Old And New

In early sf, a narrative always began in its author's and readers' here and now even if it immediately jumped to another planet or time. In H.G. Wells' anticipations:

the Time Traveler travels to 802,701 A.D. and beyond;

the Sleeper sleeps into the twenty second century;

Raven dreams a book of the future, The Shape Of Things To Come;

even "A Story of the Days to Come" (see here) begins with a Mr. Morris in Victoria's reign before hastening down the generations until it reaches his descendant, Mwres;

a companion story both to The Sleeper Wakes and to "A Story of the Days to Come" is "A Dream of Armageddon." See here.

None of these works begins simply with its characters living in the future as in a lot of later sf. James Blish deliberately reverted to the earlier narrative style when he wrote Midsummer Century (London, 1975) in the early 1970s. Having emigrated from the US to England, he created a fictional character, John Martels, who had emigrated in the opposite direction. Chapter 1, pp. 3-6, not only is set in the then "present" but is as full of that "present" as its author can make it:

Martels is part of "...the brain-drain..." (p. 3);

the US gives him higher pay, lower taxes and apparent classlessness although there is ferocious discrimination against blacks, Mexicans and the poor and political opposition is becoming increasingly dangerous, indeed would lose Martels his passport or his citizenship;

originating from a working-class background in Doncaster, Martels speaks in a regional accent that excludes him from upper class British society and that also obliges him to drink in public bars, not in lounges or saloons;

the British population includes "...smuggled Pakistani immigrants..." (p. 4);

Martels' school was not fee-paying and his D.Sc., First class, in astrophysics is not from Oxbridge but from a new redbrick polytechnic;

(much more recently, all "polys" have been upgraded to Universities - my Postgraduate Certificate in Education was from Manchester Polytechnic which has become Manchester Metropolitan University);

in the US, Martels is judged not by his accent but by his grammar, vocabulary and knowledge;

he is at a university in the midwest (remember Everard and other Anderson characters);

he sailplanes.

In true Blish style, the text refers to:

"...Ursa Major No. 2, a cluster of galaxies half a billion light-years away..." (p. 4)

When Martels begins to be projected into the future, Blish switches to the omniscient narrator mode used by Wells in "A Story of the Days to Come." We are informed, although Martels, whose point of view we have shared until now, certainly does not know this, that Thor Wald will be born in 2060. We see Wald in 2090-'91 in The Quincunx Of Time.

These two companion volumes by Blish, The Quincunx Of Time and Midsummer Century, are worthy successors of Wells' The Time Machine although what a long way we have come from Wells' Mr. Morris to Blish's John Martels. Wells' description of Mr. Morris' half-timbered house passing away reminded me of passages in The Time Machine and in Anderson's There Will Be Time that I compared here.