New Book Reveals the Secrets of Time Travel

The Best Time Travel Short Stories Ever Written

edited by Bill Adler, Jr.

Carroll & Graf ($24.00)

Everybody wants to time travel.

If we could journey back just a little bit in time, to say just before Microsoft went public, what a fortune we could make! Or perhaps one’s desire is to handle a first date a little differently. Or maybe, your time travel plans are more grandiose: To prevent a war.

The benefits of time travel are as infinite as time itself. The only problem isžhow? How to construct a time machine?

Scientists don’t have the answer. But science fiction writers do. For decades writers have constructed all kinds of devices to let people safely travel into the past or future. Through the imagination of science fiction writers, we can see both how to travel through time, and what the consequences of time travel really are.

Bill Adler, Jr. has collected the best time travel short times in a marvelous anthology, Time Machines: The Best Time Travel Short Stories Ever Written. Time Machines includes stories by Isaac Asimov, Jack Finney, Rod Serling, H.G. Wells, Harry Turtledove, and others. The anthology also includes never-before published stories.

Author Bill Adler, Jr. is available to talk about time travel: will we ever be able to time travel, the paradoxes we could encounter, the limitations of time travel, and more.

Some people like romance novels, some like mysteries or adventure storiesžothers prefer serious nonfiction or science fiction. But perhaps the most universally-enjoyed kind of fiction are time-travel stories.

Why are time travel stories so universally loved? The answer isn’t all that complicated: It’s a human trait to dream "what if?" What if you were in Dallas in 1963? What if you knew the outcome of each Kentucky Derby for the next ten years? What if you could revisit an old flame and this time do things right? And what if you could see what actually happened when Rome fell? What would it be like to live one hundred years from now? Oh, the things we could do. In Time Machines readers will get to do all those things.

From A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to Back to the Future to A Wrinkle in Time to Star Trek: The Journey Home to Twelve Monkeys—time travel stories have fascinated us ever since the notion was conceived. Time travel is one of the most popular genres in fiction It is one of the few science fiction themes that have crossed over to mainstream fiction.

(Order Time Machines.)

How to travel back in time—that is, of course, the most important question. Authors have solved the problem of time travel through various inventive means: sheer intellect, a rift in space, a long-lost tunnel, tapping into neutrinos, or a fantastically complicated machine are some of the mechanisms that time travelers use. For some readers, the how of moving backward and forward through time is the enthralling part of the story; for others it is what the characters do with their fortune—or misfortune that is interesting. For others still, time travel stories are interesting for what they reveal about our notions of the future at the time the stories were written.

Time Machines draws on both contemporary and older time travel tales. The more recent the story, the more sophisticated the story is in terms of how it applies contemporary physics. Black holes and superstring theory, for example, are some of the more contemporary cosmological discoveries that have made time travel easier. But older stories are equally interesting, because imagination knows no bounds.

Some of the stores in Time Machines are:

TempEx by Wayne Freeze. There’s a new delivery service: "When things absolutely, positively have to be there yesterday."

Star Bright by Mark Clifton. "At three years of age a little girl shouldn’t have enough functioning intelligence to cut out and paste together a Moebius strip." So begins Star Bright, in which a little girl, Star, who is abnormally bright, learns how to bend space in her mind and use those thoughts to transport herself through time. Raising any child is hard enough—but when that little girl can travel through time at will, the task becomes even more challenging.

The Third Level by Jack Finney. Everyone thinks that there are only two levels of Grand Central Station. But Charley knows that there’s a third level. And if you can find it, by taking the right twists and turns down corridors and stairs, you will discover that the third level transports you to 1894.

The Oddysey of Flight 33 by Rod Serling. On a flight to New York, a Boeing 707 mysteriously picks up speed. The captain tries to radio Idyllwild, but there’s no answer. When Flight 33 breaks through the clouds, it finds New York below—but the buildings are gone. Flight 33 arrives in New York, but it is some 200 million years ahead of schedule.

A Touch of Petulance by Ray Bradbury. You will murder your wife. You will murder her because she has become nagging, annoying, unpleasant, and just generally impossible to live with. Although you love her dearly now and you have only been married a year, in twenty years you will feel just the opposite, difficult as that is to believe. You know this because the man on the train tells you: He is from the future. He is you. And what do you do about it? To help prevent the awful future, do you tell your wife every day that you love her? Do you leave her this moment—just walk out the door? Ignore your future self and let fate take its course? Or do you kill her now and save yourself from years of misery? But perhaps the real question is: While you trust your present-day self, can you trust your future-self to have the same interests as you do now?

In Time Machines readers will have an opportunity to travel the limits of imaginationžand beyond. Bill Adler, Jr. can talk about the hows and whys of time travel.

Bill Adler, Jr. is an author and literary agent. He has written over 15 books including Outwitting Squirrels (over 150,000 copies sold), Outwitting Critters, Baby-English: A Dictionary for Interpreting the Secret Language of Infants (written with his then 16-month old daughter, Karen), and Tell Me a Fairy Tale. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Peggy Robin, also an author, and two daughters. Adler’s own time travel fiction appears in Time Machines.

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