To Travel Through Time

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Excerpt from To Travel Through Time: In Commemoration of the Centenary of H. G. Wells's "the Time Machine", An Exhibition, October 16-December 31, 1995 But the story of the seven sleepers contains a second element common to later writings: authority. Time-travel invests the narrator with a special distinction. In the present tale, the miracle permits a doctrinal point to be resolved, and it is the miraculous nature of this resolution that is meant to win it credit. This method of winning acceptance is of course not limited to time-travel. Physical distance, too, is used as a guarantee. More's Utopia and Bacon's New Atlantis, Cyrano de Bergerac's L 'états et empires sur les lune et soleil and Swift's Travels of Lemuel Gulliver, all employ this method. Similarly, those who dwelt in the future were, by virtue of hindsight, ostensibly able to survey the past and to comment upon it with greater insight and expertise than any contemporary could command. The idea can still be recognized in the rhetorical cry, history will justify us. The concept of volitional time - travel does not seem to predate H. G. Wells. Of course, not impossibly, he was anticipated. As it is easy enough to discover scattered individuals anticipating various discoveries, so it is not unlikely that the notion occurred to others before Wells. But if there were anyone who was earlier, his or her work appears to be unknown. Before Wells's time-traveller, those who travelled in time did so passively, whether by accident, by divine agency, or by another's impulse. After 1895, the traveller could be an active agent. The concept of a time machine likewise appears to be original to Wells. In one sense, this mechanism was even more in¿uential than the idea of volitional time-travel. Wells's emphasis on physics and engineering as methods for achievement helped create and establish science fiction as a genre. Here however Wells was essentially anticipated by writers like Jules Verne and Lt. Col. Chesney. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.