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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer/Preface
Rian Johnson/Introduction
Charles Yu/Top Ten Tips for Time Travelers
EXPERIMENTS
Richard Matheson/Death Ship
Geoffrey A. Landis/Ripples in the Dirac Sea
Robert Silverberg/Needle in a Timestack
Ursula K. Le Guin/Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
Alice Sola Kim/Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters
Eric Schaller/How the Future Got Better
Michael Moorcock/Pale Roses
William Gibson/The Gernsback Continuum
C.J. Cherryh/The Threads of Time
Michael Swanwick/Triceratops Summer
Steve Bein/The Most Important Thing in the World
Cordwainer Smith/Himself in Anachron
H.G. Wells/The Time Machine
Douglas Adams/Young Zaphod Plays It Safe
Stan Love/Time Travel in Theory and Practice
REACTIONARIES AND REVOLUTIONARIES
Ray Bradbury/A Sound of Thunder
Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore/Vintage Season
John Chu/Thirty Seconds from Now
Harry Turtledove/Forty, Counting Down
David Langford/The Final Days
Connie Willis/Fire Watch
Kage Baker/Noble Mold
George R.R. Martin/Under Siege
Steven Utley/Where or When
Ellen Klages/Time Gypsy
Garry Kilworth/On the Watchtower at Plataea
Rosaleen Love/Alexia and Graham Bell
Kage Baker/A Night on the Barbary Coast
Elizabeth Bear/This Tragic Glass
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud/The Gulf of the Years
Max Beerbohm/Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties
Genevieve Valentine/Trousseau: Fashion for Time Travelers
MAZES AND TRAPS
Edward Page Mitchell/The Clock That Went Backward
Theodore Sturgeon/Yesterday Was Monday
Kim Newman/Is There Anybody There?
Joe Lansdale/Fish Night
Gene Wolfe/The Lost Pilgrim
Peter Crowther/Palindromic
Karin Tidbeck/Augusta Prima
Barrington J. Bayley/Life Trap
Greg Egan/Lost Continent
Adrian Tchaikovsky/The Mouse Ran Down
Langdon Jones/The Great Clock
David I. Masson/Traveller’s Rest
Vandana Singh/Delhi
Tony Pi/Come-From-Aways
Dean Francis Alfar/Terminós
Norman Spinrad/The Weed of Time
Eric Frank Russell/The Waitabits
Jason Heller/Music for Time Travelers
COMMUNIQUÉS
Isaac Asimov/What If
Tanith Lee/As Time Goes By
Geoffrey A. Landis/At Dorado
Karen Haber/3 RMS, Good View
Harry Turtledove/Twenty-One, Counting Up
Bob Leman/Loob
Tamsyn Muir/The House that Made the Sixteen Loops of Time
Gene Wolfe/Against the Lafayette Escadrille
Carrie Vaughn/Swing Time
Richard Bowes/The Mask of the Rex
Nalo Hopkinson/Message in a Bottle
Adam Roberts/The Time Telephone
Kristine Kathryn Rusch/Red Letter Day
Rjurik Davidson/Domine
E.F. Benson/In the Tube
Molly Brown/Bad Timing
Pamela Sargent/If Ever I Should Leave You
Charles Stross/Palimpsest
Acknowledgements
About the Editors and Nonfiction Contributors
Extended Copyright
Copyright
PREFACE
“I gave a party for time-travelers, but I didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came.”
Stephen Hawking (from an interview with Ars Technica)
Time travelers, as you will soon discover, are often too busy to attend parties – and the parties they attend are only those they know in advance are going to be good ones. Just because you travel through time does not mean that you can take time out from saving the universe, preserving history, finding your true love, or hunting dinosaurs just to confirm a famous physicist’s theories. Indeed, the shadowy Preservationists Guild,1 founded in 2150, would argue that the worst thing for time travelers would be to show up at such a party.
Thus, most of us are left with the stories, the speculations – some of them based on facts and personal experiences – offered up by a variety of fiction writers. Which is not such a bad place to be. Because one thing we chrononauts know for sure: for more than a century, readers have been enthralled by time travel stories with classics from writers like H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and Isaac Asimov becoming fixtures of modern fiction. Whether thrilling, cautionary, or adventurous, these imaginative what-if tales transport us to other worlds, most often right here on our own planet.
Today, time travel is as familiar a concept to readers as space travel. Such stories are more popular than ever, including such recent bestsellers as Stephen King’s 11/22/63, Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. The resurgence of iconic TV series like Doctor Who has fed into this trend. In addition, time travel often incorporates elements of such hot subgenres like steampunk and historical fiction, further extending its appeal. Time travel has also been popular with teens ever since the publication of such classics as Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, extending to the present-day and such popular youth novels as When You Reach Me by Newberry winner Rebecca Stead. Meanwhile, movies like The Terminator, Back to the Future, Time Bandits, Donnie Darko, and Safety Not Guaranteed have shown the cinematic range of such tales.
Oddly, however, never before has there been an anthology that demonstrated the full depth and breadth of the time travel story. Perhaps this has something to do with the Preservationist Guild’s Fifth Dictum: “Diffuse, disguise, confuse, obfuscate, deny.” Most prior attempts have zeroed in on excellent yet decidedly science-fictional tales in which the focus has been on the dreaded “time paradox” – otherwise known as either “And Then I Found Out I Was My Own Father” or “Will I Be Kissing My Grandmother By Mistake?” That may be the bedrock of time travel fiction, but there is so much more: tales of fantasy and horror that involve travel through time like Kim Newman’s “Is There Anybody There?,” E.F. Benson’s “In the Tube,” and Rick Bowes’s “The Mask of the Rex,” – in addition to such truly strange science fiction as “Traveller’s Rest,” by David Masson, “Loob” by Bob Leman, and “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim.