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Could You Have Thought Up Time Travel On Your Own?

I didn’t discover the concept of time travel until September 25, 1965, when the 1960 film version of The Time Machine was shown on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies. That was two months before I turned 14. It blew my mind. The next day at Cutler Ridge Junior High, kids excitedly talked about the movie. Sometime after that, I read the H. G. Wells novella, but I’m not sure when.

I consider The Time Machine by H. G. Wells the most science fictional of all science fiction stories. Not only did it introduce me to the concept of a time machine, but it also introduced me to social evolution, Homo sapiens evolving into different species, the extinction of humankind, the end of the Earth, and the death of the Sun. That’s epic for a 13-year-old in 1965.

I’m pretty sure I’d never have imagined time travel on my own. I think if I had learned about astronomy before discovering science fiction, I could have thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat to go to the Moon or Mars?” on my own. But time travel was a much bigger conceptual breakthrough, one I don’t think I would have made.

Now, I had been a watcher of The Twilight Zone since 1959, when it premiered, and it often played with time. This video lists ten episodes involving some form of time travel.

The episode I remember best is from April 7, 1961, “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim,” where a man from a 19th-century wagon train walks over a hill into the 20th century. Most of the episodes were fantasies about people thrown through time. There was one episode where Buster Keaton had a helmet that let him time-travel, but I don’t remember seeing it as a kid. (Here’s another list that covers 13 episodes featuring some form of time travel.)

On January 13, 1964, I saw “Controlled Experiment” on The Outer Limits. It was the series sole comic episode about two Martians studying humans. They had a machine that could roll back time and replay it. That might be my first inkling of time travel. But I didn’t make the jump to using a machine to travel in time.

How often do we imagine original ideas? Readers and writers sometimes claim that one writer stole an idea from another, but is that fair? Don’t all writers use concepts built up from a long line of previous writers? Like Newton standing on the shoulders of giants. Was the time machine original with H. G. Wells? His ideas about evolution and cosmology came from the popular science of his day. There’s probably no way to document the evolution of the idea of time travel.

I believe that science fiction is a conceptual tool for generating ideas through literary evolution. For every far-out idea you encounter in science fiction, there’s a long history of previous stories that helped evolve that idea. I’d love to have a book, database, or website that creates taxonomic ranks of all science fiction concepts and shows how each evolved over time.

We like to think that science fiction has infinite possibilities, but I have a hunch that it’s finite. If we studied science fiction and developed a classification system for SF story ideas, we’d discover its limitations.

Take time travel. There’s only so much you can do with the concept. I’m currently rewatching the old TV series, The Time Tunnel, from the 1966/1967 television season. The same season that Star Trek premiered. The Time Tunnel, like Quantum Leap, allowed its protagonists to jump around in time. But in both treatments, you quickly realize how limiting time travel is as a plot device. Most time travel stories end up being about their destinations, not the concept itself. H. G. Wells milked the idea for most of its worth in The Time Machine.

Time travel stories generally produce historical or romance fiction.

Robert A. Heinlein knew this, so he published “—All You Zombies—” in 1959, a fantastic satire on the concept. Heinlein pushed time travel to its limits. Just look at this plot diagram.

Another brilliant example of imagining the nature of time is “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. Wikipedia quotes Chiang as having several sources of inspiration. I interpreted the story to mean that the heptapods perceive time all at once, and Louise’s learning their language affected her awareness of time. This reminded me of Heinlein’s first story, “Life Line,” where the protagonist invents a machine to see a person’s life as one long being, letting him know when it ends. Great science fiction about time has to constantly push the envelope, but like these two stories, is any idea a singular, isolated event in time?

Most science fiction is set in the future. That makes most science fiction essentially a time travel story. History is a well-established academic pursuit. That’s why time travel to the past, like stories by Connie Willis, is really a kind of historical fiction. And stories about going to the future allow writers to speculate and extrapolate. But most writers do that by just setting their stories in the future.

Today, science fiction that uses time travel often uses the concept to play with entertaining plot ideas. Most of what I really admired about The Time Machine, Olaf Stapledon explored in Last and First Men and Star Maker. Wells invented the time machine as a gimmick, a plot gimmick. And if you think about it, a time machine is always a plot gimmick. Just watch all those episodes of The Twilight Zone.

The mind-blowing parts of Wells’ story explore the evolution of humanity, the fate of the Earth, the solar system, and the galaxy. This is the real meat and potatoes of science fiction.

James Wallace Harris, 5/11/26

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“The Last Day” by Richard Matheson

Group Read 92 (#04 of 25)

“The Last Day” by Richard Matheson was first published in the April-May 1953 issue of Amazing Stories. You can read it online here. Or you can buy The Best of Richard Matheson in various media editions here. Or look at its reprint history to see if you already own it in an anthology.

Our reading group is reading 25 short stories recommended by five group members. They are stories we haven’t read as a group, but ones the five people thought we shouldn’t miss. I didn’t submit this time, but “The Last Day” would have been one of the stories I would have submitted. Three of my favorite SF short stories from 1953 are “The Last Day,” “Lot” by Ward Moore, and “Deadly City” by Paul W. Fairman. I admire these stories because they were so gritty, even brutal.

Science fiction has often dealt with post-apocalyptic stories but “The Last Day” is about the end of the world. Some astronomical object is about to crash into the Earth. It’s not specified. The story begins in the morning of the last day and ends in the evening just before the end of everything on Earth.

I have often read and thought about surviving an apocalypse. I have often contemplated my own death. And I’ve always been fascinated by stories about people with a terminal illness and what they did with their remaining days.

But I haven’t thought about what I would do if everyone had just one day to live. It’s a neat concept to ponder. After reading “The Last Day” I’m not sure I’d need to read another story on the same idea. “The Last Day” gets the job done so nicely that I can’t imagine anyone topping it.

For this reading, I read the story with my eyes and then listened to it with my ears. I was impressed by its drama. Richard Matheson is famous for writing over a dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone. Many of Matheson’s stories and novels were adapted for television and the movies, and he wrote many screenplays. Matheson knows how to create drama.

“The Last Day” begins with Richard waking up in a room full of passed-out people. Several are naked, and it’s obvious that a drunken orgy had taken place the night before. When Richard goes into the bathroom to clean up a bit, he finds a dead man in the tub. Richard enters the kitchen where a friend, Spencer, is frying eggs. By now, we’ve realized that life on Earth is about to end.

Richard wishes he were with Mary, a woman he loved but didn’t commit to. His friend Norman comes into the kitchen and tells Richard he wants to go see his mother. Norman asks Richard if he wants to see his mother. Richard dreads the idea because he knows his mother will preach religion at him, and he doesn’t want to hear it.

After Spencer leaves to have more sex with a woman who wants everyone to watch, Norman begs Richard to drive him to his mother’s house. We learn that riots are going on all over the city. Many people have committed suicide, but others run wild, murdering each other.

All of this is amazingly adult for a science fiction story in 1953, especially published in a magazine mostly read by young adults. That issue seemed atypical for Amazing Stories. It also had stories by Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Murray Leinster. It was edited by Howard Browne. I feel I need to reevaluate that era of the magazine. 1953 was a boom year for science fiction magazines. I’ve written about it before. I believe the Cold War had a significant impact on the genre that year. Just look at some of the other notable stories from 1953.

Richard eventually finds his mother at his sister’s house. There’s a poignant scene of his sister and her husband getting their daughter to take sleeping pills, and Richard watching all three commit suicide. And finally, Richard has a moving moment with his mother while they wait to die.

The story is cleanly told. Direct. It covers many bases without getting wordy. 5-stars.

James Wallace Harris, 4/29/25

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THE TWILIGHT ZONE – “And When the Sky Was Opened”

The first episode I can remember seeing of The Twilight Zone was “Eye of the Beholder,” which was broadcast on November 11, 1960. I would turn nine on the 25th. I remember seeing it with my mother and sister in Marks, Mississippi. We had just moved from New Jersey, and the culture shock from living up north to that of the deep south was about as shocking as a Twilight Zone episode. “Eye of the Beholder” was the episode where everyone had pig faces, and a beautiful girl by our standards thought she looked ugly because she didn’t look like everyone else. That show was from the second season.

I have no memory of seeing anything from the first season when it premiered, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t. I would have been seven when the show began, and I don’t remember much about being seven.

I bring all this up because for The Twilight Zone to work, the audience had to suspend belief. My perception of the show at 72 is much different from my perception of the show at eight. I can’t say for sure, but The Twilight Zone might have been my introduction to science fiction, although I didn’t know the term at that time.

Growing up with The Twilight Zone in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a trip. I was a gullible kid and easily fooled. Rod Serling and his stories were spooky, eerie, strange, and sometimes scary. I’d love to observe my eight-year old mind when I watched that TV show. How many unrealistic fantastic themes did I believe back then?

I bring all this up because watching “And When the Sky Was Opened” you have to wonder about what Rod Serling expected of his audience. Serling introduces the episode while we look at a rocket in a hanger under a tarp:

Her name: X-20. Her type: an experimental interceptor. Recent history: a crash landing in the Mojave Desert after a thirty-one hour flight nine hundred miles into space. Incidental data: the ship, with the men who flew her, disappeared from the radar screen for twenty-four hours.

The story begins with Lt. Colonel Clegg Forbes (Rod Taylor) visiting Maj. William Gart (Jim Hutton) in the hospital. Forbes is a nervous wreck. Gart wants to know what’s going on. Forbes tells him yesterday that three of them came back from this mission, but today they are only two of them, and no one remembers Col. Ed Harrington (Charles Aidman). When Gart tells Forbes he’s never heard of Harrington, Forbes starts breaks down. He tells his version of the previous day, and how he loses Harrington. At one point, Harrington tells Forbes that he thinks that some one doesn’t want them there anymore. Eventually, Forbes disappears, and Gart goes crazy, because no one remembers him. Then, we see Gart disappearing, and then a doctor and nurse discussing an empty hospital room. Finally, we are shown the hanger where the X-20 was in the first scene. It’s no longer there, the tarp folded up on the floor.

On my Blu-ray edition, there’s an extra for this episode where we hear Serling giving a speech to college students about writing. He says the core of this story is accepting the idea that someone doesn’t want those men to be here anymore. Serling says if you can’t suspend your belief for that one point, the story won’t work.

That might be the essence of The Twilight Zone. Let’s pretend that one impossible thing is possible. That just Mr. Serling and we the audience know the full truth about reality. That we see what the characters never know. In other words, this is a game of pretend for grownups. (Even though a lot of children like myself watched The Twilight Zone, I can’t help but feel that the show was aimed at adults.)

The show never expects us to believe any of this. But us kids, we wanted to believe, and so did all the nutballs of the 1950s, the ones who believed in flying saucers, Bridey Murphy, Chris Costner Sizemore, Edgar Cayce, and science fiction. Those people Philip K. Dick called crap artists in his novel Confessions of a Crap Artist. The people who wanted reality to be a lot further out than its already far out existence.

If Philip K. Dick had been the host and main writer of The Twilight Zone the episodes would have been a lot edgier, with a lot more paranoia. He would ask us to believe that there were gods or beings capable of making us disappear from reality. You might think Dick’s work up until Valis was just for fun like Serling’s The Twilight Zone. But once you read Valis, you realize PKD believed strange things were possible. That there is a hidden reality behind ours.

When watching this episode I realized we had a unique perspective as the viewer. We get to see a larger reality, one that the characters in the show don’t get to see. This is the basis of gnosticism. It’s also the basis of stories by Philip K. Dick. Most science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers don’t use this perspective. In their stories, there’s one reality. I need to keep an eye out for gnostic fiction. Some science fiction and fantasy have always played around with it.

“And When the Sky Was Opened” is about astronauts before NASA’s Mercury Seven. Was Serling really thinking something might not want us to travel in space? I know my grandmother believed that. Just before we landed on the Moon, my grandmother told me that God would strike down the Apollo astronauts. She was born in 1881, and had seen a lot of stuff, but going to the Moon was too much.

Since the Internet has revealed that billions think crazy things I have to wonder what Serling really thought. He was socialy conscious guy. Many of his Twilight Zone episodes have morals. But was he weird like PKD?

When we watch The Twilight Zone, at least back in 1959, was Serling really saying that it’s all just a bit of fun, or did he ever believe that things sometimes do go bump in the night? And what’s the difference between believing in weird possibilities, and pretending to believe in them? Isn’t pretending close to wanting to believe in them?

James Wallace Harris, 10/31/24 (weird topic for Holloween)