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