Containing seventy-two stories about travel through
time, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The
Time Traveler’s Almanac is an essential book for anyone who has an
interest in time travel. Reading
the book involves its own sort of time travel, since it takes the reader
from 1881, when Edward Page Russell published “The Clock That Went
Backward,” to 2012, when Adrian Tchiakovsky’s “The Mouse Ran Down”
was published. Along the way,
the reader is introduced to flights of time by such luminaries as Michael
Moorcock, Connie Willis, Nalo Hopkinson, and the granddaddy of
time travel authors, H. G. Wells.
While the quintessential time travel story may involve
a character climbing into a time machine and traveling to the future or the
past, as happens in Wells’ The Time
Machine, many of the time-slipping tales included by the VanderMeers are
more subtle in their nature. In
some cases, the question of whether a person actually traveled in time or is
merely hallucinating is left open, or not even addressed, as with Gene
Wolfe’s “Against the Lafayette Escadrille” in which the hobbyist
narrator builds a replica World War I Fokker triplane and encounters a
balloon, possibly out of time, during one of his flights.
Although Wolfe’s narrator believes the balloon, and its female
passenger, are from the Civil War, the possibilities that she is a similar
hobbyist or even a figment of the narrator’s imagination are just as
likely.
In other cases, time travel is achieved through strange
natural phenomenon, such as the recurring storms in Tony Pi’s
“Come-From-Aways,” which posits a shipwrecked man on the coast of
Newfoundland, possibly an ancient Celtic mariner.
Pi explores the ramifications of such a person showing up with the
reactions of the police, scientists, and linguists called in to determine
who the man is and where he comes from.
In the end, the linguist is convinced, not only of his authenticity,
but of his identity as the Welsh Prince Madoc, who disappeared on a voyage
in 1170.
Pi’s Madoc slips through time without his own
volition, something that often happens in these stories.
Rosaleen Love’s “Alexia and Graham Bell” is an intriguing story
of cause and effect as Alexandre Graham Bell fails to invent the telephone,
although his descendent, Graham Bell, does.
The belated invention reverberates through time, causing people to
lose track of their own history, eventually coming to believe that the
telephone did exist since Bell’s time.
Richard Matheson presents “Death Ship.”
Given Matheson’s close relationship with The
Twilight Zone, it isn’t surprising that his time travel story about
the crew of a spaceship feels like it could easily have been an episode of
that show.
Although Theodore Sturgeon’s story “Yesterday Was
Monday” predates The Truman Show by 57 years, the two stories both take
Shakespeare’s dictum from As You
Like It, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely
players” and took it literally. In Sturgeon’s tale, one of the players,
the mechanic Harry Wright, accidentally misses his cue and learns what is
going on behind the scenes, in the process skipping from Monday to
Wednesday. Not entirely a time
travel story, but rather an existential look at our lives and how we
interact with our world.
One of the themes often explored in time travel stories
is the question of “What If,” which also provides the title for Isaac
Asimov’s included story, in which a husband and wife have the opportunity
to explore how their lives would have been different had they not met.
While their occasion comes from a chance encounter during a dull
train ride, Harry Turtledove’s look at the same theme is much more
planned. Turtledove’s two
stories, “Forty, Counting Down” and
“Twenty-One, Counting Up” were originally published
simultaneously in Asimov’s and Analog and both tell the story of Justin Kloster, who is trying to
improve his life. One of the
stories is told from the point of view of the 21 year old Kloster whose
whole life is ahead of him, the other from the same character’s point of
view 19 years later, as he comes back in time to try to fix the mistakes he
believes he made. Although the stories can be read separately, they work
best when read together, and the VanderMeers, fortunately, had enough space
in this massive anthology to include both.
Time travel is a trope that can be used for a variety
of types of stories and to explore different themes.
Tamsyn Muir’s “The House That Made Sixteen Loops of Time” could
have been written as a horror tale in the hands of someone like Matheson or
Bloch, but Muir uses the story of a possibly sentient house that creates a
time loop to explore relationships and the question of whether the main
character, Dr. Rosamund Tilly, has made the best possible choices for her,
by allowing her multiple chances to look at her history, her current
situation, and make the “right” choice for her future.
The remaining stories in this anthology offer a variety of takes on time
travel, running the full gamut of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror
fields, allowing any reader to find something of interest and even the most
widely read reader to find something previously unknown.
The VanderMeers include classic time travel stories, including an
excerpt from Wells’s book, as well as stories from up-and-coming authors,
reaching beyond the borders of America to Canadian, British, Australian, and
even French writers for their tales through time.
