Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine

Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells’

The Time Machine

Wells Unleashed Series

Book 2

Edited by

JW Schnarr

Northern Frights Publishing

In the Great White North, Blood Runs Colder…

www.northernfrightspublishing.webs.com

Also Available from Northern Frights Publishing

Shadows of the Emerald City

Wells Unleashed Series

Book One: War of the Worlds: Frontlines

Book Two: Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’

The Time Machine

Watch for these titles coming soon from NFP!

Fallen: An Anthology of Demonic Horror

Things Falling Apart by JW Schnarr

Wormfood Island by Ken La Salle (2011)

The Blackest Heart by Vince Churchill (2011)

Pandora by Vince Churchill (2011)

Symphony for the Quiet Ones by Michael Scott Bricker (2011)

Alice and Dorothy by JW Schnarr

Wells Unleashed Series

Book 3: Bloodlines: The Diaries of Dr Moreau (2011)

Book 4: Sightlines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’

The Invisible Man (2011)

Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’
The Time Machine

© 2010 by JW Schnarr

Wells Unleashed SeriesTM 2010 by JW Schnarr

This edition of

Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’
The Time Machine

© 2010 by Northern Frights Publishing

Timelines: Stories Inpsired by HG Wells’
The Time Machine

Edited by JW Schnarr

Cover Art and Design © 2010 by Gavro Krackovic

Interior Layout and Design © 2010 by JW Schnarr

All stories © their respective authors. Northern Frights Publishing reserves the right to publish Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’
The Time Machine
in perpetuity.

Northern Frights Publishing is proudly Canadian.

This book is a collection of stories inspired by the Herbert George Wells novel
The Time Machine
. No paradoxes were made during the creation of this book. If you or someone you know was altered or erased from the Timeline as a result of purchasing this book, take heart. NFP now accepts returns from book sellers!

This book is a collection of stories based on the Public Domain work of Herbert George Wells and his novel
The Time Machine.
The characters, names, and places of some of the stories are derivatives of the original work.

For everything ever taken away from us,

And for everything we wish we could have taken back.

Acknowledgements

In no particular order, as always, thanks go out to my sister Janice for her contuinued support of NFP and everything that happens therein; A big thank you and lots of love to my daughter Aurora for making me want to be more than I am, and thank you to my great friends, who continue to buy NFP books and give me encouragement.

Of course, this collection would ber nothing without the artists and authors who contributed to make it so special; and to you, the reader, goes the biggest thanks of all.

Foreword By Paul J. Nahin

The End Of The Experiment By Peter Clines

Love And Glass By Michael Scott Bricker

Perpetual Motion Blues By Harper Hull

Rocking My Dreamboat By Victorya

Spree By John Medaille

The Time Traveller By Vincent L. Scarsella

Correspondence By Ruthanna Emrys

The Woman Who Came To The Paradox By Derek J. Goodman

Midnight At The End Of The Universe By Eric Ian Steele

Happiness Everlasting By Gerald Warfield

Professor Figwort Comes To An Understanding By Jacob Edwards

One One Thousand By William Wood

Doxies By Brandon Alspaugh

Conditional Perfect By Jason Palmer

By His Sacrifice By Daliso Chopanda

Wikihistory By Desmond Warzel

Written By The Winners By Matthew Johnson

Sunlight And Shadows By JW Schnarr And John Sunseri

Xmas By Douglas Hutcheson

Time’s Cruel Geometry By Mark Onspaugh

Kelmscott Manor: In The Attics By Lynn C. A. Gardner

Cast Of Contributors

“
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”

The Holy Bible
Ecclesiastes (ch. III, v. 1-8)

“
Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.”

Michichio Kaku,
Wired
Magazine, Aug. 2003

“
At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for The Time Traveler; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveler vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.”

Herbert George Wells,
The Time Machine

by Paul J. Nahin

University of New Hampshire

“
It is so full of invention and the invention is so wonderful…it must certainly make your reputation.”

- from a September 1894 letter to H. G. Wells from

the editor of the
New Review
, where
The Time Machine

first appeared, in serial form, the following year

Could there be a reader of this book who hasn’t read H.G. Wells’ masterpiece,
The Time Machine
, or seen the 1960 movie (with Rod Taylor as the Time Traveller) based on the novella? I very much doubt it, and so there is little I can say about the story itself that would be new. But what of
Wells
, the man himself?
He
offers me much fresher ground to plow; the scientific background of the man whose genius inspired the tales in this new anthology of time travel tales is a story not nearly so well known.

Wells’ great contribution with
The Time Machine
was to make the
science
part of ‘science fiction’ important. He commented on this, himself, in the Preface to a 1934 collection (
Seven Famous Novels
, Knopf). There he wrote that while all previous attempts at writing fantastic stories depended on magic – or sleeping into the future as in Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward
(published in 1888), or traveling into the past via a knock on the head from a crowbar as in Mark Twain’s
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
, or by some other equally curious mechanism – his did not: “It occurred to me that instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted.” The ‘scientific patter’ in
The Time Machine
is that of the fourth dimension.

The idea of time as the fourth dimension entered the popular mind in 1895 with the publication of the first of Wells’ ‘scientific romances’ (his term; the modern term of
science fiction
was still decades in the future). Wells’
The Time Machine
has never been out of print, and is now recognized as one of the modern classics of the English language. But it didn’t arrive at the printer without some effort. Wells was at first uncertain on just how well he had done in presenting his revolutionary new work, and wrote to the editor at the
New Review
for an opinion on the opening chapter. Back came a letter (from which I’ve taken the opening quotation), and no one who has read the Time Traveler’s story can doubt that Wells’ editor was right.

The novella opens with the Time Traveler (he is never named) expounding during a dinner party on a recondite matter to a group of his friends. As he asserts, “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.” When asked to say more about the fourth dimension, he replies “It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and it is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly – why not another direction at right angles to the other three? – and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb [a Canadian-born American mathematician and astronomer who was quite famous at the time] was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month ago.”

And so he was. Wells was a trained scientist (B.Sc. with first-class honors in zoology and second-class in geology in 1890 from the Royal College of Science), and he quite clearly kept up with technical developments. Certainly he read the British science journal
Nature
(one of his college friends at the Normal School in South Kensington, Richard Gregory, eventually became editor of
Nature
, and one of their teachers, Norman Lockyer, was
Nature
’s first editor), and Wells found Newcomb’s complete address of December 28, 1893 to the New York Mathematical Society (during which he called four-dimensional space “the fairyland of geometry”) reprinted in the magazine (you can look it up for yourself, in the February 1, 1894 issue). In this same talk Newcomb hinted at the modern idea of parallel universes when he said “Add a fourth dimension of space, and there is room for an indefinite number of Universes, all alongside of each other, as there is for an indefinite number of sheets of paper when we pile them upon each other.”

This commentary wasn’t a momentary amusement for Newcomb; he continued to think about the fourth dimension for years. In his 1897 Presidential Address to the American Mathematical Society, for example, Newcomb concluded with the words “We must leave it to posterity to determine whether…the hypothesis of hyperspace can be used as an explanation of observed phenomena.” It was less than two decades later that Einstein did precisely that, explaining gravity in terms of a curved four-dimensional hyperspace (spacetime).

Professor Newcomb’s talk of the fourth dimension influenced Wells well beyond
The Time Machine
, in fact, and he used Newcomb’s imagery as inspiration for two of his other novels;
The Wonderful Visit
(1895) and
Men Like Gods
(1923). In the first novel there is explicit mention of multiple worlds “lying somewhere close together, unsuspecting, as near as page to page in a book,” and in the second novel he speaks of one parallel universe being rotated into another.

Newcomb’s 1893 talk struck a responsive chord in Wells, making him rethink the issue of time as a fourth dimension along which one could travel
at will
. Only weeks after its appearance in
Nature
, he published what would be the opening to
The Time Machine
as an unsigned essay in the March 17, 1894 issue of the
National Observer
, under the title of “Time Traveling. Possibility or Paradox?” This date is of great interest because it firmly establishes (along with the date of Newcomb’s address) that the Time Traveler’s dinner party must have taken place either in January or February of 1894. (This wonderful party did
not
occur in the perfectly awful 2002 remake of the 1960 film, directed by Wells’ own great-grandson Simon Wells. And that was just the
first
of young Simon’s missteps, the next being to place the story in America rather than England and the next to declare the Time Traveler’s name to be—of all things—Alex! If H.G. could come back from the dead he’d give Simon a good Victorian thrashing on his bottom! And a well deserved thrashing it would be, too.)