First published in
Astounding Stories, July 1937.
For all the talk of the
bold steps the science fiction was taking in the 30s and 40s, this
story feels very old fashioned even in comparison to the previous
volume. Not only is it very heavily influenced by Wells’ The
Time Machine (that’s being kind) which was 40 years old by the
time this came out, but it has a nested narrative of the ‘traveller’s
tale’ sort that was the a huge feature of fantastic fiction from
the17th century on.
Like The Time
Machine, this story is a vehicle to provide us with snapshots of
the future of humanity. It gives us a look at five periods of the
future, although some are glimpsed only briefly. The protagonist –
Glyn Weston – comes from the year 1998. He spends a short time in
2007 – just long enough to conclude that his device works – and
then travels forward to 2486 where he spends a bit more time, and
then 34,656 where spends several days. He ends up 75,000 or so years
in the future, from where he tells his story to the remains of
humanity who have abandoned the barren Earth in favour of Venus.
It’s a combo of
speculation of observing trends and considering where they might lead
and Swiftian satire. As such, it inevitably tells us more about the
times it was written than the future.
Weston is a scientist
given access to a cache of documents relating to the research of a
now deceased researcher whose ideas were discredited and who
subsequently died (or vanished – this becomes important later on,
although I missed the significance of it on my first read). It’s an
example someone picking up the lost technology that we’ve seen in
some of the earlier stories, but the technology remains lost in this
one, too.
Perhaps that’s
because Weston’s invention is less of a time machine and more of a
time warp machine – it only allows travel in one direction,
forward, and so there’s no way to go back and tell anyone it works.
Even so, though, no one he visits seems that interested in building
their own model. The men of 34,656 (sorry, it’s all men in this
story, another feature of its era, perhaps) dismiss the idea as
little more than a trifle, maybe because of its unidirectionality.
We don’t learn much
about 1998 and because Weston is off on his travels before we get a
good look around. We learn a little more about 2007, where the
inhabitants are celebrating a new speed record for travel between the
UK and New Zealand of 18 hours (I’m always excited to see New
Zealand get a name check!). There’s some speculation about whether
a rocket-powered trip to the Moon could be successful. It’s a
refreshing contrast, I suppose, contrast to all the stories that see
us all commuting between the planets as a matter of course, but it’s
still surprising that anyone with knowledge of the state of flight
and rocketry could be so pessimistic.
Anyway, having
confirmed his machine works, Weston zaps forward to 2486, where he
finds the world at war, split into three factions – the White
World, the Yellow World and the Brown World. The English – the
story seems to all happen in the UK – are part of the White World,
of course, who are locked in mortal combat with the yellows ‘to
assert their right to breed regardless of the room available.’ So,
it’s a race war with crude Darwinian motives where the Brown World
– the most insignificant of the factions – is neutral.
It’s a pretty
startling scenario by our contemporary standards and hard to imagine
a story that expounded this premise being published today. Even so
these divisions don’t lie far beneath the surface of the modern
world, even if we want to congratulate ourselves on our liberality.
The rhetoric of the trade war, for example, sees the developed world
competes with the Bric nations – Brazil, Russia, India and China –
and Africa is largely a charity sink. The story doesn’t really take
a moral or jingoist stance, although the fact that Weston lands in
the White World clearly influences what we hear about the situation.
By contrast, the fashion in contemporary SF of the ‘gap year SF’
variety is definitely to take the side of the emerging nations against the evils of the developed world.
Weston leaves this
world precipitously, fleeing a bomb attack in the time machine and
ends up in a utopian post-capitalist world. There’s some notes of
exotica – weird and humiliating outfits, a fad for hairlessness –
but it seems like a kind of 1930s paradise of the sort being imagined
by the various political thinkers of the era. If we see the race war
as a perception of the upcoming global conflagration, then this is
the resulting utopia that the ideological factions saw as the
inevitable result.
Because the necessities
of life are free, creativity is valued higher than anything else. The
world is similar to the type of world Cory Doctorow wrote about 70
years later in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where
barter, reputation and lotteries take the place of currency.
Weston seems happy
enough here, but hears word of another time traveller who came before
him thousands of years in the past. He learns that the man whose
research he’s following isn’t dead after all but if also
travelling into the future. So, he heads off again, landing in the
even more distant future where the Earth has become uninhabitable
thanks to the Velikovsky-like intervention of a rogue planet making
its way through the solar system. This brings us to the stories
present, where he tells his tale to the Venusian humans.
It’s an amusing
enough tale, but the futures it imagines are rather prosaic. The race
war angle will be particularly alarming to contemporary readers,
although the similarity to Orwell’s Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania
demonstrates that there was seemingly something in the air at that
time that saw the world falling into three broad factions.
These days
we expect even our near-future scenarios to paint picture of
unrecognisable exoticism, but which is really the more realistic
approach, I wonder? Would a traveller from the palaeolithic find us
and our world entirely incomprehensible? I suspect the human mind is
more plastic and the future more prosaic than the singularitarians
would have us believe and the worlds and attitudes that Weston
encounters are probably closer to what we’ll see than the uploaded
minds and artificial intelligences so popular today.
Er, race wars
notwithstanding of course.
Themes: vastness (gulfs
of time), race war, apocalypse from space, traveller’s tale,
post-capitalism, colonialism, lost technology.
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