Time Flies
The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, was not the first literary work involving time travel. Not by a long shot. The Mahabharata, one of the great Sanskrit epics from India, includes a story of King Kadhumi, who leaves his earthly realm and visits Brahma. After listening to celestial music, the King returns home to discover that many centuries have passed. Oral versions of this story are believed to date back well before the Common Era.
Numerous other ancient tales – from Japan and the Middle East, for example – also involve characters experiencing radical shifts in chronology, tropes that more modern authors employed in such works Rip Van Winkle and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
The 1895 novel by H.G. Wells, from which we drew the quote in this week’s acrostic, is probably the first to feature a mechanical device in which someone can intentionally travel through time and can control, at least to some extent, how far into the future or the past to go. And whoever came up with the version of that device used in the 1960 film of The Time Machine and pictured above had a stroke of brilliance, in our view.
The genre of time travel has grown explosively since 1895, perhaps aided by Albert Einstein and others who taught us about the space-time continuum and offered us the counterintuitive notion that time can move at different speeds and proceed in other strange ways. (If any of you can explain these concepts to us in sixth-grade terms, please feel free.) That growth in the time travel genre provided us with lots of fodder for thematic clues and answers. Which ones are your favorites?
One of our favorites – alright, one of Dave’s favorites – appears as Answer I and in this iconic video: