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INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT SILVERBERG

TIME AND TIME AGAIN, YES: throughout a career of nearly sixty years I would return almost obsessively to the theme of traveling freely in time. It has always seemed to me the essence of what science fiction is about, offering liberation from the bonds of the quotidian, the freedom to move in unhindered leaps through the unknown realms of the future and the nearly-as-mysterious realms of the past. Even though one could argue with some justification that the space-travel story also provides such freedom, I still think that a fictional space voyage, even if it takes us to the ends of the universe, still ties us to our three-dimensional world, whereas an imagined trip in time, sending us backward even to the moment of creation or forward to the final day of all, or, indeed, down some parallel track in a reality that is not our reality, adds a fourth dimension, a sense of boundless adventure, of infinite possibility.

And so for me, time travel has always been the basic theme. I have assembled here an assortment of my time travel stories, spanning the full length of a long writing career. One story from my earliest days as a writer is in this book, and one of the last that I wrote before I decided, around the year 2009, that I had written enough fiction for one lifetime—and in the decades between “Absolutely Inflexible” of 1955 and “Against the Current” of 2009 I rang every imaginable change I could on the idea that it might somehow be possible to move forward or backward along the stream of time. Which is an idea, by the way, that I happen to think is scientifically impossible, a violation of the laws of thermodynamics, and one which I think is philosophically implausible as well, running us aground on the shoals of paradox whichever way we try to go. But science fiction is not necessarily limited by the boundaries of the possible: quite the contrary. As Robert A. Heinlein once suggested, it really ought to be called speculative fiction. There often isn’t much science in it, but there’s a powerful element of speculation, a what-if element, that allows a sufficiently skillful writer to transcend mere scientific or philosophical implausibility for the sake of telling a good story and to arouse the reader’s sense of wonder. The trick is to make one’s speculations seem plausible: to achieve what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called, long ago, the willing suspension of disbelief. It is by achieving that suspension of disbelief that we can make the gateway swing open and undertake the otherwise impossible journey to some otherwise inaccessible distant reach of time.

Four works of science fiction in particular imprinted this lifelong fascination with time travel on me before I was thirteen years old.

The first, which I encountered in the Brooklyn Public Library when I was ten or eleven, was H.G. Wells’ short novel The Time Machine. I had already read Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which only marginally qualifies as science fiction but which does convey the kind of extraordinary venture into the unknown that science fiction would later provide for me, and when a librarian suggested that I might want to try some H.G. Wells next, I pounced eagerly on the slender volume that was The Time Machine.

The opening page or two must have been tough going for me, precocious reader though I was. The book opens with a fairly dry mathematical discussion: “You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of the thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.” I wonder how much of that I, who had had my first experience of multiplication and division only three or four years earlier, was able to follow. But I must have pushed gamely on, into a discussion of space as having three dimensions, “length, breadth, and thickness,” and then the suggestion that time could be understood as a fourth dimension at right angles to the other three. Such things as dimensions and even right angles surely still were mysteries to me, terms from the unknown world of mathematics that lay some years in my future, but I had at least heard of the famous Fourth Dimension, which popped up often enough in comic books, where villains, for example, tended to escape by jumping off into something blithely labeled the Fourth Dimension, without further explanation. So I kept going, and was told that the protagonist of the story, whom we know only by the name of the Time Traveler, had developed a machine that traveled in four dimensions, capable of journeys not just in the three dimensions that make up our tangible existence, but in the fourth dimension, time, as well. And then he revealed the machine itself, “a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance.” It had two levers. One, said the Time Traveler, sent the machine forward in time. The other reversed the direction.

He demonstrated; and the little machine disappeared. “You mean to say that the machine has traveled into the future?” one onlooker asked. And the Time Traveler said, “Into the future or the past—I don’t, for certain, know which.” He went on to declare that he had nearly finished constructing a full-sized version of his device. “Upon that machine,” he said, “I intend to explore time.”

I was hooked. I read on and on, and within a few pages, the preliminary disquisitions were over and the Time Traveler was telling his friends about his successful voyage to the far reaches of time.

Wells had begun writing his story around 1887, when he was 21, and it went through six drafts before it finally appeared in book form, the first of his many published novels, in 1895. Though I had no way of knowing it then, it had not been his intention simply to tell an adventure tale in the manner of such popular writers of the day as Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard. He wanted it to be a novel of ideas as well. He had read Karl Marx and was interested in the history of class struggle, and had some strong notions of how class warfare would transform the civilization of the millennia ahead. He knew his Darwin, too, so the novel would explore the future of human evolution. But none of that meant much to me then. What interested me was the look and feel of the future Wells was depicting, a future that I knew I myself could never live to see, but which had, for me, the absolute reality of the most powerful and vivid of visions. So onward I went, following the Time Traveler into the years to come. “I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapor, now brown, now green; they grew, shivered, and passed away. I saw tall buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed—melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands that registered my speed raced round faster and faster.…”

Eventually the Time Traveler’s vehicle came to rest in what the dials indicated was the year 802,701: the world of our successor humans, the gentle, effete Eloi and the bestial Morlocks. I wandered that world, agog. The class strife between the Eloi and the Morlocks was of very little interest to me, but the beauty of the future world certainly held my attention, its soaring towers and its porcelain palaces with gates of bronze.

Then—after a bit of romance with a delicate Eloi girl named Weena, which interested my prepubescent self not at all—it was onward again, deeper and deeper into time, into an epoch when the sun was red and feeble and the world was plainly dying, and finally the Time Traveler gave me a view of Earth’s last denizens, monstrous crabs crawling slowly about at the edge of a chilly sea under a somber, swollen sun that had come to its final days. That image, the huge crabs, the bloated red sun, the desolate landscape, has remained with me all my life. I will never live to see any such thing, of course— but Wells had shown it to me in his astounding little tale, and once I had made that journey to the end of time with his voyager, I would never be the same again.

My encounter with the second of those four powerful time travel stories came a year or so later. I discovered that the book department of Macy’s vast department store in Manhattan had a little group of books of what I was only just learning to call science fiction, a term that had not yet come into wide popular usage. There my parents, always generous in allowing me to acquire books, bought me a small, thick volume called The Portable Novels of Science, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, which contained four long stories, three of which would burn their way into my soul forever. The opening novel, The First Men in the Moon by Wells, again, had surprisingly little impact on me. But the book also contained Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John, a haunting, tragic story of a strange young boy of high intelligence with whom I found it only too easy to identify, and H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time, a novella poised on the brink between science fiction and fantasy. I had already encountered a couple of Lovecraft’s stories in an anthology called Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, and they had made a strong impression on me, but they had been horror stories, and The Shadow Out of Time was science fiction, a genre that was rapidly becoming of major importance in my developing reading tastes.

And what science fiction it was! A professor at Miskatonic University in the New England town of Arkham—both of them, I would later discover, Lovecraftian inventions—had suddenly become subject to terrifying hallucinations that had sent him, for six years, into a psychotic state. Awakening finally from his madness as his old rational self, he realized that some sort of alien entity had taken possession of his mind during those six lost years, and then he began to have dreams of a vast library, “holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with strange hieroglyphs on their backs,” situated in a steamy tropical jungle that he perceived after a while to be the Earth of a remote prehistoric era, 150 million years or more in the past. As the complicated story unfolds, it becomes clear that his mind had been invaded by a denizen of that ancient world that had thrown its consciousness forward into the twentieth century; and he himself comes to visit the alien civilization of the Permian or Triassic Age in dreams, moving among its grotesque inhabitants and exploring the books in that strange library. As the story develops, Lovecraft unfolded visions of remote time that provided exactly what I was looking for in science fiction: a gateway out of the here-and-now world into the unknown and unknowable.

The biggest moment for me came when the dreaming protagonist encounters other time-wanderers who, like him, had drifted back into that lost world:

There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of paleogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry prehuman Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos.…

And so on for three staggering paragraphs:

I talked with the mind of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of 16,000 A.D.; with that of a Roman named Titus Cempronius Blaesus, who had been a quaestor in Sulla’s time; with that of Khepnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty, who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep.… with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of 15,000 B.C.; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them.

Those dizzying marvels dizzied me, too, and have continued to do so, every time in the past seventy years that I have re-read that amazing page. It seemed to me that all of time lay open before me: there were no barriers, no mysteries of worlds gone by or worlds yet to come. By way of Lovecraft’s stupendous imagination, I was treated to the sort of revelations that only time travel fiction can provide.

And then another story in that astonishing little collection of science fiction novellas clinched the deal for me: John Taine’s Before the Dawn, which took me back to one of the obsessions of my earlier childhood, the vanished world of the dinosaurs. As a small boy growing up in New York City, I had ready access to the American Museum of Natural History and the spectacular collection of dinosaur fossils displayed on its fourth floor; and, like many other small boys then and now, I had been utterly captivated by those great beasts and learned all I could about them, diligently mastering such mouth-filling names as Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus and Triceratops before I was eight years old. It was my early fascination with dinosaurs and the remote epoch in which they had lived, I think, that made it so easy for me to tumble into a love for time travel fiction, which I swiftly discovered would take me into distant reaches of time in the only way available to me.

John Taine was, in reality, Eric Temple Bell, a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, who under his own name published books on mathematical and technical subjects, and under the pseudonym wrote a dozen or so superb science fiction novels, mainly in the 1920s and 1930s. Before the Dawn, which dated from 1934, had an unusual publishing history, having been brought out not by a company noted for works of fiction, or in a science fiction magazine, but rather by Williams and Wilkins, a Baltimore-based publisher of scientific texts. Many years later after encountering it in the Wollheim collection, I would acquire a copy of the Williams and Wilkins edition, the jacket of which proclaimed it to be a novel of “TELEVISION IN TIME,” television then being something more in the province of science fiction than commercial reality. And in a somewhat apologetic preface, the publishers declared:

When a house that has devoted its attention wholly to factual books and journals in the realm of research science or its applications publishes a romance, it is no more than reasonable to explain the phenomenon. Dr. Bell’s Before the Dawn is fiction, written for the love and fun of the thing, and to be read in the same spirit. It is a romance. But it is not mere unguided romancing. There is scientific background for everything he writes.… If there is no television in time as a matter of sober fact, it is also a matter of sober fact that the thing is possible; science has sown the seeds. The conjecture lies in guessing which way the seeds will grow.

The commodity that Before the Dawn delivered was precisely that which I had been hungering for ever since my first glimpse, at the age of six or seven, of the mighty dinosaur skeletons in the American Museum of Natural History. I would never see a living Brontosaurus or Tyrannosaurus; but here was a book in which a plausibly described device could focus a beam of light on some ancient object and bring forth television images showing scenes that had been imprinted on that object at some distant point in time. We are marched step by step through a series of tests that reveal a gigantic bloody claw, and then, from a shapeless lump of stone, a crudely-executed statuette of a woman, carved far back in prehistory by a Mayan sculptor; and then, finally, a nest of reptile eggs out of which a small creature that is unmistakably a baby dinosaur emerges.

As they gain more control of their instrument, the experimenters are able to bring forth a coherent narrative of dinosaur life, following the growth of their baby dinosaur, his development as a warrior, his battles, his migrations. Belshazzar, they call him. Other dinosaurs enter the narrative, and are given names: Jezebel, Satan, Bartholomew. And I, that not-quite-teenage reader, was held entranced, as though I myself were looking on these living dinosaurs as they moved across the television screen. At last, in a chapter that bore what to me was the wondrous heading of “Sunset and Evening Star,” death comes to the titanic creature that the baby dinosaur Belshazzar has become: “The last light died in his eyes as the head dropped back, the unconquerable jaws still wide in their last snarl of defiance.” And I, deeply shaken by what I had read, put the book down with the feeling that this work of fiction had actually conveyed me, however briefly, into the actual Age of Reptiles. Just as Wells had given me a vision of the unreachable eons to come, and Lovecraft had shown me the full range of astonishing pasts and futures, so had Taine taken me into a remote era that had been vivid in my mind for most of my life but which I had never seen with such clarity before.

It remained for one more story to show me the complete possibilities of the time travel story. This I came upon about a year after the first three. By now—the year was 1949, and I was a sophomore in high school—I was a regular reader of the science fiction magazines of the day, Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories and five or six more—and I had learned that certain writers, Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt and Lewis Padgett and, particularly, Robert A. Heinlein, were reliable producers of superior work. So when I discovered, in Macy’s ever-delightful science fiction department, a bulky anthology called Adventures in Time and Space that had stories by all those people plus many more of my new favorites, I knew that revelations were in store for me.

And so they were. I read and re-read Adventures in Time and Space, and it became one of the great books of my lifetime, and even now, when I take my copy down from the shelf seventy years later, I feel the original thrill all over again. I would not want to choose any one favorite from its three dozen stories, but it was Heinlein’s time travel dazzler, “By His Bootstraps,” that had the greatest impact on my career to come. For this was my first encounter with the time paradox story.

As I said many pages ago, I don’t believe that time travel is scientifically possible, and one reason for that belief is that it asks us to accept the notion that someone can be in more than one place at once along the stream of time. Heinlein began his story with a mysterious stranger materializing out of nowhere in the room where a graduate student named Bob Wilson is working on a thesis that proves that time travel is a mathematically-impossible concept. The stranger is about the same age as Wilson, with a black eye, a three-day growth of beard, and a cut and swollen upper lip. Wilson demands to know who he is, and the stranger replies, “Don’t you recognize me?” Wilson does not. He is told that the stranger has just arrived through a Time Gate—a circle hovering in the air behind him, “a great disk of nothing, of the color one sees when the eyes are shut tight.” The visitor tosses Wilson’s beloved hat through the gate and it disappears. Wilson protests. They argue; while that is happening, a third man, who looks very much like the other one but has no black eye, steps through the gate.

And then the fun begins, for one thing leads to another, there is a fistfight, and one of the strangers knocks Wilson through the gate. He lands in a strange place that turns out to be more than twenty thousand years in the future, and the story unfolds a complex series of adventures involving four characters who, we eventually learn, are—well, I hesitate to spoil the surprise that landed on me at my first reading of the story in 1949. Suffice it to say that Heinlein methodically and brilliantly presents us with a spectacular demonstration of the paradoxical nature of time travel. I would, in many stories to be written decades into my own future, devote much mental energy to the time paradox issue myself.

The earliest of them is before me right now, in the form of the battered 19-page manuscript of a story called “Vanguard of Tomorrow,” which bears a penciled notation indicating that I wrote it when I was fourteen. It has never been published, and, no, it isn’t ever going to be published, either, because although it’s a reasonably decent job for a fourteen-year-old writer, that kid was still some years away from producing publishable copy. It starts off with a scene that is as close to a plagiarism of Heinlein’s opening in “By His Bootstraps” as makes very little difference: “Bill Ferris was putting the finishing touches on the story when four men popped out of nowhere and stared coldly at him.” Ferris is a would-be writer, not a graduate student of philosophy, and the four men are nothing like the various visitors that Heinlein’s Bob Wilson has to deal with, but they have come to him from the future through a time gate, and—well, never mind. It’s not a very good story. But I was only fourteen.

I went on writing stories, many of them time travel stories, and by the time I was seventeen or so, they were good enough to be published, and were. The earliest one that I sold dates from June 1954, when I was finishing my junior year at Columbia. It was called “Hopper.” It was about unemployed workers traveling to the past to find jobs, and it was almost good enough—not quite—to be worth using as the leadoff story for this collection. (I did expand it, a dozen years later, into a novel called The Time Hoppers that is a good deal better.) There were plenty of other time travel stories from me after that, as you will see, and not just short ones. Over the years there were novellas as well, some of them reprinted here. As though caught in some compulsion to wrestle with this stuff, I grappled at greater length in such novels as Shadow on the Stars (1958), Up the Line (1969), and The Stochastic Man (1975) with the philosophical questions Heinlein had raised in “By His Bootstraps.” And, as I noted above, one of the last stories I wrote before I retired from the literary arena, “Against the Current” of 2009, was, once more, a story of travel through time.

Wells had given me my first taste of the visionary splendor a fictional voyage into the far future could provide. Lovecraft had shown me how a time travel story could unfold an infinity of possibilities in all directions. Taine had allowed me to think I was actually visiting the Mesozoic of my childhood dreams. And Heinlein had revealed the dizzying paradoxes inherent in the assumption that time travel could be achieved at all. As I continued my youthful reading of the science fiction magazines and anthologies, I came upon many other remarkable stories that provided further variations on the time travel concept: Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time,” pioneering the alternative world idea; P. Schuyler Miller’s “As Never Was,” posing a nasty little circular reality paradox; Ross Rocklynne’s “Time Wants a Skeleton,” a time travel murder mystery; and Henry Kuttner’s “Line to Tomorrow,” in which a telephone is mysteriously connected to the future, among many others. Then, by 1954, I began to sell stories to the science fiction magazines myself, and, year in, year out, I chose frequently to deal with the narrative challenges of time travel, beginning with such works as 1954’s “Hopper” and 1955’s “Absolutely Inflexible” and continuing on, decade after decade as I was making my own long journey through time. Here, now, is the full spectrum of them, my adventures in time travel brought together in one book from first to last.

—Robert Silverberg