The Big List of Time Travel Adventures

 1933

   “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 don’t want to claim any one else’s laurels, but that was my view even before the name of Einstein was heard of. I’ve been working at it for thirty-five years. It’s 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 can’t 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, I’m sure. My apparatus is improved. But, in my first trial, my subject was—injured. I’ve 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 ]

 

14 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)