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