The Seeds of Time: Classic Science Fiction

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A time-travel rom-com which, despite the foreword, has a spot of adventure and peril. The title refers to the sort of anomaly that can arise if users of history-machines do anything more than observe. The risks of killing one’s grandfather or becoming one’s own progenitrix are mentioned. This is The Butterfly Effect, an idea generally credited to Bradbuy’s Sound of Thunder from 1952 (see my review HERE), the year before this story was first published. Survival: terrifying in its spare approach to unspooling a conventional thriller scenario (a disabled spacecraft is running out of food and on the edge of social collapse - then they find out the one female passenger is pregnant) Pillar to Post": a future scientists' experiment results in a legless man from the present to be teleported in to a healthy body far in to the future. Understandably, the man from our time does not want to return. Here's another take on time travel. This story works around the idea of different futures arising from different outcomes to decisions. Can true love sort things out when fates goes horribly pear shaped?

This was written pre-war, but lightly edited afterwards. It’s definitely an adventure, but there are no “galactic gangsters”. The basic plot is obvious from the off, but it’s an interesting example of how an insular perspective (life, experience, body) skews objectivity and ability to interpret unfamiliar situations. There are serious, satirical, and outright comic examples of travelling to another place or time, sometimes with the intention of settling there. Wyndham is clearly against the historical human pattern of dominating and enslaving or obliterating those already there and was perhaps a multiculturalist before the word was coined: What I look for in sci-fi is interesting ideas (language, character development, and even plot are secondary). Wyndham delivers. Dark humour and ethical quandaries. Like Meteor, it’s about disorientation when one cannot even begin to understand one's circumstances, but Terry is fully aware of his ignorance, and the plot and dilemmas are more complex. It also posits that government paternalism removing the need to adapt could cause the slow demise of humanity. Meteor - a ship containing 1000 survivors from an apocalypse land on an unknown planet. This was one of my favourites. The battle for survival from a different perspective; reminded me a bit of the 1960s tv show Land of The Giants.

urn:lcp:seedsoftime0000jame:epub:2f6d6aa2-b835-4ad9-8aa7-b7805fa8c4c0 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier seedsoftime0000jame Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s240bfkn2hm Invoice 1652 Isbn 023108059X Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.15 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-1300236 Openlibrary_edition A collection of short sci-fi stories, covering all kinds of things - time travel, body swapping, space racism, interplanetary colonization etc etc

Would you want to know what happens on alternative timelines, if certain key decisions went another way? Which decisions would they be?Fawleys peepholes - tourists from the future make people feel like they are living in a goldfish bowl. What can you do when you cannot touch physically? loved how they turned the tables in the end.