The Big List of Time Travel Adventures

 1976



  
 Humboldt #1
Time Piper
by Delia Huddy
First publication: 1976

In the first of two books Luke meets an out-of-place girl named Hare, and given all the tachyon flying around, he begins to suspect that Tom Humboldt—the head of Luke’s summer research project—has pulled Hare from the past.

A sequel, The Humboldt Effect, picks up Luke’s life several years later.

 She was strange, remote, and beautiful, and she called herself “Hare.” 








   The Chronopath Stories
by Steven Utley
First story: Galaxy, Jan 1976

I’ve read only the first of this series of stories which predates Utley’s better known Silurian tales. The first-person narrator, Bruce Holt, tells of his power (which he didn’t ask for and has no control over) of traveling through time and being deposited in other beings’ minds for a brief few seconds at a time.
  1. Getting Away (Jan 1976) Galaxy
  2. Predators (Oct 1976) The Ideas of Tomorrow
  3. To 1966 (Spring 1977) Chacal
  4. Spectator Sport (Jul 1977) Amazing
  5. The Maw (Jul 1977) F&SF
  6. Time and Hagakure (Winter 1977) Asimov’s
  7. Where or When (Jan 1991) Asimov’s
  8. The Glowing Cloud (Jan 1992) Asimov’s
  9. Now That We Have Each Other (Jul 1992)   Asimov’s
  10. One Kansas Night (Jun 1994) Asimov’s
  11. Living It (Aug 1994) Asimov’s
  12. Staying in Storyville (Dec 2006) in When or Where
  13. Life’s Work (Dec 2006) in When or Where
  14. The Here and Now (Mar 1998) Asimov’s

 What do you want me to do? Go back and find out where Captain Kidd buried his loot? 

—“Getting Away”




   Time Travelers
by Jackson Gillis (Alexander Singer, director)
First aired: 19 Mar 1976

ABC-tv picked up this failed pilot (a proposed revival of The Time Tunnel) and aired it as a made-for-tv movie in which Dr. Clinton Earnshaw and his government-sent sidekick Jeff Adams venture back to 1871 to track down a cure for a modern-day epidemic.

 For your information, medical historians have been digging into that puzzle for years without any luck at all. So unless somehow—miraculously—you have discovered Dr. Henderson’s diaries in the last couple of hours . . . 




   “Birth of a Notion”
by Isaac Asimov
First publication: Amazing, Apr 1976

The world’s first time traveler, Simeon Weill, goes back to 1925 and gives some ideas to Hugo.

 That the first inventor of a workable time machine was a science fiction enthusiast is by no means a coincidence. 




   “An Infinite Summer”
by Christopher Priest
First publication: Andromeda, May 1976

For purposes that only they can know, people from the future—Thomas Lloyd calls them “freezers”—put a small number of people into a kind of suspended animation. Nobody can see the frozen except for those who have been previously frozen and then thawed. Thomas himself is among this select group: frozen in 1903 on the verge of proposing to his beloved Sarah; unfrozen shortly before World War II, at which point he can but view his still-frozen Sarah.

 Thomas James Lloyd, straw hat raised in his left hand, his other hand reaching out. His right knee was slightly bent, as if he were about to kneel, and his face was full of happiness and expectation. A breeze seemed to be ruffling his hair, for three strands stood on end, but these had been dislodged when he removed his hat. A tiny winged insect, which had settled on his lapel, was frozen in its moment of flight, an instinct to escape too late. 


   “Balsamo’s Mirror”
by L. Sprague de Camp
First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jun 1976

MIT student W. Wilson Newbury has a creepy Lovecraftian friend who is enamored with the 18th century, so naturally they visit an Armenian gypsy who makes them passengers in the bodies of an 18th century pauper and his father.

This story gave me a game that I play of pretending that I have just arrived as a passenger in my own body with no control over my actions or observations. How long does it take to figure out who and where I am? So, I enjoyed that aspect of the story, but I have trouble reading phonetically spelled dialects.

In his autobiography, de Camp says he based the setting of the story on his time as a graduate student at MIT in 1932, when Lovecraft (whom de Camp didn’t know) lived in nearby Providence: “I put H.P. Lovecraft himself, unnamed, into the story and stressed the contrast between his idealized eighteenth-century England and what he would have found if he had actually been translated back there. To get the dialect right, I read Fielding’s Tom Jones.”

 I didn’t say that we could or should go back to pre-industrial technology. The changes since then were inevitable and irreversible. I only said . . . 


1982 paperback edition   “Room 409”
by Nance Donkin
First publication: A Handful of Ghosts, Nov 1976

A thirteen-year-old Australian boy on vacation in England gets a key to a room that existed during World War II but no longer does.

 He didn’t seem to fit in at all well with the modern decor of the place, but I got the key from him and went towards the lift. 



No Time Travel. Move along.
  The Nonsuch Lure by Mary Luke, 1976 [reincarnation ]

  Dragonriders of Pern #3 (Harper Hall #1): Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey, Mar 1976 [no time travel ]

  “I See You” by Damon Knight, F↦SF, Nov 1976 [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)