The Time Ships

Editor’s Note

The attached account was given to me by the owner of a small second-hand bookshop, situated just off the Charing Cross Road in London. He told me it had turned up as a manuscript in an unlabeled box, in a collection of books which had been bequeathed to him after the death of a friend; the bookseller passed the manuscript on to me as a curiosity — “You might make something of it” — knowing of my interest in the speculative fiction of the nineteenth century.

The manuscript itself was typewritten on commonplace paper, but a pencil note attested that it had been transcribed from an original “written by hand on a paper of such age that it has crumbled beyond repair.” That original, if it ever existed, is lost. There is no note as to the manuscript’s author, or origin.

I have restricted my editing to a superficial polishing, meaning only to eliminate some of the errors and duplications of a manuscript which was evidently written in haste.

What are we to make of it? In the Time Traveler’s words, we must “take it as a lie — or a prophecy… Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction…” Without further evidence, we must regard this work as a fantasy — or as an elaborate hoax — but if there is even a grain of truth in the account contained in these pages, then a startling new light is shed, not merely on one of our most famous works of fiction (if fiction it was!), but also on the nature of our universe and our place in it.

I present the account here without further comment.

Stephen Baxter

January 1995