HOW STRANGE, then, to realize that time travel, the concept, is barely a century old. The term first occurs in English in 1914fn1—a back-formation from Wells’s “Time Traveller.” Somehow humanity got by for thousands of years without asking, What if I could travel into the future? What would the world be like? What if I could travel into the past—could I change history? The questions didn’t arise.
By now The Time Machine is one of those books you feel you must have read at some point, whether or not you actually did. You may have seen the 1960 movie, starring the matinee-handsome Rod Taylor as the Time Traveller (he needed a name, so they called him George) and featuring a machine that didn’t remind anyone of a bicycle. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times called this time machine “an antique version of the flying saucer.” To me it looks like a rococo sort of sledge, with a plush red chair. Apparently I’m not the only one. “Everyone knows what a time machine looks like,” writes the physicist Sean Carroll: “something like a steampunk sled with a red velvet chair, flashing lights, and a giant spinning wheel on the back.” The movie also features the Time Traveller’s erstwhile companion, Weena, played by Yvette Mimieux as a languid peroxide blonde of the year 802701.
George asks Weena whether her people think much about the past. “There is no past,” she informs him, with no discernible conviction. Do they wonder about the future? “There is no future.” She lives in the now, all right. Everyone has forgotten about fire, too, but luckily George brought some matches. “I’m only a tinkering mechanic,” he says modestly, but he’d like to fill her in on a few things.
Motion picture technology, by the way, was just coming over the horizon when Wells wrote his fantasy, and he took note. (The bicycle was not the only modern machine from which he drew inspiration.) In 1879 the photographic stop-motion pioneer Eadweard Muybridge invented what he called a zoopraxiscope for projecting successive images to give the illusion of movement. They made visible an aspect of time never before seen. Thomas Edison followed with his kinetoscope and met in France with Étienne-Jules Marey, who was already creating la chronophotographie, followed soon after by Louis and Auguste Lumière and their cinématographe. By 1894, London was entertaining crowds at its first kinetoscope parlor in Oxford Street; Paris had one, too. So when the Time Traveller begins his voyage it looks like this:
I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind … The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness.
One way or another, the inventions of H. G. Wells color every time-travel story that followed. When you write about time travel, you either pay homage to The Time Machine or dodge its shadow. William Gibson, who would reinvent time travel yet again in the twenty-first century, was a boy when he encountered Wells’s story in a fifteen-cent Classics Illustrated comic book; by the time he saw the movie he felt he already owned it, “part of a personal and growing collection of alternate universes.”
I had imagined this, for my own purposes, as geared in some achingly complex spheres-within-spheres way that I could never envision in operation … I suspected, without admitting it to myself, that time travel might be a magic on the order of being able to kiss one’s own elbow (which had seemed, initially, to be quite theoretically possible).
In his seventy-seventh year Wells tried to recall how it came to him. He couldn’t. He needed a time machine for his own consciousness. He put it almost that way himself. His brain was stuck in its epoch. The instrument doing the recollecting was also the instrument to be recalled. “I have been trying, for a day or so, to reconstruct the state of my brain as it was about 1878 or 9 … I find it impossible to disentangle … The old ideas and impressions were made over in accordance with new material, they were used to make up the new equipment.” Yet if ever a story was kicking to be born, it was The Time Machine.
It flowed from his pen in fits and starts over a period of years, beginning in 1888 as a fantasy called “The Chronic Argonauts,” serialized in three installments in the Science Schools Journal, a periodical Wells started himself at the Normal School. He rewrote it and threw it away at least twice. A few dramatic early bits survive: “Conceive me, the Time Traveller, the discoverer of Futurity”—futurity!—“clinging senseless to his Time Machine, choking with sobs & with the tears streaming down his face, full of a terrible fear that he would never see humanity again.”
In 1894 he revived “that old corpse,” as it already seemed, for a series of seven anonymous pieces in the National Observer and then produced a nearly final version, at last called The Time Machine, for serial publication in the New Review. The hero was called Dr. Moses Nebogipfel, Ph.D., F.R.S., N.W.R., PAID—“a small-bodied, sallow-faced little man … aquiline nose, thin lips, high cheek-ridges, and pointed chin … his extreme leanness … large eager-looking grey eyes … phenomenally wide and high forehead.” Nebogipfel turned into the Philosophical Inventor and then into the Time Traveller. But he did not so much evolve as fade. He lost his honorary initials and even his name; he shed all the lively word painting and became nondescript, a gray spectre.
Naturally it seemed to Bertie that he was the one striving: learning his craft, shredding his drafts, rethinking and rewriting late into the night by the light of a paraffin lamp. He struggled, certainly. But let’s say instead that the story was in charge. The time for time travel had come. Donald Barthelme suggests we see the writer as “the work’s way of getting itself written, a sort of lightning rod for an accumulation of atmospheric disturbances, a St. Sebastian absorbing in his tattered breast the arrows of the Zeitgeist.” That may sound like a mystical metaphor or a bit of false modesty, but a lot of writers talk that way and they seem to mean it. Ann Beattie says Barthelme is giving away an inside secret:
Writers don’t talk to nonwriters about being hit by lightning, being conduits, being vulnerable. Sometimes they talk that way to each other, though. The work’s way of getting itself written. I think that’s an amazing concept that not only gives words (the work) a mind and a body but gives them the power to stalk a person (the writer). Stories do that.
Stories are like parasites finding a host. In other words, memes. Arrows of the Zeitgeist.
“Literature is revelation,” said Wells. “Modern literature is indecorous revelation.”
THE OBJECT OF Wells’s interest, bordering on obsession, was the future—that shadowy, inaccessible place. “So with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity,” says the Time Traveller. Most people, Wells wrote—“the predominant type, the type of the majority of living people”—never think about the future. Or, if they do, they regard it “as a sort of blank non-existence upon which the advancing present will presently write events.” (The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on.) The more modern sort of person—“the creative, organizing, or masterful type”—sees the future as our very reason for being: “Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. The creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.” Wells, of course, hoped to personify that creative, forward-looking type. He had more and more company.
In bygone times, people had no more than the barest glimmerings of visiting either the future or the past. It seldom occurred to anyone. It wasn’t in the repertoire. Even travel through space was rare, by modern standards, and slow, before the railroads came.
If we stretch, we can find arguable cases of precocious time travel. Time travel avant la lettre. In the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic, Kakudmi ascends