Arriving In The Future

HG Wells' Time Traveler arrives physically in the perpetual summer of 802,701 A.D. and, while then, visits a disused and abandoned museum. James Blish's John Martels arrives mentally in a disused and abandoned museum in the perpetual summer of 50,000 A.D. Thus, reading Blish's Midsummer Century might remind us of Wells' The Time Machine even if we do not analyze why.

Midsummer Century is a companion volume to Blish's The Quincunx Of Time which, like The Time Machine, presents the questionable metaphysic of immaterial consciousnesses moving along static, four-dimensional world-lines, which I discuss here and here. Blish is more consistent with this premise than Wells. Martels' consciousness, apparently leaving his dead body in 1985, enters a living brain artificially preserved in the museum.

As in Olaf Stapledon's two Last Men novels and in John Wyndham's "Pillar to Post" (see here), time travel is mental, not physical.