The Big List of Time Travel Adventures

 1932

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 woman’s scream, a moment’s 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 ]

 

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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)