Fri 10 Apr 2020
Pulp SF Stories I’m Reading: POUL ANDERSON “Flight to Forever.â€
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Science Fiction & Fantasy , Stories I'm Reading[4] Comments
POUL ANDERSON “Flight to Forever.†Novella. First published in Super Science Stories, November 1950 First reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels: 1952, edited by Everett F. Bleiler & T. E. Dikty (Frederick Fell, hardcover, 1952), and The Mammoth Book of Vintage Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1950s, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, & Charles G. Waugh (Carroll & Graf, softcover, 1990), among others. Collected in Past Times (Tor, paperback, 1984) and Alight in the Void (Tor, paperback, 1991), among others.
This is one of Poul Anderson’s earliest stories, written when he was only 24, and a better story of Gosh Wow time travel, I can think of none better. And I do not mean that disparagingly! This tale was written back when time-traveling machines could be constructed in a garage, or if not, then in a single scientist’s laboratory, with only a modicum of assistance. Such a scientist is Martin Saunders, and his machine has been working perfectly. Inanimate objects have been sent farther and farther into the future, and in case they have also returned.
Until now. An object sent 100 into the future has not come back, and Saunders an assistant decide to take a trip there themselves and see if they can’t figure out what went wrong. Now you and I know that this might not be the wisest thing to do, but this was also in the age (1950) when scientists did not think things out too clearly ahead of time before jumping into either homemade spaceships or time machines as they should.
The problem does not consist of getting there. It seems, however, that there is a limit of only 70 years in going backward in time. The solution: keep going ahead into the future until they reach such a time when scientists have figured out a way to overcome the difficulty in going backward in time. Ahead they go, each stage of the in larger and larger increments of time. Fifty tears, a hundred years, a thousand years, five thousand years. Empires come and go, as they discover, oftentimes with barbarians at the gates. Some people they find are friendly; others not. A million years, a million million years, and on to the end of time?
Well, I will leave it to you to read this to see if Saunders ever finds his way home again, but wow, what a trip he makes!
April 10th, 2020 at 7:09 pm
The whole anthology “The Mammoth Book of Vintage Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1950s” sounds great. Full of stuff I’ve never read.
Thanks for telling us about the Anderson story.
April 10th, 2020 at 7:56 pm
Mike
Here are the contents of the Vintage SF book:
1 • Flight to Forever • (1950) • novella by Poul Anderson
48 • The Martian Way • (1952) • novelette by Isaac Asimov
91 • Second Game • [Kalin Trobt] • (1958) • novelette by Charles V. De Vet and Katherine MacLean
130 • Dark Benediction • (1951) • novella by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
180 • The Midas Plague • (1954) • novella by Frederik Pohl
231 • The Oceans Are Wide • (1954) • novella by Frank M. Robinson
296 • And Then There Were None • (1951) • novella by Eric Frank Russell (variant of … And Then There Were None)
361 • Baby Is Three • (1952) • novella by Theodore Sturgeon
414 • Firewater • (1952) • novella by William Tenn
464 • The Alley Man • (1959) • novella by Philip José Farmer
Some of these I know, others I don’t. I’m looking forward to reading them as time goes on.Even those I know, I haven’t read in a long time.
April 10th, 2020 at 7:13 pm
Anderson would come back to this theme of the vastness of time and the Universe in later books with more science and less adventure.
April 10th, 2020 at 7:58 pm
Between you and me, I like Anderson’s earlier stuff a lot whole better than what he wrote later on, even the books and stories he won a lot of awards for. It’s just me, I know.