood with his aunt who owned a very old Dutch clock. When the aunt dies, the narrator takes possession of the clock. While in university, one of his professors takes an interest in the clock, and argues that based on Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung, he believes that the sequence of past, present, and future is arbitrary and can be changed. To demonstrate, he winds the Dutch clock backwards, during which it is struck by lightning and causes a fire. In the aftermath the professor and the narrator find themselves thrown out of their time and into the 1500s. After a series of disasters, the narrator is knocked unconscious and awakens back in his own time again. It is never clear how the clock sent them to the past, nor how they returned.

“The Gernsback Continuum” is a short story by William Gibson published in 1981. Gibson, incidentally, is one of my favorite authors and his first novel Neuromancer, is one of the most important cyberpunk novels (arguably the first) ever written. The name “Gernsback” in the title pays homage to Hugo Gernsback, a publisher who pioneered the creation of science fiction pulp magazines. In this short story, a photographer is assigned to photograph the futuristic architecture of the 1930s, a period in time that attempted to imagine what the far utopian future might look like. While doing so, the photographer finds himself slipping in and out of a version of the present/future 1980s, based not on current reality but on the optimism of that 1930s vision. A version of reality filled with utopian visions of flying cars and zeppelins and glittering “raygun gothic” architecture. Eventually, he breaks free from this slippage of reality back to the real 1980s, which he finds horrific, violent, and full of despair.

A couple other stories in the collection I’d recommend are: “If Ever I Should Leave You” by Pamela Sargent, “Himself in Anachron” by Cordwainer Smith, and “Palimpsest” by Charlie Stross. But seriously, the entire collection is worth a deep dive.

This collection of stories is very well curated and organized by the editors, with a wide range of texts, that offers a strong overview of the time travel narrative genre. It is a good place for any reader or scholar to start as they enter into an in-depth examination of the genre. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to branch out, learn more about the history of the genre, or gain a more expansive view of SFF in general.