Re: Time Machine revised?

Girish <girishbhat6620@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

On May 4, 9:50 pm, David Librik <lib...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There's a good book called THE DEFINITIVE TIME MACHINE, edited by
Harry M. Geduld. It has the text of the 1924 revision of the story

Thanks! Was the story retconned to have the red giant sun? :-)
Otherwise H G Wells must really have been a true visionary to come up
with that in the 1890s.

I always had the impression it was common knowledge in the 1890s.

For instance, here are the last three paragraphs of the National
Observer (1894) version of The Time Machine, an early and schematic take
on the story. The Time Traveller is back from his visit to the year
12,203, and engaged in a vigorous argument with his guests who call his
tale a "Gospel of Despair."


"And after man?" said the medical man.

"A world with a continually longer day and a continually
shorter year, so the astronomers tell us. For the drag of
the tides upon the spin of the earth will bring this planet
at last to the plight of Mercury, with one face turned always
to the sun. And the gradual diminution of the centrifugal
component of the earth's motion due to interplanetary matter
will cause it to approach the sun slowly and surely as the
sun cools, until the parent body has recovered its offspring
again. During the last stages of the sunward movement over
those parts of the earth that are sunward there will be an
unending day, and a vast red sun growing ever vaster and
duller will glow motionless in the sky. Twice already it
will have blazed into a transient period of brilliance as
the minor planets, Mercury and Venus, melted back into its
mass. On the further side of the earth will be perpetual
night and the bitterest cold, and between these regions will
be belts of twilight, of perpetual sunset, and perpetual
afternoon. Whether there will be any life on the earth then
we can scarcely guess. Somewhere in the belts of intermediate
temperature, it may be, that strange inconceivable forms of
life will still struggle on against the inevitable fate that
awaits them. But an end comes. Life is a mere eddy, an
episode, in the great stream of universal being, just as man
with all his cosmic mind is a mere episode in the story of
life --"

He stopped abruptly. "There is that kid of mine upstairs
crying. He always cries when he wakes up in the dark. If
you don't mind, I will just go up and tell him it's all right."


It's really not very well written. It reads like a popular science
lecture hastily retold with lots of verbal repetition. I believe
that between the National Observer revision and the New Review one
Wells must have learned the rule "show, don't tell."

What would have been truly "visionary" would have been to guess
that Mercury isn't tide-locked permanently to face the sun. But
even mid-twentieth-century SF writers got that wrong. (It made
for great stories, though.)

- David Librik
librik@xxxxxxxxx
.

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