Weekly Short Story: Barrier by Anthony Boucher

During the past few days I have been rereading my all-time favorite Stephen King novel 11/22/63, an odyssey about time travel.  In line with this theme I picked another time travel "special", the 1942 short story Barrier by Anthony Boucher, which appeared in the collection Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 4 (1942) published by DAW Books in 1980.  You may be familiar with this book, for I've already discussed two tales from it, Mimic by Donald A. Wollheim and Nerves by Lester del Rey...it contains a few other gems as well...

Once you overcome the impossible physics of time travel...at least into the past...the way is open for wild speculation and the paradoxes that can occur.  Neither King in 11/22/63 nor Boucher in Barrier disappoint in this respect.  In Boucher's story, a time machine built in the "advanced" time (from 1942's perspective) of 1973 propels John Trent...hired by the inventor for the trip...500 years into the future.  He finds himself in a stagnant and totalitarian society...science and free thought are prohibited and everything "legal" derives from that time's scriptures and their interpreters, an apparent dig by the author against organized religion.  Everything in this society is run by the principle of Stasis...no societal change, no scientific development...and definitely no time travel...are allowed.  They have gone so far as to construct a barrier to time travel...Trent manages to get through because his machine is from the past.  The Stasis builds another, more effective barrier and at the instant it is activated, many time travelers from the future collide with it...and the conflict between the totalitarian status quo and the future full of inevitable change ensues in earnest, with our hero in the middle of it all...

Change and growth are indispensable to a healthy society, and Anthony Boucher is by no means alone in emphasizing this.  And while principles and precepts can be important guidelines in structuring a society, it is also crucial that people rely on what they can see going on before them with their own eyes and not practice denial of reality in favor of dogma...I see too much of that denial going on in the world around me.  But what I liked the most about Barrier was the time travel speculation...and the ingenious way how Bokor, one of the time travelers from the future, is able to circumvent the Stasis and "beat the system"...