The Big List of Time Travel Adventures

 1925 to 1939



  
 The World Below #1
The Amphibians: A Romance of 500,000 Years
by S. Fowler Wright
First publication: 1925

After two time travelers head to the far future and never return, the story’s narrator pursues them and encounters one monstrous being after another, including, of course, the Amphibian himself, all as a setting to write about morality.

The work was reprinted in 1930 as the first part of The World Below along with a second part (later called The Dwellers.

 Its true enough, what theyve told you, as far as we can tell it. As to theories of time and space, I know no more than you do. I used to think they were obvious. Ive heard the Professor talk two nights a week for three years, and Ive realised that it isnt all quite as simple as it seemed, though I dont get much further. But the next rooms a fact. We lay things down on the central slab, and the room goes dark, and we go back in two minutes, and it gets light again, and theyre still there. And the Professor says hes projected them 500,000 years ahead in the interval, and they dont look any the worse for the journey. 






   Felix the Cat
created by Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer
First time travel: 23 Aug 1925

Perhaps the first time travel in cartoons is Felix in “Trifles with Time,” where the silent, surreal cat negotiates with Father Time for a trip to a better age. After appropriate payment, Father Time obliges and Felix goes back to a stone age with dinosaurs.

 A cat cant live nowadays—turn me back to a better age, just for a day. 




   The Road to Yesterday
adapted by Jeanie MacPherson and Beulah Marie Dix (Cecille B. DeMille, director)
First release: 15 Nov 1925

Although Dix was one of the writers of this silent movie, I didn't see much resemblance between the movie and Dix’s earlier play of the same name. In the movie, bickering newlyweds Kenneth and Malena Paulton are thrown back to previous lives in Elizabethan England where they are a knight and a gypsy.

 I know I love you, Ken! But today—during the marriage service—something seemed to reach out of the Past that made me—afraid! 



No Time Travel.
Move along.
The Dream by H.G. Wells [just a dream ]

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald [just a wish ]

from the 1946 production by the Progressive Players Amateur Drama Company (Gateshead, England)

   Berkeley Square
by John L. Balderston and Jack C. Squire
First performance: 6 Oct 1926

Based on Henry James’s The Sense of the Past, Balderston’s play follows modern-day American Peter Standish who exchanges place with his American Revolution ancestor. Leslie Howard starred in the 1929 Broadway run. Some sources list Jack C. Squire as a coauthor.

 [The same room, at the same time, on the same day, in 1928. Most of the furniture remains, but the tone of time has settled upon it, and there are some changes.] 

—from the stage directions


   “The Assault on Milagro Castle”
by J.M. Hiatt
First publication: Weird Tales, Nov 1926

The narrator, visiting Count Ramon Nuñez in Spain hears a story of a group of attacking Moors who simply disappeared 700 years ago, a story he doesn't believe until the same group reappears and continues the attack.

1941 edition   The Burning Ring
by Katharine Burdekin
First publication: 1927

In the decade before Tolkien, Derbyshire author Burdikin wrote of young Robert Carling who had a magic ring of his own, a ring that took him to ancient Rome, the age of Charles II, and the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

   The Strange Inventor
by Mark Powell Hyde
First publication: 1927

Young Johnny Devlin falls in with Mr. Merlin who first sends him on adventures with various inventions, then sends him to Arthurian England (where Mr. Merlin is Merlin), and finally sends him to the future (where Mr. Merlin rules the world).

   “The Lost Continent”
by Cecil B. White
First publication: Amazing, Jul 1927

Mad scientist Joseph Lamont builds a time machine to prove his brother’s theories about Atlantis, and then he takes a passenger ship back 12,000 years.

   The Time-Raider
by Edmond Hamilton
First publication: Weird Tales, Oct 1927–Jan 1928

Our narrator, Wheeler, and a great scientist, Landin, listen to Cannell’s story of being abducted and rapidly taken forward three years in time by a shapeless form, and when Cannell is again taken, they build a time machine to follow him.

 Held in its shapeless form were men, who hung helpless in its grasp. 


   “The Astounding Discoveries of Doctor Mentiroso”
by A. Hyatt Verrill
First publication: Amazing, Nov 1927

Professor Feromeno Mentiroso of the Universidad Santo Tomas argues with his friend about the time-traveling effects of rapidly traveling through many time zones.

 Don Feromeno nodded and smiled. “Then let us assume that your purely imaginary aircraft is capable of traveling at the rate of 24,000 miles per hour or that, in an hour's time, you can circumnavigate the earth. In that case, starting from Lima at noon on Monday, and rushing eastward, you would arrive in Barcelona at 6.30 P. M. on Monday, though your watch would show it to be 12.15 P. M. You would reach Calcutta at 1 A. M. Tuesday, although still only 12.20 on Monday by your watch. At Hawaii you would find time had leaped back to 7.30 A. M. Monday, despite the fact that your watch showed 12.45 of the same day, and at 1 P.  on Monday by your watch you would be back in Lima where the clocks would prove to that it was 2 P. M. despite the fact that you had been absent only one hour. 


   The Dancing Cavalier
by Don Lockwood, Cosmo Brown and Kathy Seldon (Roscoe Dexter, director)
First release: Soon after the Oct 1927 release of The Jazz Singer

Of course, this shouldn't be in my list, because Cosmo himself says that it’s all just a dream, but when my friend Jim pointed out that The Dancing Cavalier (née The Dueling Cavalier) was a dream-based time-travel movie, I couldn’t resist putting it on my list.

 Hows this? We throw a modern section into the picture. The heros a young hoofer in a Broadway show, right? Now he sings and he dances, right? But one night backstage, hes reading A Tale of Two Cities, in between numbers, see? And a sandbag falls and hits him on the head, and he dreams hes back during the French Revolution, right? Well, this way we get in the modern dancing numbers—♫Charleston, Charlston♫—but in the dream part, we can still use the costume stuff! 


   “The Isle of Lost Souls”
by Joel Martin Nichols, Jr.
First publication: Weird Tales Dec 1928 - Feb 1929

In search of a lost Russian treasure, Dr. Trask sends himself and his compatriots back and forth between the 1920s and the present day, 2014 A.D.



  The World Below #2
The Dwellers
by S. Fowler Wright
First publication: 1929

After the monster-fest of The Amphibians, the narrator is captured by the rulers of the far-flung future: superintelligent beings who dwell underground.

This second part of the story was combined with The Amphibians in 1929 and published as a single volume called The World Below. In 1954, it was published on it’s own as The Dwellers.

 I know from what you have shown me already, that you come of a race which has lived only on the earths surface, and any cave or tunnel by which you enter it implies the approach to a confined and narrow space, so that when you attempt to visualise the condition of a race which lives under the surface, your imagination is of a cave, and not of a country. 


   The Rebel Passion
by Katharine Burdekin (as by Kay Burdekin)
First publication: 1929

Twelfth-century monk Giraldus of Glastonbury, a man with the soul of a woman, is taken by a Child of God to see the epochs of time from the emergence of man from primeval slime through 21st-century Britain where women have equal rights, unfit people are sterilized, and dark-skinned people have been relocated out of Europe. By the fourth millennium, this muddled book shows an all-Christian Europe of happy people.

Most of my early listings without quotations are based on reviews in Bleiler’s Science Fiction: The Early Years.   The Time-Journey of Dr. Barton:
An Engineering and Sociological Forecast Based on Prestne Possibilities

by John Lawrence Hodgson
First publication: 1929

Dr. Barton travels to the year 3927 where the world’s population has grown to an unimaginable eight billion, but fear not! The utopian society has elimated waste from poor economic systems of the past, and all inhabitants now work (by choice) for but one month per year.



   “The Hounds of Tindalos”
by Frank Belknap Long
First publication: Weird Tales, Mar 1929

Chalmers, a man of mysticism but also of science, sends his mind back to the origin of the Earth and beyond where beings he calls the Hounds detect him and pursue him back to the present.

 “Then you do not entirely despise science.”
   “Of course not,” he affirmed. “I merely distrust the scientific positivism of the past fifty years, the positivism of Haeckel and Darwin and of Mr. Bertrand Russell. I believe that biology has failed pitifully to explain the mystery of mans origin and destiny.
 




   Cuddles: A Flapper in King Arthur’s Court
by Charles Forbell
First publication: Kay Features, 4 Mar 1929

After a car crash, Cuddles, our favorite flapper, finds herself in Camelot where she is unflappable.

 P-p-peace! Ye half d-d-d-dressed dragon! Ye wot not w-w-what ye good Kynge Arthur will think of such an t-t-t-tantalizing reflection of c-c-cr-creation! 


   “The Shadow Girl”
by Ray Cummings
First publication: Argosy, 22 Jun - 13 Jul 1929

In the year 7012 A.D., scientist Poul and his beautiful (shadowy) granddaughter Lea construct a tall tower that can travel throughout time in the area that is presently Central Park in New York City, but an evil mimic creates his own tower from which he conducts time raids (most often involving Lea), and counter-raids ensue.

Lea is but one of the prolific Cummings’s many girls! You can also have the Girl in the Golden Atom, the Sea Girl, the Snow Girl, the Gadget Girl, the Thought Girl, the Girl from Infinite Smallness, and the Onslaught of the Druid Girls.

 No vision this! Reality! Empty space, two moments ago. Then a phantom, a moment ago. But a real tower, now! Solid. As real, as existent—now—as these rocks, these trees! 


The first of the three stories was reprinted in the Sep 1968 Amazing.   The Paradox Stories
by Charles Cloukey
First story: Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1929

In the first story, Hawkinson receives a manuscript written in the hand of his friend Cannes and detailing how to build a time machine, which he does in order to send Cannes into the future to learn how to build a time machine and, thus, send the manuscript back to Hawkinson. More paradoxes (not to mention Martian plans to blow up the Earth) abound in the two sequels.
  1. Paradox (Summer 1929) Amazing Stories Quarterly
  2. Paradox+ (Jul 1930) Amazing Stories
  3. Anachronism (Dec 1930) Amazing Stories

 Cannes told of his life in that far future year, of his mystification at the circumstances surrounding the origin of that manuscript, which was used before it was made and could not hae been made if it hadnt been previously used. He told us of the grandfather argument, and also of the time when he was actually and physically in two different places at one and the same time. 

—Paradox+


   “Rays and Men”
by Miles J. Breuer
First publication: Amazing Stories Quarterly Summer 1929

Our narrator, Dr. Atwood, goes into a long sleep (because of an experimental anaestetic) and wakes in 2180 where everyone is peaceful living under an autocratic government that forbids strong emotion and says no to the doctor marrying the nurse he falls in love with, at which point he is disintigrated and reawakens in his own time.





   Stories of Addison, Time Traveler
by Henrik Dahl Juve
First story: Air Wonder Stories, Aug 1929

After wandering around the fourth and fifth dimensions for some time, 20th century scientist Theodore A. Addison rematerializes himself in a 28th century filled with many amazing inventions and a war between the west and the Occidentals. In his review of the story, Robert Jennings notes that “Every few paragraphs in the story everything stops as the protagonist inquires about the science behind some future marvel.” In all, three stories were set in this world, although only the first two (“The Silent Destroyer” and “The Sky Maniac”) featured Addison; the third (“The Vanishing Fleet”), according to Everett F. Bleiler, was an adventure set against the same background.

Apparently, Juve and his wife lived just down the road from me (in Moscow, ID) while I was bean’ edicated in Pullman, but I didn’t know of him then.

 As they watched, paralyzed, the building and air barge fell apart and hurtled toward the earth. The entire train had been split from end to end. The attacker now swung back and the then darted away. 

—The Sky Maniac


   “The Time Deflector”
by Edward L. Rementer
First publication: Amazing, Dec 1929

When Professor Melville’s theories on time travel are generally ridiculed, he reacts by sending his daughter’s suitor to the year 6925, where he finds a culture that has taken all the worst features of the 1920s to extremes.

 The reader will have come to the conclusion the world of 6925 was inhabited by fools, or madmen. 



No Time Travel.
Move along.
“The Seventh Generation” by Harl Vincent, Amazing Stories Quarterly, Winter 1929 [just a dream ]



   Last and First Men
by Olaf Stapledon
First publication: 1930

Time travel plays only a tiny role in this classic story of the history of men over the coming two billion years—in that the story itself is transmitted through time into the brain of a 20th century writer.

 This book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future. The brain that conceives and writes these sentences lives in the time of Einstein. Yet I, the true inspirer of this book, I who have begotten it upon that brain, I who influence that primitive being's conception, inhabit an age which, for Einstein, lies in the very remote future. 


   “Into the 28th Century”
by Lilith Lorraine
First publication: Wonder Stories Quarterly, Spring 1930

A man is pulled into the future year of 2730 where Iris, a beautiful young woman, takes him on a tour of their eutopia.



   “Creatures of the Light”
by Sophie Wenzel Ellis
First publication: Astounding, Feb 1930

I think this was the first time-travel story that Astounding ever ran, although the time travel is incidental to the story in which handsome Northwood pursues an artificially created superman who can jump just a few moments into the future.

 Before Northwoods horrified sight, he vanished; vanished as though he had turned suddenly to air and floated away. 






   Astounding’s The Readers’ Corner
edited by Harry Bates
First letters column: Astounding Stories of Super Science, Mar 1930

Before modern-day blogs and online fora, before Astounding Science Fictions Brass Tacks letters’ column, there was The Readers’ Corner of Astounding Stories of Super Science, where at the leisurely pace of once a month, readers vehemently mixed it up about all topics—including time travel.

 Dear Editor: Thus far the chief objection to time traveling has been this: if a person was sent back into the past or projected into the future, it would be possible for said person to interfere most disastrously with his own birth. —Arthur Berkowitz, 768 Beck Street, Bronx, N.Y. (Mar 1932)

Dear Editor: I write this letter to comment, not on the stories, which satisfy me, but on a few letters in the “Corner” of the March issue; especially Mr. Berkowitz’ letter. . . . Since he brought up the question of the time-traveler interfering disasterously with his own birth, I will discuss it. . . . Back he goes into time and meets his grandfather, before his fathers birth. For some reason John kills his grandfather. —Robert Feeney, 5334 Euclid, Kansas City, Mo. (Jun 1932)

Dear Editor: I read and enjoyed Mr. Feeneys interesting letter in the June issue, but wish to ask: Why pick on grandfather? . . . This incessant murdering of harmless ancestors must stop. —Donald Allgeier, Mountain Grove, Mo. (Jan 1933)
 


   “An Adventure in Time”
by Francis Flagg
First publication: Science Wonder Stories, Apr 1930

When a small time machine appears in Professor Bayers’s lab, he builds a larger copy and travels to the future, which is ruled by Amazon women.



   “Monsters of Moyen”
by Arthur J. Burks
First publication: Astounding, Apr 1930

When the U.S. is attacked with monsters and combination submarine/aeroplanes by the Asian demagog Moyen, it's up to Professor Mariel to find a way to save the country, possibly even through the manipulation of time!

 In this, I have even been compelled to manipulate in the matter of time! I must not only defeat and annihilate the minions of Moyen, but must work from a mathematical absurdity, so that at the moment of impact that moment itself must become part of the past, sufficiently remote to remove the monsters at such distance from the earth that not even the might genius of Moyen can return them! 




   “The Atom-Smasher”
by Victor Rousseau
First publication: Astounding, May 1930

We've got the evil Professor Tode who modifies an atom-smasher into a time machine that travels to the paleolithic age and Atlantis, a fatherly older professor, his beautiful young daughter (menaced by evil Tode), casually written racist pronouncements (by Rousseau), and our hero scientist, dashing Jim Dent. But my favorite sentence was the brief description of quantum mechanics, which I didn’t expect in a 1930 science fiction tale.

 The Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of a body cannot vary continuously, but only by a certain finite amount, or exact multiples of this amount, had been the key that unlocked the door. 


   “The Time Ray of Jandra”
by Raymond A. Palmer
First publication: Wonder Stories, Jun 1930

Sylvester Gale, shipwrecked on the west coast of Africa, discovers a long lost civilization and finds himself back there, but unable to interact; when the civilization’s scientists manage to set off a lava explosion, Gale is thrown forward, but overshoots his original time of 1944 by 13 years.

This is the first published story of fan, writer and long-time editor Raymond A. Palmer.

   “The Time Valve”
by Miles J. Breuer
First publication: Wonder Stories, Jul 1930

In an earlier story (“The Fitzgerald Contraction”), survivors of the sinking of Mu (or Mo, as they called it) travel into space at relativistic speeds only to return to Earth some 200,000 years later. That, of course, is mere time dilation rather than time travel; but in this sequel, the Moans along with present-day beauty Vayill continue even further into the Earth’s future where trouble ensues until Vayill’s aged father comes to the rescue with a real time machine in an airplane.

   The 20,000 A.D. Stories
by Nat Schachner and Arthur Leo Zagat
First story: Wonder Stories, Sep 1930

Tom Jenkins heads into the “Vanishing Woods” to prove that there’s nothing dangerous about them, but he doesn’ return until six months later, and he refuses to talk about where he’s been and what he’ seen—but fortunately for us, the titles of the two Wonder Story stories (“In 20,000 A.D.” in Sep 1930 and “Back to 20,000 A.D.” in Mar 1931) gives us a big clue, although it doesn’t tell us that the world he visits is divided into cold-hearted Masters and their four-armed, giant human Robots.

The use of the word “robot” had not yet evolved from Čapek’s meaning of a humanoid laborer to the modern usage as a purely mechanical being.

 True, he says, the Masters are far advanced, an able to do lots o thingsas a result. Theyve learnt everything there was to be learnt, they can live on the earth, in the air, in the water, or underground; they can travel to the other stars; they know how the world come about an when its ending, they think great thoughts anthings I couldnt even understand, but, he says, what about the Robots? 




   “The Man Who Saw the Future”
aka “The Man Who Saw Everything”
by Edmond Hamilton
First publication: Amazing, Oct 1930

Henri Lothiere, an apothecary’s assistant in 1444 Paris, must face charges of sorcery at an inquisition into his supposed disappearance and subsequent return from 1944 Paris.

 Then the car rolled swiftly forward, bumping on the ground, and then ceased to bump. I looked down, then shuddered. The ground was already far beneath! I too, was flying in the air! 


   “The Pineal Stimulator”
by Inga Stephens Pratt and Fletcher Pratt (as by I.M. Stephens and Fletcher Pratt)
First publication: Amazing, Nov 1930

Maddish scientist Jimmy Casmey first gets his college buddy to experience ancestral memories of a Civil War soldier and then a paleolithic man, at which point Casmey realizes that his device can also allow experiences of future descendants.

   “The Time Annihilator”
by Edgar A. Manley and Walter Thode
First publication: Wonder Stories, Nov 1930

When genius Larry Stenson disappears into the future, his two friends follow him to the year 2418 where the world is ruled by cruel, giant superhumans—a fate for Earth that the trio discovers cannot be changed, even with a time machine.

 We have purposely allowed our time travellers to become known to the people of the eras that they visit, for in this way the great drama of the story becomes apparent. 




   “The Uncharted Isle”
by Clark Ashton Smith
First publication: Weird Tales, Nov 1930

A man, adrift in the Pacific, washes up on an island where none of the men (or the giant ape) see or interact with him, which leads him to conclude that part of him is in the bygone past.

 Is there a part of the Pacific that extends beyond time and space—an oceanic limbo into which, by some unknowable cataclysm, that island passed in a bygone period, even as Lemuria sank beneath the wave? And if so, by what abrogation of dimensional laws was I enabled to reach the island and depart from it? 


The story also appeared in this 1935 collection.   “The Man Who Lived Backwards”
by Algernon Blackwood
First publication: World Radio (broadcast guide), 12 Dec 1930

Professor Zeitt posits that all of time always exists and he should be able to break the usual serial traversal of time in order to influence his earlier self to not get into a bad marriage.


No Time Travel.
Move along.
“Phantoms of Reality” by Ray Chandler, Astounding, Jan 1930 [parallel universes ]

The Royal Four-Flusher by Arthur Hurley (Murray Roth, director), 16 May 1930 [secondary world ]
Sadly, I haven’t found a copy of this early talkie with possible, but unlikely, time travel. I say “unlikely” because the hero is transported to a land of kings and queens and fair maidens, but it could be a fantasyland as much as a time in the past. According to imdb, the soundtrack included “Here We Are”, although that song was also sung earlier by Annette Hanshaw for a 1929 animated film, Sita Sings the Blues.

Just Imagine by Buddy G. DeSylva, Lew Brown, et. al. (David Butler, director), 23 Nov 1930 [long sleep ]

  Via the Time Accelerator”
by Francis J. Brueckel, Jr. (as by Frank J. Bridge)
First publication: Wonder Stories, Jan 1931

Mathematician and physicist Anton Brookhurst takes a trip 1,000,000 years into the future in a machine that was inspired by H.G. Wells and explained (in this story) by a series of official-looking equations, but, unlike in The Time Machine, Brookhurst’s machine resides in an airplane, and Brookhurst himself examines various paradoxes, such as: Would he have been brave enough to embark on the journey had he not first seen himself safely return?

 
T  =  t
 √ℓ - v²/c²  
 


   “A Flight into Time”
by Robert H. Wilson
First publication: Wonder Stories, Feb 1931

Ted Storrs is inexplicably transported from 1933 to 2189 (I almost thought, Hooray! Not a round number of years!—but it turns out to be 28 years into the future) where he is amazed by the air traffic congestion, beamed atomic power, casual nudity, interplanetary travel, and more.



   “The Meteor Girl”
by Jack Williamson
First publication: Astounding, Mar 1931

When a meteor lands on the beachfront airfield of our narrator and his partner Charlie King, Charlie realizes that it provides a portal through space-time through which they view the death-at-sea of Charlie’s ex-fiancée.

 A terrestrial astronomer may reckon that the outburst on Nova Persei occurred a century before the great fire of London, but an astronomer on the Nova may reckon with equal accuracy that the great fire occurred a century before the outburst on the Nova. 


Jack Williamson, Master Traveller

In the 1930s alone, Williamson had five classic time travel stories culminating with “The Legion of Time,” to be followed by what has to be the first of the let’s-kill-Hitler stories and another seven decades of unmatched science fiction.



   “The Empire of Glass”
by Frank Miloche
First publication: Wonder Stories Quarterly, Spring 1931

A present-day man puts on a helmet that lets him view the future where a scientist named Nebor outlines his plans to save mankind from giant insects by transporting all men to either the distant past or the far future.

   “An Adventure in Futurity”
by Clark Ashton Smith
First publication: Wonder Stories, Apr 1931

Conrad Elkins, an scientist from 15,000 A.D. who hopes to find a solution to the problem of too many male babies in his time, strikes up a friendship with Hugh in present-day New York City, eventually inviting Hugh to return with him to a future of infinite leisure where Venusian slaves with Martian overseers outnumber humans five-to-one.

 And do you ever think that present-day New York will some time be as fragmentary and fabulous as Troy or Zimbabwe? That archaeologists may delve in its ruins, beneath the sevenfold increment of later cities, and find a few rusting mechanisms of disputed use, and potteries of doubtful date, and inscriptions which no one can decipher? 




   The Exile of Time
by Ray Cummings
First publication: Astounding Stories, Apr–Jul 1931

George Rankin and his best friend Larry rescue an hysterical Mistress Mary Atwood from a locked New York City basement only to find that she believes she’s come from more than 150 years in the past, chased by a crazy man named Tugh and his mad robot, Migul.

 Lets try and reduce it to rationality. The cage was—is, I should ay, since of course it still exists—that cage is a Time-traveling vehicle. It is traveling back and forth through Time, operated by a Robot. 




   A Connecticut Yankee
adapted by William M. Conselman (David Butler, director)
First release: 6 Apr 1931

At the beginning, this version of the story borrows a bit from Frankenstein (a mad scientist) and H.G. Wells (who invents a time machine), but in the end, poor Hank Morgan (actually, Hank “Martin” in this case, portrayed by Will Rogers) still ends up at the round table predicting an eclipse.

 Think! Think of hearing Lincolns own voice delivering the Gettysburg address! 




   “Worlds to Barter”
by John Wyndham (as by John B. Harris)
First publication: Wonder Stories, May 1931

In Wyndham’s first published story, Jon Lestrange (the distant descendant of the world’s foremost inventor) comes back to the moment of his ancestor’s greatest invention with a story of how his own time was invaded by the people of the 5022nd century, demanding to change temporal places with the people of Lestrange’s time.

 It is a difficult situation, but I hope I shall convince you. Very few men can have had the chance of convincing their great-great-great grandfathers of anything. I am now an anachronism. You see, I was born in the year A.D. 2108,—or should it be, I shall be born in 2108?—and I am—or will be—a refugee from the twenty-second century. I assure you that you will be married shortly, but I cant remember when—I think I told you I was bad at dates. 


Louise Fazenda (top)
and friend


   Blondes Prefer Bonds
by Lewis R. Foster (Foster, director)
First release: 15 May 1931

I decided to include this movie in the list in the hopes that someone will point me to a copy of the talkie that stars Louise Fazenda and Arthur Hoyt as a married couple who in the hopes of rekindling their vows are thrown back to the time of their courtship.



   “The Man from 2071”
by Sewell Peaslee Wright
First publication: Astounding, Jun 1931

Special Patrol Service officer John Hanson (hero of ten Wright stories) stumbles upon a mad inventor who has traveled many centuries to Hanson’s beachfront Denver in order to obtain knowledge that will let him become the absolute, unquestioned, supreme master back in the 21st century.

 I could not help wondering, as we settle swiftly over the city, whether our historians and geologists and other scientists were really right in saying that Denver had at one period been far from the Pacific. 


   “The Man Who Changed the Future”
by R.F. Starzl
First publication: Wonder Stories, Jun 1931

When Park Helm laments about the state of gangster-overrun Lakopolis, his friend, Professor Nicholson, sends him into the future to observe whether things will get better, but somehow Helm manages to do a lot more than just observe, eventually becoming the future boss man, gaining a lovely wife, and generally righting wrongs.

   “The Time Flight”
by Miles J. Breuer
First publication: Amazing, Jun 1931

Widower Ezra Hubble hatches a scheme to deprive his stepson of an inheritance by taking the money with him to the future.

   “The Raid of the Mercury”
by A.H. Johnson
First publication: Amazing, Jul 1931

A seer projects our narrator into the world of 22,000 A.D where a pirate airship fuels a revolution against the wealthy.

   “Rebellion—5000 A.D.!”
by Garth Bentley
First publication: Wonder Stories, Jul 1931

During an experiment with a new radio technology, Professor Crewe’s assistant (and our narrator) is flung to a post-apocalyptic 5000 A.D. where an authoritarian, largely urban civilization has arisen and a group of rebels are expecting a man from the past to lead them.



   “The Port of Missing Planes”
by Capt. S.P. Meek
First publication: Astounding, Aug 1931

Capt. Meek’s hero, Dr. Bird (an agent of the Bureau of Standards), had at least one minor run-in with time travel in this story of underground molemen (who excavate their tunnels by time travel) who have been duped by the evil Saranoff into serving as a base for Saranoff’s attacks on the southwestern United States (as well as an attack on Dr. Bird’s brain, which is in peril of being sent back in time).

 “I wish I could remember how that time machine was built and operated,” said Dr. Bird reflectively, as he sat in his private laboratory in the Bureau of Standards some time later, “but Jumor did his work well. I cant even remember what the thing looked like.” 


   “The Time Hoaxers”
by Paul Bolton
First publication: Amazing, Aug 1931

Four men and a woman travel from 2030 to 1930, hoping to advance civilization, but everyone believes that the resulting newpaper stories of their arrival are all fakes.

 They said we could hope to be received only as impostors and fakirs. 


   “The Time-Traveler”
by Ralph Milne Farley
First publication: Weird Tales, Aug 1931

Mathematics professor John D. Smith rues the day he saved his college room-mate from drowning only to have the ungrateful cad thwart his every career move for the next decade. Oh, if only Smith could redo that fateful day!

 If I could go back into the past, there is one event which I should most certainly change: my rescue of Paul Arkwright! 


   “After 1,000,000 Years”
by J.M. Walsh
First publication: Wonder Stories, Oct 1931

Beautiful time traveler Leela Zenken, searching for atomic power to save her people of the future, is aiming for 1985, but hits 1935 instead where hiker John Harling tries to help her.



   The Stone from the Green Star
by Jack Williamson
First publication: Amazing, Oct–Nov 1931

Jack Williamson’s college buddy Dick Smith is transported a couple million years into the future where he meets a blind scientist, falls in love with the scientist’s beautiful daughter, fights the evil lord of the Dark Star, seeks the fountain of youth, wantders through the galaxy, and eventually transmits a manuscript of his adventures back in time to Williamson.

 “That is a space-port where the ships come in from the stars,” the girl said. (Of course, all conversations recorded in Smiths notes have been translated into our English—if they were not, no one would be able to read them.)
   “Ships from the stars!” Dick ejaculated.
 


   “Emperors of Space”
by Jerome Gross and Richard Penny
First publication: Wonder Stories, Nov 1931

Being chased by the Chinese, Luke Raliegh (scientist extraordinaire) and his pal Harry build a giant gyroscope that spins so fast it takes them into the future where they cure the yellow rot and save the world.

In 1946, the serial was released as a novel.

   The Time Stream
by John Taine (aka Eric Temple Bell)
First publication: Wonder Stories, Dec 1931–Mar 1932

In this dated sf classic, four like-minded men from 1906 are swept into the time stream via a mental exercise, taken to the land of Eos in a far-off time (possibly in the past, possibly in the future) where they encounter Cheryl (who may or may not be the Cheryl that they know in their own time) and consider how personal freedom may or may not be abrogated.

 No man or woman of Eos has the authority to direct, check, or in any way influence the free decision and impulses of another without that others full and intelligent consent. We demand the right to follow the natural inclinations of our characters. We demand the right to marry. 


   “The World of the Red Sun”
by Clifford D. Simak
First publication: Wonder Stories, Dec 1931

Harl Swanson and Bill Kressman leave Denver in their flying time machine, aiming to travel five millennia, but they end up some five million years later in a desolate world ruled by the evil and cruel brain Golan-Kirt.

I read this in Asimov’s anthology Before the Golden Age, which was the first SFBC book to arrive in my mailbox after going to college in Pullman in the fall of ’74.

 The twentieth century. It had a remote sound, an unreal significance. In this age, with the sun a brick red ball and the city of Denver a mass of ruins, the twentieth century was a forgotten second in the great march of time, it was as remote as the age when man emerged from the beast. 


Clifford D. Simak, Master Traveller

“The World of the Red Sun” is the first of Clifford D. Simak’s many time travel contributions which spanned a total of 56 years.




No Time Travel.
Move along.
“No Traveller Returns” by John Collier [parallel universes ]

“The Fifth-Dimension Catapult” by Murray Leinster, Astounding, Jan 1931 [parallel universes ]

“Hell’s Dimension” by Tom Curry, Astounding, Apr 1931 [differing time rates ]

“The Man Who Evolved” by Edmond Hamilton, Wonder Stories, Apr 1931 [sped up evolution ]

Jack Williamson   “The Moon Era”
by Jack Williamson
First publication: Wonder Stories, Feb 1932

Stephen’s rich inventor uncle sends him on a trip to the moon in an antigravity capsule without realizing that a side-effect also sends the capsule back to when the moon was young, green, and populated by the evil Eternal Ones and the last of the Mothers.

 Time was a fourth dimension, he had said. An extension as real as the three of what we call space, and not completely distinguishable from them. A direction in which motion would carry one into the past, or into the future. 




   “The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper”
by H.G. Wells
First publication: Ladies’ Home Journal, Feb 1932

A copy of the Evening Standard newspaper makes its way from 1971 back to one Mr. Brownlow in 1931, and the narrator relates to us the queer happenings from forty years in the future. Would that the political aspects of his world would have materialized!

 It means, I take it, that in only forty years from now the great game of sovereign states will be over. It looks also as if the parliamentary game will be over, and as if some quite new method of handling human affairs will have been adopted. Not a word of patriotism or nationalism; not a word of party, not an allusion. But in only forty years! While half the human beings already alive in the world will still be living! You cannot believe it for a moment. Nor could I, if it wasn't for two little torn scraps of paper. 


   “When the Earth Tilted”
by J.M. Walsh
First publication: Wonder Stories, May 1932

After a passing comet throws the earth’s axis out of kilter, the survivors, searching for a habitable spot to live on the planet’s surface, stumble upon a colony from the lost continent of Mu, whereupon war breaks out (after all, there’s limited land available now) and the Muians have a time-travel trick up their sleeves.



   Dangerous Corner
by J.B. Priestley
First performance: 17 May 1932 at London’s Lyric Theatre

I need you to tell me whether the conclusion of this play involves time travel or not. I claim it does. But regardless of that, it’s worth reading Priestley’s first play, which follows the dire consequences of a chance remark at the start of Act I. The play was also filmed as a 1934 screenplay and later as a Yorkshire Television Production.

 For the last few seconds the light has been fading, now it is completely dark. There is a revolver shot, a womans scream, a moments silence, then the sound of a woman sobbing, exactly as at the beginning of Act I. 




   “Omega”
by Ameila Reynolds Long
First publication: Amazing, Jul 1932

Via hypnosis, a professor sends a convicted murderer throughout the circle of time until he eventually visits the very omega of the universe.

 I, Doctor Michael Claybridge, living in the year 1926, have listened to a description of the end of the world from the lips of the man who witnessed it; the last man of the human race. That this is possible, or that I am not insane, I cannot ask you to believe: I can only offer you the facts. 


   “The Time Conqueror”
aka “The Tyrant of Time”
by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach
First publication: Wonder Stories Jul 1932

Evil scientist Koszarek kills Ovington and uses his brain to view the future, which is dominated by the Brain who ruthlessly kills each of his servants that Koszarak inhabits.

 Beyond the fourth there is a fifth dimension. . . . Eternity, I think you would call it. It is the line, the direction perpendicular to time. 


   “Flight into Super-Time”
aka “The Letter from Mohaun Los”
by Clark Ashton Smith
First publication: Wonder Stories, Aug 1932

Eccentric millionaire Domitian Malgraff and his Chinese servant Li Wong head off in a time machine, first to adventure into the future, but if that fails to hold there interest—says Malgraff in a letter to his ex-fiancée—there is always the past.

 You have always considered me a hopeless dreamer; and I am the last person who would endeavor or even wish to dispute your summary. It might be added that I am one of those dreamers who have not been able to content themselves with dreams. Such persons, as a rule, are unfortunate and unhappy, since few of them are capable of realizing, or even approximating, their visionary conceptions. 


   “Beyond the Veil of Time”
by B.H. Barney
First publication: Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall/Winter 1932

Mathematician Richard Nelson, Andean Indian Huayan, and engineer Dan Bradford who try to capture images from a pre-Incan city in the Andes, but instead are blown back in time and have a series of high adventures.

The story—Barney’s only publication—was a plagiaristic hodgepodge of elements from the work of A. Merritt, although Everett Bleiler’s review notes that there were imaginative and ingenious original elements.

 A. MERRITT, WHO IS WELL KNOWN TO MANY OF THE READERS OF AMAZING STORIES, HAS CALLED OUR ATTENTION TO MANY SIMILARITIES IN DESCRIPTIONS, CHARACTERIZATIONS AND SITUATIONS IN THE STORY "BEYOND THE VEIL OF TIME" BY B.H. BARNEY, PUBLISHED IN THE FALL-WINTER ISSUE OF AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY, AND DESCRIPTIONS, CHARACTERIZATIONS AND SITUATIONS IN HIS TWO BOOKS "THE MOON POOL" AND "THE FACE IN THE ABYSS". MR. MERRITT OBJECTS PARTICULARLY TO THE UTILIZATION OF THE CONCEPTION AND THE NAME OF "THE DREAM-MAKERS", WHICH FORMED AN ESSENTIAL PART OF HIS "FACE IN THE ABYSS". 

—an announcement in the June 1933 Amazing Stories


   “Chicago, 2042 A.D.”
by Paul Bolton
First publication: Wonder Stories, Oct 1932

The U.S. in the 1950s is ruled by the Jerry Ratoni of the Chicago mob, which Wakefield plans to infiltrate, but things go wrong when Ratoni, Wakefield and Ratoni’s secretary are transported to 2042, where the mob still rules.

   “The Man Who Lived Twice”
by William Kober
First publication: Amazing, Nov 1932

In a dire time of war, a man from the Bureau of Standards in look of new weapons visits Professor Dane who claims he can travel to the future, which our man from the Bureau does, but he finds an alien invasion instead of great new weapons.

   “The Time Express”
by Nat Schachner
First publication: Wonder Stories, Dec 1932

Under strict rules against smuggling technology, time-travel tourism is permitted to the residents of 2124 A.D., but, of course, when a tour guide tries to take modern technology to the nontechnical time of 4600 A.D., our man Denton Kels must bring the dastard to justice.


No Time Travel.
Move along.
The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan [visions of possible futures ]

“The Einstein See-Saw” by Miles J. Breuer, Astounding, Apr 1932 [monster-filled universes ]

“The Finger of the Past” by Miles J. Breuer, Amazing, Nov 1932 [viewing the past ]

   “Ancients of Easter Island”
by F. Stanley Renshaw
First publication: Amazing, Apr 1933

Archeologist Harvey Manly and crew visit Easter Island where they participate in a sacred ritual with the indiginous people, and the ritual seems to take Harvey back to a time when he, as leader of the ancient Lemurians, lived the legend that gave birth to the ritual.

   “The Man from Tomorrow”
by Stanton A. Coblentz
First publication: Amazing Stories Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1933

An apparent madman, James Richard Cloud, pops in on Professor Ellery Howard of Gotham University, and the professor is about to dismiss Cloud’s claims of building a machine that can see all of time and retrieve objects from time, when the professor’s assistant arrives and recognizes a certain sensibility in the madman’s mathematical notes, all of which leads to a personal viewing of the machine, which hiccups and kidnaps a man from the 23rd century who insists on being shown around nighttime New York City.

 You know some of the modern theories about the fourth dimension. How Einstein and others suppose that the fourth dimension of sapce is time. Well, I dont want to claim any one elses laurels, but that was my view even before the name of Einstein was heard of. Ive been working at it for thirty-five years. Its my belief too that the fourth side of space is time, and that, in a sense, all time exists simultaneously and eternally—although on some other plan than ours—just as all space exists simultaneously and eternally. 


   “The Third Vibrator”
by John Wyndham (as by John Beynon Harris)
First publication: Wonder Stories, May 1933

Hixton tells his fiancé the reason why he destroyed his death ray: He’s been back to ancient Lemuria and Atlantis and seen with his own eyes the effect it had.

Although the mechanism of the weapon differed from the atom bomb, it still feels as though Wyndham anticipated the capability for world destruction that would soon be upon us.

 Miles away the ground split from a center in radiating crevasses. I saw men far beyond it halt in dismay and turn back. A violent shaking of the ground sent me to the floor. 




   The Golden City
by Ralph Milne Farley
First publication: Argosy, 13 May–17 Jun 1933

Back in 1932 in The Radio War (which is not related to Farley’s more famous Radio Man stories), we heard the story of the author’s grandson John Farley Pease, who fought the Siberians in the year 2000, but mostly* without time travel. Now we hear from John Farley Pease’s uncle’s friend who did time travel, disappearing through time to the long-lost Pacific island of Mu, only to reappear unaged some decades later.

*although The Radio War had no time travel, a lost section of the first chapter, published in 1934, does involve some chrono-atypical shenanigans. Please see the related stories link.

 Furthermore, this young man cant possibly be Adams Mayhew! Why Mayhew would be nearly eighty, if he were alive today, and this man is still in his twenties. 


   “The Intelligence Gigantic”
by John Russell Fearn
First publication: Amazing, Jun-Jul 1933

There’s just a smidgen of time travel in this story—possibly so that every known science fiction trope is covered. The jump through time occurs when an artificially created human who uses all of his brain (instead of the tiny amount that we use) jumps forward in time to start his world domination.



   Berkeley Square
by John L. Balderston, Henry James and Sonya Levien (Frank Lloyd, director)
First release: 15 Sep 1933

Leslie Howard reprises his dual role of Peter Standish(es) from the 1929 Broadway version of the Balderston’s Berkeley Square, which in turn was based on Henry James’s unfinished novel.

 How many of us have wished that we might escape from the dull reality of the present into the glamor and romance of yesterday?
But if we could journey back into the mystery of the past, should we find contentment—or unhappiness?
 


   “Theft of the Washington Monument”
by Robert Arthur, Jr.
First publication: Amazing, Oct 1933

In order to exact revenge for the ridicule that his theories on time have endured, Professor Green decide to transport the Washington Monument to the future for a few days, and in the process, they see the eventual fate of our planet.

   The Oliver Kent Stories
by Joseph W. Skidmore
First story: Amazing, Nov 1933

I’m not sure how often the super-scientist Oliver Kent showed up in Skidmore stories, but at least twice Kent administered drugs that allowed the heroes to be thrown back in time, living in other bodies (“The Beetle in the Amber,” wherein Donald and Joane Cromwell are sent back to prehuman bodies in the time that an amazing beetle came from, and “The First Flight” in which aviator Donald Calvert flies a pterodactyl).

 From the looks of the Brontosaurus  . . . we are in the Pleistocene period. 




   The Tyme Stories
by A. Fedor and Henry Hasse
First story: Wonder Stories, Nov 1933

In a series of two Wonder Stories tales, Tyme (our man from the future) visits science fiction editor B. Lue Pencil who first has Tyme committed to an insane asylum (“The End of Tyme” in Nov 1933 ) and then decides to not commit suicide because Tyme shows him future sales figures and tables of contents for his magazine (“The Return of Tyme” in Aug 1934).



   “Ancestral Voices”
by Nat Schachner
First publication: Astounding, Dec 1933

Time traveler Emmet Pennypacker kills one ancient Hun and without realizing who will disappear from the racist world of 1935.

This is the first issue of Astounding that lists F. Orlin Tremaine as editor, although he began that job two months earlier, and I think this is the first time-travel story that he published.

 The year of grace 1935! A dull year, a comfortable year! Nothing much happened. The depression was over; people worked steadily at their jobs and forgot that they had every starved; Roosevelt was still President of the United States; Hitler was firmly ensconced in Germany; France talked of security; Japan continued to defend itself against China by swallowing a few more provinces; Russia was about to commence on the third Five Year Plan, to be completed in two years; and, oh, yes—Cuba was still in revolution. 


   “Island of Science”
by B.S. Keirstead
First publication: Amazing, Dec 1933

An Englishman is shipwrecked on an island of brilliant Italian scientists who, among other things, take him back to ninth century England and the time of King Alfred.

The story also appeared in the third volume of Williamson’s collected stories (Sep 2000)   “Terror Out of Time”
by Jack Williamson
First publication: Astounding, Dec 1933

Until I started reading these 1930s pulps, I didn’t realize how ubiquitous were the scientist with a beautiful daughter and her adventurous fiancé. This story has Dr. Audrin, his machine to project the brain of a present-day man forty million years into the future and possibly bring another mind back, his beautiful daughter Eve, and her manly fiancé, Terry Webb, who agrees to be the test subject for the machine.

 I must have a subject. And there is a certain—risk. Not great, now, Im sure. My apparatus is improved. But, in my first trial, my subject was—injured. Ive been wondering, Mr. Webb, if you— 



No Time Travel.
Move along.
“The Fifth-Dimension Tube” by Murray Leinster, Astounding, Jan 1933 [parallel universes ]

“Across the Ages” by Allen Glasser, Amazing, Aug/Sep 1933 [just a dream ]



   Proud Man
by Katharine Burdekin (as by Murray Constantine)
First publication: 1934

An androgynous traveler—initially known as the Person, then as Verona, and finally as Gifford Verona— communicates with the subhumans called Englishmen about a time thousands of years in the the future of 1930’s England.

 To return to my dream, this person thought that either you or I should go among these subhumans, and yoiu, though willing to go, were a shade less willing than I. So it was decided that I was to go, and when I asked this person, who had been thinking to us about these creatures, how I should come to them, seeing that they were either on another planet or in another time, the way thither was made clear to me, for all I had to do was to wish to be there with them, and there, wherever or whenever it was, I should be.
I am much inclined to think it was not on another planet, but on the same planet in another time.
 


   “To-Day’s Yesterday”
by Russell Blaiklock (as by Rice Ray)
First publication: Wonder Stories, Jan 1934

Cavanaugh, a movie’s sound engineer, realizes that the complex wiring on the movie set has transported a microphone to another time, and Cavanaugh’s assistant, Wilson, then transports himself to that time, too.



   “The First Chapter of the Radio War”
aka “The Missing Chapter of the Radio War”
by Ralph Milne Farley
First publication: Fantasy Magazine, Feb 1934

As we all know, the 1932 story, The Radio War, of how John Farley Pease fought the Siberians in the year 2000 involved no time travel. But wait! Just how did Ralph Milne Farley get ahold of the story of the future Pease’s war exploits? That story was told in the 1934 fanzine, Fantasy Magazine (published by megafans Julius Schwartz, Ray Palmer, Mortimer Weisinger, and Forry Ackerman) as a missing part of the first chapter of The Radio War.

 In addition to his various tricks of magic, this young Chinaman had another typically Oriental trait, namely that of being able to commune with his ancestors. 


   “The Time Jumpers”
by Philip Francis Nowlan
First publication: Amazing, Feb 1934

Ted Manley and girlfriend Cynthia hop back to 993A.D. (attacked by Vikings) and then to 1753 (where they are sightseers at the French and Indian Wars and say hi to George Washington).

   “The Retreat from Utopia”
by Wallace West
First publication: Astounding, Mar 1934

A newspaper reporter from 2175 describes his strict, puritan world where nobody is happy because nothing ever happens, and even the criminals off in Borneo refuse to rejoin that society, so the story’s 1934 narrator visits the future to set things right.

This NY Times headline from Jun 11, 1934, describes an American Rocket Society test flight; Schachner was one of the founding members of the society.   “The Time Impostor”
by Nat Schachner
First publication: Astounding, Mar 1934

Newspaper reporter Derek leaps into a time machine that has come back from the 9th millennium to rescue the condemned murderer Mike Spinnot because he’s worshiped as a hero in that future time.

   “The Time Traveller”
by A.M.Low (anonymously)
First publication: Scoops, 3 Mar 1934

When newspaper reporter Brant Emerson saves the life of the reclusive Professor Lestrange, the scientist offers to let Brant use a time machine—an offer which Brant accepts (hoping to get a scoop), and Brant soon finds himself in 2034 London where newspapers have been totally replaced by tv and radio (quite a good prognosis, even if Low didn’t think of the role the internet would play).



   “The Mentanicals”
by Francis Flagg
First publication: Amazing, Apr 1934

On a whim, the handsome Captain Bronson, adventurer and yacht captain for the multimillionaire Olson Smith, steps into the time machine of the quirky Professor Stringer and presses the Wellsian lever forward, whereupon he finds himself in a future world populated by stupid beastly men and smooth, cylindrical robots.

 Professor Stringer threw open the laboratory door and turned on the lights. We saw it then, an odd machine, shiny and rounded, occupying the center of the workshop floor. I had been drinking, you will recollect, and my powers of observation were not at their best. It was the same with the others. When I questioned them later, they could give no adequate description of it. “So this,” said Olson Smith rather flatly, “is a time machine.” The doctor walked about—a little unsteadily I noticed—and viewed it from all angles. “The passenger,” said the Professor, “sits here. Notice this lever on the graduated face of the dial; it controls the machine. Turn it this way from Zero and one travels into the past; throw it ahead and one travels into the future. The return of the lever to Zero will return the machine to the point of departure in time. The electronic flow. . . .” he went into obscure details. “Will it work?” demanded the Doctor. 


   “The Long Night”
by Charles Willard Diffin
First publication: Astounding, May 1934

Garry Coyne devises a way to move into the future via suspended animation, which (as we all know) is not time travel, but once he arrives in the future to fight throwback homoids and take shelter with the small band of normal men, he does have a moment where he slides back to the present for a brief communication with his trusted friend and a realization about the nature of time.

 Past, present, future—all one. And we, moving along the dimension called time, intersect them. I cant grasp it. But I cant deny it. If only there were proof— 


   “Invaders from Time”
by John Russell Fearn
First publication: Scoops, 12 May 1934

In retrieving objects from the future, Tom Lawton and Bill Richard manage to grab four brothers from 2534, and the brothers promptly take over London, announcing that they intend to make a utopia, but first they must kill half the population.

Scoops was a weekly British publication that lasted about half of 1934. This particular Fearn story was reprinted in the 1997 Fantasy Annual.

 Its a paradox. 


   “Voice of Atlantis”
by Laurence Manning
First publication: Wonder Stories, July 1934

Volking, a scientist, accidentally sends himself back to Atlantis where he reveals the eventual diluvian fate of the island and converses with an old man about the ills of our society and the closed nature of theirs.

   “Time Haven”
by Howard Wandrei (as by Howard W. Graham, Ph.D.)
First publication: Astounding, Sep 1934

Vincent Merryfield, the “alien” of his family for the sin of being a scientist, builds a time machine that takes him to the year 2443 where the rest of his family has died out and he is the sole owner of everything within sight of his seven-mile-high tower in Manhattan—but how did everyone know he was coming? Sadly, it may be that he never really traveled through time, but I had to put artist and writer Howard Wandrei into my list nonetheless. A later story, “The Missing Ocean” (May 1939), follows much the same time-travelless plot.

 Of course! It has always been known that you would ‘appear’ sooner or later. 


   “Inflexure”
by H.L. Gold (as by Clyde Crane Campbell)
First publication: Astounding, Oct 1934

Some rogue object passing through the solar system manages to merge together all people from all times of Earth.

 Im over the Caroline Islands, longitude 158° 23´ west, latitude 8° 30´ north. Therere millions of people drowning all around me. What shall I do? 


H.L. Gold, Master Traveller

H.L. Gold wrote the earliest story of different eras living side-by-side because of some sort of time storm or, as he called it, an “Inflexure.” But even without that innovation, Gold would deserve an award for the volumes of time travel stories he published as the first Galaxy editor.





   “Twilight”
by John W. Campbell, Jr. (as by Don Stuart)
First publication: Astounding, Nov 1934

In 1932, James Waters Bendell picks up a magnificently sculpted hitchhiker named Ares Sen Kenlin (the Sen means he’s a scientist, but Waters is just a name) who says that he’s trying to get back to his home time (3059) from seven million years in the future—a time when mankind has atrophied because of their reliance on machines.

 They stand about, little misshapen men with huge heads. But their heads contain only brains. They had machines that could think—but somebody turned them off a long time ago, and no one knew how to start them again. That was the trouble with them. They had wonderful brains. Far better than yours or mine. But it must have been millions of years ago when they were turned off, too, and they just hadnt thought since then. Kindly little people. 


John W. Campbell, Jr., Master Traveller

Campbell’s three time travel stories were published under his pseudonym of Don Stuart before he took over the reins of Astounding, and even together they would not justify the prestigious Master Traveller Citation. But the number of classic time travel yarns he brought to light at Astounding and Analog make him more than worthy.



   “The Time Tragedy”
by Raymond A. Palmer
First publication: Wonder Stories, Dec 1934

A judge who sentenced a man named William Gregory to death thirty years ago explains his theory on what has happened to his own son, an inventor also named William Gregory.

 Into the future she had gone, William said, and I had no reason to doubt him. The cat took the matter in a calm way and seemed in no wise injured by its uncanny transit. 




   Lux Radio Theater
aka Hollywood Radio Theater
First time travel: “Berkeley Square,” 9 Dec 1934

The long-running Lux Radio Theater (later renamed Hollywood Radio Theater to avoid commercial ties when it moved to the Armed Forces Radio Network) did productions of both Berkeley Square (with Leslie Howard reprising his movie role) and I’ll Never Forget You” (with Tyrone Power reprising his role). They also adapted other movies of interest such as the iconic The Day the Earth Stood Still.

 Greetings from Hollywood. Ladies and gentlemen: I think youll be as intrigued with our play tonight as I was when I discovered it was a most unusual love story, the story of a modern scientist in love with a girl whom he meets in another century. 

—I’ll Never Forget You



No Time Travel.
Move along.
Before the Dawn by Eric Temple Bell [viewing the past ]

   “The Prenatal Plagiarism”
by Mort Weisinger
First publication: Wonder Stories, Jan 1935

After the publication of Daniel Cartwright’s wildly successful novel, charges of exact plagiarism from a 50-year-old novel arise, even though he insists that he was the only author.



   Pre-Superman Comic Books
First time travel: New Fun Comics 1, Feb 1935

Comic books didn’t really take off until the introduction of the Man of Steel in Action Comics 1 (Jun 1938). Before that, many comics were compilations of strips similar to the Sunday funnies, and some of these had time travel. The earliest series that I found was the story of Bobby and Binks, two kids who at first time traveled through a Magic Crystal of History and later just viewed past adventures through the crystal. They first appeared in DC’s first comic book publication, New Fun Comics #1, February 1935, by Adolphe Barreaux. As I find other such series, I’ll add them to my time-travel comic book page. So far, the pre-1939 titles I've found are:
  1. New Fun Comics 1 (Feb 1935) Bobby and Bink
  2. Big Book of Fun Comics Annual (Nov 1935) Bobby and Binks reprints
  3. New Comics 1 (Dec 1935) Fritz the time traveler
  4. More Fun 7 (Jan 1936) Bobby and Binks
  5. The Comics 6-11 (Feb 1938 - Mar 1939) Mickey and Meg’s Enchanted Stone of Time

 Binks: Why—why—I can understand what theyre saying!
Bobby: So can I! Its that magic crystal that did it! 


The first story also appeared in this July 1973 reprint magazine.   The Time Control Stories
by Philip Jacques Bartel
First story: Amazing, Feb 1935

Two Russians (Khalin and Mikhailloff) and an American engineer (Earl Lyons) find a way to step outside of time, view the future, then step back into time at the very point that they left, thereby preventing bad things such as Mikhailloff’s murder (in “When Time Stood Still,” Amazing, Feb 1935) and an insult that’s intended to start a war (“The Time Control,” Amazing, Dec 1936).

   “Valley of the Rukh”
by Harl Vincent
First publication: Amazing, Feb 1935

Pilot Stanley Kent and his client, spoiled authoress Ruth Owens, find themselves in a piece of Venus that’s been transported from the past, whereupon they have exciting adventures.

   “The Prophetic Voice”
by Laurence Manning
First publication: Wonder Stories, Apr 1935

A voice, purporting to be from the future, warns mankind that they must all go into suspended animation or face extinction; mankind obeys, but when they wake up, the people at the other end of the future phone don’t know anything about the earlier message.

Brick Bradford #5,
Jul 1948


   Brick Bradford
by William Ritt and Clarence Gray
First time travel: 20 Apr 1935

Ritt and Gray introduced The Time Top as a short-lived separate topper strip on April 20/21, 1935, and it first appeared in Brick’s Sunday strip on Oct 17, 1937; thereafter, it frequently took the comic strip adventurer into the future (and occasionally the past).

Brick’s strips were reprinted as early as 1934 with two hardcover issues of Saalfield Comics (#1059 and #1309). He was reprinted in King Comics starting with the first April 1936 issue, and he headlined one 1938 hardcover Big Little Book (#1468, combining text with line illustrations). Some Ace Comics had reprints (1947-49), and he appeared in four issues of his own comic book: #5 (Jul 1948) to #8 (Jul 1949) that were possibly strip reprints. In the 60s, new Brick backup features appeared in some issues of The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician (at least #5, #6 and #10) and Flash Gordon (at least #14, #16, #17). They probably all used the top, but I don’t know for sure. All that was just in the U.S.: He was vastly more popular in Australia and New Zealand.

 Into the past . . . into the future . . . read on for another exciting adventure in time with Brick Bradford  

Brick Bradford and the Time Top 25, Australia




   “Alas, All Thinking”
by Harry Bates
First publication: Astounding, Jun 1935

Charles Wayland is tasked with discovering why his cold-hearted college buddy and all-around genius (I.Q. 248) physicist Harlan T. Frick has abandoned everything technical for mundane pursuits such as golfing, clothes, travel, fishing, night clubs, and so on—and the explanation may have to do with either Humpty Dumpty or Frick’s trip to the future with an average (but meditative) young woman named Pearl who is most curious about love.

 I showed her New York. Shed say, “But why do the people hurry so? Is it really necessary for all those automobiles to keep going and coming? Do the people like to live in layers? If the United States is as big as you say it is, why do you build such high buildings? What is your reason for having so few people rich, so many people poor?” It was like that. And endless. 


   “A Thief in Time”
by Vernon H. Jones (as by Raymond A. Young)
First publication: Wonder Stories, Jul 1935

A scientist sends gangster Tony Carponi to steal some radium, and only years later does Carponi realized that the caper involved time travel.



   The Bungle Family
by Harry J. Tuthill
First time travel: 23 Jul 1935

Father and husband George Bungle saw his comic-strip family through various adventures as early as 1918 (then called “Home, Sweet Home”) including a trip on his own to the year 7324 in the story that ran from July to October of 1935.

 Why anyone knows this is the year 7324. What did you think it was, old-timer? 


   “The Branches of Time”
by David R. Daniels
First publication: Wonder Stories, Aug 1935

James Bell invents a time machine, sees the end of mankind in the near future, travels further to see man’s successor, returns to mankind’s end to save the species, and visits the Mesozoic, anticipating Bradbury’s Butterfly Effect.

   “The Kingdom of Thought”
by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach
First publication: Amazing, Aug 1935

Donald Stile is transported to the future by a Time Sphere where he finds two groups of giant brains (the good white brains and the evil black brains) battling—but what of the grey brain?

   “The Man Who Met Himself”
by Ralph Milne Farley
First publication: Top-Notch, Aug 1935

Among physicists, the most favored resolution to time-travel paradoxes is a world of one fixed landscape of time and its events. Time travel may be possible, but if so, the Karma will conspire to have only those events that have been written into the landscape to occur. Heinlein’s “—All You Zombies—” may be the pinnacle of such stories, but Farley’s is the earliest case that I’ve read to present a clear deterministic time loop along these lines. In the story, Boston stock broker Dick Withrick is on a 1935 tiger hunt in Cambodia when he runs into a strangely familiar (and slightly older) man who warns him, “As you value your freedom, do not touch the machine—” And yet, he does touch the machine, taking him back to 1925 so he (in the company of his Buddhist Abbot host) can relive the decade of financial turmoil.

 “It cannot be,” the Abbot asserted suavely. “The years from 1925 to 1935 happen only once in the whole course of eternity. You are not now living through a repetition of those ten years. Rather it is those same ten years. The events which you remember as having happened back in Boston, and the events which are happening here today, are happening simultaneously. Your ten years in Boston from 1925 to 1935, are one and the same ten years. It is only an illusion of your mind that they seem to be successive, rather than concurrent. And this illusion is not so different from the illusion of all mankind with respect to the flow of timel for Brahm, the Creator, sees all time and all space as once complete instantaneous event.” 


This story was reprinted in the Winter 1951 issue of Fantastic Story Quarterly   “The Reign of the Reptiles”
by Alan Connell
First publication: Wonder Stories, Aug 1935

Sanders is kidnapped and sent to a laboratory in the far past from which he escapes to find a civilization of intelligent, winged reptiles—possibly the first story of intelligent dinosaurs in our past.



   “Night”
by John W. Campbell, Jr. (as by Don A. Stuart)
First publication: Astounding, Oct 1935

Bob Carter takes a plane up to 45,000 feet to test an anti-gravity device, but instead it hurls him into the same future as the story “Twilight”—but whereas the earlier story had mankind who were dying out in 7,000,000 A.D. because of the ubiquity of machines, Carter finds himself billions of years beyond that, with both man and (most) machines long gone.

 Ah, yes, you have a mathematical means of expression, but no understanding of that time, so it is useless. But the last of humanity was allowed to end before the Sun changed from the original G-O stage—a very, very long time ago. 


   “The Fall of Mercury”
by Leslie F. Stone
First publication: Amazing, Dec 1935

Mort Forrest and his fellow explorer Bruce are headed for supposedly uninhabited Mercury when they are captured by Mercurians intent on taking over the solar system, but fortunately, a friendly Saturnian named Chen-Chak (with a ray gun that can momentarily transfer bad guys into the future) rescues them, tells them of the history of species from all the planets, and saves the solar system.

The story also appeared in Phil Stong’s 1941 anthology, The Other Worlds.   “The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator”
by Murray Leinster
First publication: Astounding, Dec 1935

Pete Davidson has inherited all the properties of an uncle who had been an authority on the fourth dimension, including the Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator that can pull copies of matches, coins, dollar bills, fiancées and kangaroos out of the past.

 Its produced another burnt match. Dragged it forward out of the past, sir. There was a burnt match at that spot, until the glass plate moved a few seconds ago. Like the girl and the banana peel, sir. The machine went back to the place where the match had been, and then it went back in time to where the match was, and then it brought it forward. 


   “Human Machines”
by J. Harvey Haggard
First publication: Astounding, Dec 1935

When the megalomanic and utopia-builder Lan Darth is opposed by Therm Sutner, Darth throws Sutner into a horrid future world that is populated by strange creatures that arose out of Darth’s eugenic and policies that banned sexual reproduction.



   “Time Found Again”
by Mildred Cram
First publication: Cosmopolitan, Dec 1935

Bart Henderson hates his life in 1935, longing for a daughter without painted fingernails and curled coxcombs, a son without bloodshot eyes at the breakfast table, a wife less jaded. Then his army buddy visits and suggests that nothing is ever lost in time, and it might be possible for the human mind to tear off the veils and return to a time such as the 18th century that Bart longs for.

It was fun to see both the advertisements and the innovation of Cosmopolitan to publish a time-travel story by the prolific Mildred Cram in 1935. The style reminds me of later Jack Finney stories of the 50s.

 He ran a few steps forward in the dark, stumbling. The syncopated, thudding hoofbeats broke rhythm, paused . . . And Bart Henderson found himself, in broad daylight, standing beside a fine carriage driven by a coachman in livery, drawn by two black horses with silver-trimmed harness. 



No Time Travel.
Move along.
“The 32nd of May” by Paul Ernst, Astounding, Apr 1935 [parallel universes ]

“Relativity to the Rescue” by J. Harvey Haggard, Amazing, Apr 1935 [ftl ]

“The Worlds of If” by Stanley Weinbaum, Wonder Stories, Aug 1935 [viewing alternate pasts ]

“The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator” by Murray Leinster, Astounding, Dec 1935 [despite title, no time travel ]



   “In the World’s Dusk”
by Edmond Hamilton
First publication: Weird Tales, Mar 1936

Galos Gann, the greatest scientist whom Earth had ever seen and last man on Earth, vows than mankind will not perish.

 There are no living men and women in the world today. But what of the trillions of men and women who have existed on Earth in the past? Those trillions are separated from me by the abyss of time. Yet . . . 




   “The Shadow Out of Time”
by H.P. Lovecraft
First publication: Astounding, Jun 1936

During an economics lecture, Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee’s body and mind are taken over by a being who can travel to any time and place of his choice, and during the next five years the being studies us, all of which Peaslee pieces together after his return.

Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi says that Lovecraft saw the movie Berkeley Square four times in 1933, and “its portrayal of a man of the 20th century who somehow merges his personality with that of his 18th-century ancestor” served as Lovecraft’s inspiration for this story.

 The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore, learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques. 




   “The Land Where Time Stood Still”
by Arthur Leo Zagat
First publication: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Aug 1936

Modern-day Englishman Ronald Stratton and Arthurian damsel Elaise find themselves in a land with people from all ages and predators from the year 6000 A.D.

 All right. Skip it. Im having trouble understanding you, too. What year do you think this is? 


   “The Time Entity”
by Otto Binder (as by Eando Binder)
First publication: Astounding, Oct 1936

John Dakin considers paradoxes as he communicates by radio with his future descendant.



   Popeye the Sailor Cartoons
created by Elzie Crisler Segar
First time travel: 27 Nov 1936 (Sindbad)

Several early Popeye cartoons had plots that might only be explained by time travel, such as meeting Sindbad (played by Bluto) in a sixteen minute 1936 cartoon. However, for me, the real time travelin’ began in the 1960s television cartoon when the Professor had a time machine. Heres a list of episodes which I know of that might be explained by time travel. Send me others that you spot!
  1. Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad (1936) to ancient Persia?
  2. Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba (1937) time of 1001 Nights
  3. Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1939) evil vizier to present
  4. Popeye and the Pirates (1947) pirate ship to present
  5. Wotta Knight (1947) jousting tournament
  6. Pre-Hysterical Manb (1948) caveman times
  7. Popeye Meets Hercules (1948) to ancient Greece
  8. Robin Hood-Winked (1948) to Sherwood Forest
  9. Pilgrim Popeye (1951) Popeye as a pilgrim
  10. Big Bad Sindbad (1952) mostly reuse from 1936
  11. The Golden-Type Fleece (1960) to ancient Greece
  12. Popeye and the Dragon (1960) to middle ages
  13. Invisible Popeye (1960) future Martians
  14. Out of This World (1960) to the future
  15. The Glad Gladiator (1960) Roman gladiators
  16. Popeyed Columbus (1960) 1492
  17. Astro-Nut (1960) just time dilation
  18. Popeye’s Tea Party (1960) Boston Tea Party
  19. Time Marches Backwards (1960) caveman days
  20. Quick Change Ollie (1960) middle ages via magic hen
  21. Camel Aires (1960) to ancient Egypt
  22. The Black Knight (1960) Arthurian times
  23. Have Time, Will Travel (1961) prehistoric

 Huck-huck-huck-huck. There aint no such thing as pirates, Olive. Theyre only a fragamentation of the imagamentation. 

—Popeye and the Pirates




   Hairbreadth
by F.O. Alexander
First time travel: 29 Nov 1936

About midway (29 Nov 1936) through Franklin Osborne Alexander’s run with Charles Kahles’s character Hairbreadth Harry, the adventurer and his lady friend Belinda found themselves taken to the year 4936 by a magic hourglass where they are up against their arch-nemesis Relentless Rudolph Ruddigore Rassendale. I don’t know whether the characters and their hour glass had any other adventures in time.

 Harry! A mouse is in the trap and I havent the nerve to—OH!—youve knocked over the magic hour glass . . .! 


   “Trapped in Eternity”
by Ray Cummings
First publication: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dec 1936

Alan Blair and his beautiful fiancée Dora are brought to the future by the lecherous Groat who cures her blindness and then proposes to start a new race with Dora.

   “Tryst in Time”
by C.L. Moore
First publication: Astounding, Dec 1936

Bold and bored soldier-of-fortune Eric Rosner meets a scientist who sends him skipping through time, always meeting the same beguiling girl with the smoke-blue eyes.

 I can transport you into the past, and you can create events there which never took place in the past we know—but the events are not new. They were ordained from the beginning, if you took that particular path. You are simply embarking upon a different path into a different future, a fixed and preordained future, yet one which will be strange to you because it lies outside your own layer of experience. So you have infinite freedom in all your actions, yet everything you can possibly do is already fixed in time. 



No Time Travel.
Move along.
“Pre-Vision” by John Pierce, Astounding, Mar 1936 [visions of possible futures ]



   Myra North, Special Nurse
by Ray Thompson and Charles Coll
First time travel: 24 Jan 1937

My friend Art Lortie, science fiction historian extraordinaire, pointed me toward the unassuming Myra North, Special Nurse, who ran in the daily comics from 1936 to 1941. For the most part, she was nothing more than a special nurse, but some episodes, particularly in the Sunday strips, were more fantastic than others. Art told me of the 1937 appearance of a machine that saw into the future (“The Mechanical Eye” which concluded on 28 March 1937); a later story (“The Mystic Dragon”, 10 Mar 1940 to 13 Oct 1940) finds the nefarious present-day Zero back in the time of Scheherazade and Sinbad (although it’s never said whether he’s an actual time traveler).

Art Lortie's guide and scans include 141 pages of new and reprint material from comic books, too, although I didn’t spot any time travel therein.

 Now then, just visualize how important it might be if we were able to see what was happening a year from now! 


   “He Who Mastered Time”
by J. Harvey Haggard
First publication: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Feb 1937

After testing his time machine on mice, Richard Sauger himself travels to the far end of time with no plot other than that.

 He stood on a flat plain that undulated gently. That much was understandable. The surface of the earth, if it really was changing rapidly, had become a mere blur to his senses. The solid ring of substance across the sky was the sun, traveling at a prodigious rate that kept pase with his transit through Time. The retina of the eye caught its image as a solid ring, so swift was the earths rotation. As the seasons altered the ring shifted lower or higher across the horizon, that was all. 




   The Sands of Time Stories
by P. Schuyler Miller
First story: Astounding, Apr 1937

Terry Donovan realizes that it’s possible to travel through time in 60,000,000-year increments, so naturally he travels back to the time of dinosaurs and visiting aliens.

The first story, “The Sands of Time,” was under Tremaine’s Astounding editorship (Apr 1937) but the sequel, “Coils of Time,” appeared under Campbell’s (May 1939).

 Incidentally, I have forgotten the most important thing of all. Remember that Donovans dominating idea was to prove to me, and to the world, that he had been in the Cretaceous and hobnobbed with its flora and fauna. He was a physicist by inclination, and had the physicists flair for ingenious proofs. Before leaving, he loaded a lead cube with three quartz quills of pure radium chloride that he had been using in a previous experiment, and locked the whole thing up in a steel box. 




   “Forgetfulness”
by John W. Campbell, Jr. (as by Don A. Stuart)
First publication: Astounding, Jun 1937

Millions of years after mankind raised various species and sent them to the stars, one of the species returns and believes that humans have fallen into a primitive existence. And the time travel? Partway through the story, there’s a power source that goes to the end of time and cycles back to the beginning of time. In addition, Fred Galvin pointed out to me that even though it takes the aliens six years to travel to Earth, when they return to their home planet, only one year has passed, apparently a complete undoing by Seun of Rhth of the alien invasion.

The story also appeared in Healy and McComas’s seminal anthology, Adventures in Time and Space, and it was made into a one-act play in 1943 by Wayne Gordon.

 In the first revolution it made, the first day it was built, it circled to the ultimate end of time and the universe, and back to the day it was built. 




   “Lost in Time”
by Arthur Leo Zagat
First publication: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Jun 1937

While crossing the Pacific alone in a small boat, Jim Dunning runs into a storm that capsizes his boat. When he comes to, the only thing in sight is a spherical ship with one passenger: the beautiful (but unconscious) Thalma of the house of Adams, who’s been thrown into the past by her evil Uncle Marnota. When Thalma recovers, she pushes random levers which result in both her and Jim returning to her time and the clutches of Marnota.

 You just trust your Uncle Jim! Everythings going to be all right, sure as God made little apples. Just sit down over here, and powder your nose, or whatever they do in your time. Then you can tell me all about it. 


The story later appeared in this 1953 anthology.

   “Reverse Phylogeny”
by Amelia Reynolds Long
First publication: Astounding, Jun 1937

Eric Dale once again tells of an escapade of his friend, Professor Aloysius O’Flannigan—this time it’s about his quest to prove or disprove the existance of Atlantis via hypnosis and the recovery of ancestral memories. You’ll need to wait until the end for the tiny bit of time travel to be cast out.

 There are times, I reflected, when nothing else in the English language is so expressive as the single word, “Nuts.” But I said nothing, hoping that he would work off his enthusiasm by writing a letter to the magazine. I should have known better. 


   “Seeker of To-Morrow”
by Eric Frank Russell and Leslie J. Johnson
First publication: Astounding, Jul 1937

Explorer Urnas Karin and his crew of twenty return to Venus from abandoned Earth along with the body of a man who appears to have traveled from the ancient past—and then they revive him, whereupon he tells of his invention of time travel (to the future only) and subsequent journey from 1998 to the present day.

 I had set up my laboratory in the wilds of the Peak District in Derbyshire, in England, where work could be carried on with the minimum of interference. From this laboratory I had dispatched into the unknown, presumably the future, a multitude of objects, including several live creatures such as rats, mice, pigeons and domestic fowl. In no case could I bring back anything I had made to vanish. Once gone, the subject was gone forever. There was no way of discovering exactly where it had gone. There was nothing but to take a risk and go myself. 



No Time Travel.
Move along.
Time and the Conways by J.B. Priestley [visions of possible futures ]

“The Isolinguals” by L. Sprague de Camp, Astounding Sep 1937 [ancestral memory ]

“Past, Present and Future” by Nat Schachner, Astounding, Sep 1937 [long sleep ]
aka part of The Three Musketeers of Tomorrow

I Have Been Here Before by J.B. Priestley, 22 Sep 1937 [precognition ]

“City of the Rocket Horde” by Nat Schachner, Astounding, Dec 1937 [long sleep ]
aka part of The Three Musketeers of Tomorrow



   For Us, the Living
by Robert A. Heinlein
First written: 1938 (posthumously published in 2003)

I’m sad that I’ve now read all the extant Heinlein fiction, this posthumous (and first) novel being the last piece for me. It certainly held 3.5 stars worth of enjoyment for a Heinlein fan, but much of that was in seeing the nascent ideas of the writer that I would devour in my childhood. In the story, a military pilot from 1939 dies, and his consciousness is thrown forward to 2086 where social and economic aspects of society are hugely altered, though technological advances are more conservative (but, dammit, I want my flying car).

 “Let me get out of these furs.” She walked away while fumbling with a zipper at her throat. The furs were all one garment which slipped off her shoulders and fell to the floor. Perry felt a shock like an icy shower and then a warm tingle. 


Robert A. Heinlein, Master Traveller

Had Heinlein written nothing other than “—All You Zombies—”, he would still be a masterful Master Traveller.



   Hal Hardy and the Lost Land of Giants
First publication: Whitman Big Little Book 1413, 1938

Not surprisingly, Hal finds himself in the land of dinosaurs.

 The beast Hal saw looked like a rhinoceros, save for the horns. 






   The Once and Future King
by T.H. White
First book: 1938

Merlyn, who experiences time backward, is the traveler in this series, which was introduced to me by Denbigh Starkey, my undergraduate advisor at WSU and later a member of my Ph.D. committee.

The first four of these short books in the series were collected (with a substantial cut and revision to #2) into a single volume, The Once and Future King, in 1958. A final part, The Book of Merlyn written in 1941, was published posthumously in 1971.
  1. The Sword in the Stone, 1938
    —Arthur is crowned
  2. The Witch in the Wood, 1939
    aka The Queen of Air and Darkness (cut and revised), 1958
    —young King Arthur
  3. The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
    —Sir Lancelot
  4. The Candle in the Wind (1958)
    —the end of Camelot
  5. The Book of Merlyn (1977)
    —the final battle with Mordred

     EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY. 

    —a sign at the ant colony
         (and also physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s description of particle physics)






   “Shuffled Symphonies”
by Basil Reynolds
First time travel: 1 Jan 1938 in Mickey Mouse Weekly 100

Shuffled Symphonies were short, illustrated fantasy stories in the British Mickey Mouse Weekly. Some of the episodes included time travel via Doctor Einmug’s time machine. The four that I know about include a trip to Stonehenge (1 Jan 1938), to visit Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth I (12 Mar 1938), a visit to Shakespeare (6 Aug 1938), and a trip to a robotic future (26 Nov, 1938).

 A few more shivers and quivers, and the heap of gleaming metal sprang into life and bowled after the terrified Twin! 

Mickey Mouse Weekly 147, 26 Nov, 1938




   “Lords of 9016”
by John Russell Fearn
First publication: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Apr 1938

Dick and his scientist friend Ladbrook take a helicopter into the giant hole that has opened in the ground near two cities where all people and animals have disappeared, only to find giant ants from the future.

 Not ants of your time, however, but the rulers of the year ninety-sixteen, seven thousand of so years ahead of you—time enough for the busy creatures of your present day to have evolved into the significant might you see we have. 




   The Legion of Time
by Jack Williamson
First publication: Astounding Science Fiction, May–Jul 1938

After two beautiful women of two different possible futures appear to physicist Denny Lanning, he finds himself swept up by a time-traveling ship, the Chronion, along with a band of fighting men who swear their allegiance to The Legion of Time and its mission to ensure that the eviler of the two beautiful women never comes to pass.

 But Max Planck with the quantum theory, de Broglie and Schroedinger with the wave mechanics, Heisenberg with matrix mechanics, enourmously complicated the structure of the universe—and with it the problem of Time.
With the substitution of waves of probability for concrete particles, the world lines of objects are no longer the fixed and simple paths they once were. Geodesics have an infinite proliferation of possible branches, at the whim of sub-atomic indeterminism.
Still, of course, in large masses the statistical results of the new physics are not much different from those given by the classical laws. But there is a fundamental difference. The apparent reality of the universe is the same—but it rests upon a quicksand of possible change.
 


   “The Invisible Bomber”
by Ralph Milne Farley (as by Lt. John Pease)
First publication: Amazing, Jun 1938

Here’s a new rule about what constitutes a time-travel story: If the author claims that there’s time travel in the story, then it’s a time-travel story. That’s the case for this story, which doesn’t feel like time travel to me, but in the afterward of The Omnibus of Time Farley says that the airplane bomber in this story becomes soundless and invisible via a “laminated” model of space-time in which a series of different worlds are stacked one on top of another, each just a short time in front of its predecessor. According to Farley, “time-traveling will carry the traveler, not into the future, but rather into an entirely different space-time continuum than our own.” The plane becomes invisible by traveling just a short distance toward the next world without reaching anywhere near it.

My thought on this is that the notion of time as a dimension does not have anything to do with the stacking dimension. In fact, I don’t think they can be the same dimension because that would imply that there is nothing to distinguish a point in our space-time continuum from a point with the same space-time coordinates in some other continuum.

P.S. I also didn’t care for the president’s solution to the story’s problem.

 We human beings live in a three dimensional space, or which time has sometimes been called the fourth dimension. But did it ever occur to you, Mr. President, that we do not extend in time. We never experience any other time than the present. Our so-called space-time existence is thus seen to be a mere three-dimensional layer, or lamina, infinitely thin in the time direction. There could exist another three-dimensional space just a second or two away from ours, and we would never know it. 


Part I of Asimov’s autobiography

   “Cosmic Corkscrew”
by Isaac Asimov
First publication: written in 1938, but unpublished

“Cosmic Corkscrew” was the first story that Asimov ever wrote for submission to the pulp magazines of the day. In the first part of his autobiography, he describes starting the story, setting it aside, and returning to it some thirteen months later. It was the story that he took with him on his first visit to John Campbell, inquiring about why the July 1938 Astounding was late arriving. Alas, the story was rejected and then lost, but it did have time travel!

 In it, I viewed time as a helix (this is, as something like a bedspring). Someone could cut across from one turn directly to the next, thus moving into the future by some exact interval, but being incapable of traveling one day less into the future. (I didnt know the term at the time, but what I had done was to “quantize” time travel.) 

In Memory Yet Green, Part I of Asimov’s autobiography


Isaac Asimov, Master Traveller

Even though Asimov’s first story was lost, I find it comforting that the story was about time travel, a theme that he returned to over-and-over again with far more variety than any of his other themes. My favorite Asimov story, given to me by my Grandpa Main in its original 1958 issue of Galaxy will always be “The Ugly Little Boy.”





   Language for Time Travelers
by L. Sprague de Camp
First publication: Astounding Science Fiction, Jul 1938

This essay convinced me to add at least a few nonfiction works to my list. After all, why not? De Camp interleaves a few fictional vignettes with thoughts on how language might change over the next few centuries. For me, it shows how well the time travel paradigm had been established by 1939.

As a bonus, this essay appeared in the very issue of Astounding that has the final installment of The Legion of Time and which caused all the trouble in my story “Saving Astounding.”

 Wah lenksh? Inksh lenksh, coss. Wah you speak? Said, sah-y, daw geh-ih. Daw, neitha. You fresh? Jumm? 


L. Sprague de Camp, Master Traveller

Even before de Camp produced the award winning Lest Darkness Fall, my Grandpa Main had identified him as a Master Traveller based on “Language for Time Travelers,” which was the first of many de Camp essays. Appropriately enough, de Camp’s enjoyable autobiography is titled Time and Chance.









   Fiction House Comics
published by Thurman T. Scott
First time travel: Jumbo Comics 1, Sep 1938

Fiction House was a major publisher of pulp magazines and comics through the 1950s. Their comics came out of a pulp tradition with stories of jungle heros (Sheena, Queen of the Jungle), air aces (Wings Comics), westerns (Cowgirl Romances), science fiction (Planet Comics), and, of course, Jumbo Comics (Action! Adventure! Mystery!).

The first time travel that I tracked down here was an adventurer named Stuart Taylor who teamed with Dr. Hayward and his beautiful daughter Lora (later Laura) in many issues of Jumbo Comics. For me, it was exciting for two reasons: (1) It’s some of the earliest time travel in a comic book that I know of; (2) At least the first few stories were drawn by Jack King Kirby (as by Curt Davis). Time travel probably occurred in 1-4 (“The Experiment of Kromo’), as well as in 5-14, 17-78, 84-139, plus a reprint in 140. (Numbers 15-16 had no time travel; I think 79-83 are shorter, with no Stuart Taylor, and Stu disappeared after 140.)

Their science fiction comic, Planet Comics, had at least one bout of time travel when a chronoscope brought dinosaurs and such to The Lost World of heros Hunt and Lyssa (Planet Comics 41, March 1946); it also short, 2-page stories, at least one of which was time travel (“Lost World of Time” in Planet Comics 7, July 1940).

 My name is Stuart Taylor. Do you mind if I ask what seems a silly question! What year is this? 

—from Jumbo Comics 13




   If—You Were Stranded in Time
by Jack Binder
First publication: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dec 1938

Comic book artist Jack Binder wasn’t as well known among science fiction readers as his two brothers Otto and Earl, but Jack did series of what-if comics for “Thrilling Wonder Stories, including this

 Suppose some fourth-dimensional phenomenon catapulted you back to the days of Caesar, with the possibility of a return to your own twentieth century entirely removed. Equipped with an elementary understanding of various sciences, how would you capitalize on your knowledge of future events and discoveries? Could you, with a head-start of two thousand years, earn a living? 



No Time Travel.
Move along.
“Island of the Individualists” by Nat Schachner, Astounding, May 1938 [long sleep ]

“The Dangerous Dimension” by L. Ron Hubbard, Astounding, Jul 1938 [just teleportation ]

“Through the Time-Radio” by Stanton A. Coblentz, Marvel Science Stories, Aug 1938 [viewing the past ]

“Time for Sale” by Ralph Milne Farley, Amazing, Aug 1938 [differing time rates ]



   The Ship That Flew
by Hilda Lewis
First publication: 1939

Four children and a ship—a time traveling ship, that is, which takes Peter Grace and his three siblings back to the time of ancient Egypt, Robin Hood, Norse gods, and more.

 It was lovely in the magic ship, lovelier than any one could possibly have imagined. The wind sent their hair streaming backwards. Birds flew past with movements scarcely less graceful that those of the ship. The children sang for joy in the keen, fresh air. The song that they sang had no words, it just came out in trills and rhythms because they were so happy. 




   A Traveller in Time
by Alison Uttley
First publication: 1939

While staying with her aunt in Derbyshire, sickly young Penelope Taberner Cameron is swept back to the sixteenth century where she is caught up in the Babington plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I.

 I flung open the door, and I fell headlong down a flight of stairs. I had dropped into the corridor where I had seen the servants pass with their jugs and tankards. For some time I lay half-stunned with surprise, but unhurt, for I had fallen silently like a feather floating to the floor. I looked round at the door, but it had disappeared; I stared at the low whitewashed ceiling and the carved doorways, and I listened to the beating of my heart which was the only sound. Then life seemed to come to the world, distant shouts of men, the jingle of harness, and the lowing of cattle. A cock crew as if to wake the dead, and I sat up trying to remember . . . remember. . . . 






   DC Comics (Anthologies)
First time travel: Dectective Comics 23, Jan 1939

Like all the other publishers, DC also published anthologies of weird stories (as opposed to continuing characters) in the 50s, but even before that, they had anthologies of adventure stories. The earliest time travel that I’ve found so far are from 1939: a two-part story of Slam Bradley and his sidekick traveling to the year two billion, A.D., in Detective Comics 23 and 24; and a five-part story, “A Playboy in King Arthur’s Court,” starting in in Adventure Comics 37. As for the 50s weird stories, the first one I found there was an H.L. Gold tale, “The Endless War,” in Strange Adventures 2. As I find others, I’ll list them in my time-travel comic books page.

 History runs wild when Columbus, Napolean, and Cleopatra journey through time from the past to the present! 

—from the cover of Strange Adventures 60




   The Shadow
created by Walter B. Gibson
First time travel: 1 Jan 1939

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of time travelers? I found one time-travel episode of The Shadow: the Jan 1, 1939 NBC radio broadcast of “The Man Who Murdered Time”:

 My machine bends the staight track of time, curves it, curves it, so that the time track forms a perfect circle! 






   Alley Oop
created by V.T. Hamlin
First time travel: 5 Apr 1939

The caveman’s first exposure to time travel was in the 5 April, 1939 daily strip, shortly before Dr. Wonmug brought the insignts of the boisterous Alley Oop to the 20th century and elsewhere in time.

The image to the left is from Alley Oop 12 from Standard’s 1947-49 run of nine comics (10-18) that reprinted strips. The first one had pre-time-travel strips, but all of the rest probably included some time travel. The time machine picture to the right is from Dragon Lady Press strip reprints in the 1980s.

I’ve also found one Alley Oop take-off called Irving Oops in an the EC comic Panic 8, May 1955—which makes me wonder whether that other Irving of the comics, Irving Forbush, ever time traveled.

 By golly, kid, I’d swear that thing wasn’t there a while ago! I’m gonna see what— 

—Alley Oop watching a camera from the future dissolve away, 5 Apr 1939






   Fox Features Syndicate Comics
published by Victor S. Fox
First time travel: Wonder Comics 2, Jun 1939

Fox Comics had one of the earliest lineups of anthology comic books with continuing characters. Their earliest time travel that I found was by the recurring character Don Quixote, who appeared in the second issue of Wonder Comics. (The first issue starred Will Eisner’s superhero, Wonder Man, but he was quashed by a DC lawsuit.)

My favorite Fox time traveler was the Sorceress of Zoom. She was a female anti-hero along the lines of the Submariner, but her realm was not in the sea, it was the cloud city of Zoom. She had at least one time travel adventure in Weird Comics 7 (Oct 1940) when she gets the best of Morgan Le Fay in Camelot.

As I find more, I’ll list each character’s first time travel here and the details will be on my time-travel comics page. (Sadly, I never spotted any time travel by Marga the Panther Woman, who appeared alongside Cosmic Carson in Science Comics.)
  1. Don Quixote (Jun 1939) Wonder Comics 2
  2. Flick Falcon (Dec 1939) Fantastic Comics 1
  3. Cosmic Carson (Jul 1940) Science Comics 6
  4. The Sorceress of Zoom (Oct 1940) Weird Comics 7

 Ill project the City of Zoom into the past where it will be safe for the time being! 

Weird Comics 7


   Pete Manx and the Time Chair Stories
by Henry Kuttner and Arthur K. Barnes (as by Kelvin Kent)
First story: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Aug 1939

Captain Marvel’s time chair got scooped by Dr. Horation Mayhem who sent Pete Manx into dangerous hijinks in the past in the pages of Thrilling Wonder Stories.
  1. Roman Holiday (Aug 1939) Kuttner and Barnes
  2. World’s Pharaoh (Dec 1939) Kuttner
  3. Science is Golden (Apr 1940) Kuttner and Barnes
  4. Knight Must Fall (Jun 1940) Barnes
  5. The Comedy of Eras (Sep 1940) Kuttner
  6. Man about Time (Oct 1940) Kuttner
  7. The Greeks Had a War for It (Jan 1941) Barnes
  8. Hercules Muscles In (Feb 1941) Kuttner
  9. Dames Is Poison (Jun 1942) Kuttner
  10. De Wolfe of Wall Street (Feb 1943) Barnes
  11. Grief of Bagdad (Jun 1943) Barnes
  12. Swing Your Lady (Winter 1944) Kuttner

 “Yes, my boy. I understand your aversion to making any more trips into the historical Past. You have been a—um—lodestone for violent trouble . . .”
“Something always happens to me!” exclaimed Pete. “What if I shd get bumped off in the Past? Nix. No more o that stuff for me.”
“Quite right, my son. And yet—” Mayhems benign tone and dreamy stare at the ceiling were pure ham. “I would never have invited you here again, Pete, knowing it to be a place of strange memories, except that occassionally in our lives there arise demands that transcend all selfish personal considerations. Do you follow me?”
 

—“Grief of Bagdad”




   Arch Oboler’s Plays
by Arch Oboler
First time travel: 9 Sep 1939

Arch Oboler was a prolific radio playright from the mid-1930s, starting with NBC’s Lights Out radio show. One of the stories in the 1939 Arch Obolers Plays series was “And Adam Begot,” which told the story of two men and a woman thrown back into prehistoric times. The story appear in print in a 1944 anthology, was reprised for the 1951 Lights Out tv show, and formed the basis for a 1953 Steve Ditko story in the Black Magic comic book.

 The young dramalist expects to face his biggest casting problem in filling the roles of the two Neanderthal men which he has written into “And Adam Begot.” He wants a voice, he explains, which will instantly suggest a cave-man to the radio listener. With that in mind, he conducted a survey of what people expect in a Neanderthal voice. “A cross-section of the answers,” Oboler says, “suggests a bass voiced prizefighter, talking double talk with his mouth full of hot potatoes.” 

—The Lima News, 9 Sep 1939




   All-American Comics
aka “A Thousand Years a Minute”
by Carl H. Claudy
First time travel: All-American Comics 8, Nov 1939

Before being bought by DC, All-American Publications had a 102-issue run with All-American Comics, which among other things introduced the Green Lantern and had an adaptation of Carl H. Claudy’s A Thousand Years a Minute in issues 7 through 12. However, the episode in #7 was actually more the wrapping up of an earlier serial (also by Claudy and under the umbrella of Adventures in the Unknown) called “The Mystery Men of Mars,” and the actual time-traveling began until issue 8.

 If you stepped off this platform youd be cut in two just as if you stepped off a fast moving train! You cant be in two different “times” any more than you can be in two difference places at the same moment! 

All-American Comics 9




   Lest Darkness Fall
by L. Sprague de Camp
First published as complete novel: Unknown, Dec 1939

During a thunderstorm, archaeologist Martin Padway is thrown back to Rome of 535 A.D., whereupon he sets out to stop the coming Dark Ages.

 Padway feared a mob of religious enthusiasts more than anything on earth, no doubt because their mental processes were so utterly alien to his own. 




   Top-Notch Comics
by Otto Binder and Jack Binder
First publication: Dec 1939

The first two issues of Top-Notch Comics had a feature called “Scott Rand in the Worlds of Time” written by science fiction staple Otto Binder and drawn by his older brother, Jack (rather than Earl). Rand first drove his time car back to Rome in 200 A.D. where he picked up Thor. In the second episode, they went to New York in 2000 A.D. Jack Binder continued the episodes of Rand and Thor in Top-Notch 3, heading to Mars of the future, but I don’t yet know whether there were any other stories.

This title morphed into Top-Notch Laugh Comics, and was then acquired by Archie Comics. I don’t know whether there were any further adventures in time by Rand or others during the Top-Notch run.

 The time car is working perfectly! We can go anywhere . . . the past or the future! 

—Dr. Meade in Top-Notch Comics 1



No Time Travel.
Move along.
“The Gnarly Man” by L. Sprague de Camp, Unknown, Jun 1939 [immortality ]

“Stolen Centuries” by Otis Adelbert Kline, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Jun 1939 [long sleep ]

“City of the Cosmic Rays” by Nat Schachner, Astounding, Jul 1939 [long sleep ]

“Greater Than Gods” by C.L. Moore, Astounding, Jul 1939 [visions of possible futures ]

“Lightship, Ho!” by Nelson S. Bond, Astounding, Jul 1939 [FTL ]

The Hidden Universe by Ralph Milne Farley, Amazing, Nov–Dec 1939 [differing time rates ]

“Into Another Dimension” by Maurice Duclos, Fantastic Adventures, Nov 1939 [parallel universes ]

“City of the Corporate Mind” by Nat Schachner, Astounding, Dec 1939 [long sleep ]

 


191 items are in the time-travel list for these search settings.
Thanks for visiting my time-travel page, and thanks to the many sources that provided stories and more (see the Links and Credits in the menu at the top). —Michael (
main@colorado.edu)