![]() ![]() One of those themes was the idea of a mechanism (rather than a dream or trance) to take a person back in time, as presented in “The Clock That Went Backward”-the first time machine! Another time travel innovation of Mitchell was the time traveling ghost from the future in “An Uncommon Sort of Spectre,” who unlike Dickens’s ghosts could interact with the time he traveled to. In Lost Giants of American Science Fiction, sf historian Sam Moskowitz cites Mitchell as the first to spearhead five important sf themes in his anonymously published, syndicated short stories for the newspapers. Eternities seemed to contract into minutes while lifetimes were thrown off at every tick. In this whirl we ourselves seemed to be borne along. The hands were whirling around the dial from right to left with inconceivable rapidity. This is travel in a machine (or at least an artifact), but they have no control over the destination. Traveller A young man and his cousin inherit a clock that takes them back to the siege of Leyden at the start of October 1574, where they affect that time as much as it has affected them. ![]()
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