Time Travel Stories

During our stay at Ormond Beach recently, we went and saw Walt Disney's Meet the Robinsons. I enjoyed the movie, which was a Toy Story-like computer animated story about a boy inventor who is drawn into an intricate time travel crisis by a boy from the future named Wilbur Robinson (who looks a bit like Jim Carrey). It's full of the standard paradoxes you'd find in another time travel film, Back to the Future.

Aside from H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, my most memorable time travel stories were four written in the years 1941-1950 and all dealt with the paradoxes and ramifications of time travel. The best, to me, of the bunch was By His Bootstraps, written by Robert Heinlein in 1941. If you read no other time travel stories, read this one. But if this story whets your appetite for more, then I recommend Anthony Boucher's story Barrier, which came out the next year. Both By His Bootstraps and Barrier have surprise plot twists and knock-out endings. And if you want to see how utterly convoluted and complicated a time travel story can get, then read E.A. van Vogt's Recruiting Station, also from 1942. The impression I got while reading this story was that the author couldn't figure out a satisfactory way to end it and, as a result, kept getting himself (and his readers) more and more deeply mired in a big mess! I recommend Recruiting Station if you want to have a good laugh! Probably the biggest side-splitter in the genre of time travel stories is Cyril Kornbluth's masterpiece of sarcasm The Little Black Bag from 1950, though it is more about the moving of inanimate objects through time than of people.

But coming back to The Time Machine, I haven't read it yet, but did see the excellent movie made in 1960. From the movie, it seemed that Wells was more interested in conveying his social views as to where the human race was headed in both the near and far future than he was in exploring the possibilities involved in travelling through time. Even today, the movie's special effects resonate, especially the part when the time traveller observes the changes going on outside looking out of his window as he travels forward on his time machine year by year in the span of minutes.

As for Meet the Robinsons, this was a more than a funny animated story with a time travel twist. It also had a moral: keep moving forward! For even though we don't physically zip back and forth from the past into the future and all around, we do exactly that in what we dwell on in our thoughts. "Keep moving forward" were Walt Disney's own words urging his company's leaders onward with a proactive vision for the future, but it can apply to you and me as well.