The Seeds of Time: Classic Science Fiction

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The constant, however, is the strength of Wyndham's writing. Regardless of how strong you deal the plot (I realise that is very subjective), it is all beautifully written. Concepts as fiddly as the many worlds hypothesis and the possibility of jumping between them, or the transfer of personality from one body to another are well explored and you never get bogged down in the (usually brief) technical sections of the works, and the writing drags the plots along at a good pace. If the woman in this story weren't a Martian (and I think she was a human but of a multi-generation Martian lineage), the story would just be a cautionary tale against domestic abuse.

This story is another time travel piece but is much more lighthearted than Chronoclasm. What would happen if people from the future decided to turn the past into one giant theme park? How would the citizens of the past react? Pillar to Post" An amputee gets body swapped with an explorer from a future and decides he likes having legs.Cecilia Flores: About 30 years ago I read a great story about a girl who travels from future to meet her grand grand grand father. She receives a letter from him when she is 18 years old (or something like that) and in this letter he declare his love to her, so she travels to the past to meet him. I think I remember that he is the narrator of the story, and it begins when he sees her in the street. He think that she has 2 things different from people around her: her shoes and her hair (and both details are explained after by her). Pillar to Post": a future scientists' experiment results in a legless man from the present to be teleported in to a healthy body far in to the future. Understandably, the man from our time does not want to return. There’s a natural dumbness about Marts… They kind of non-register… Kind of like a half-robot, and dumb at that; certainly no fun.”

Several stories mention seeds metaphorically (including survival themes) and literally, but the one titled Wild Flower doesn’t. A strong anti-racist, anti-slavery, pro-education, feminist story, with a battle of wits towards the end that makes it more fun than my preachy-sounding description. Meteor – a threatened species sends explorers out into space to find a new home, and the planet they find is Earth. Comedy and tragedy all rolled into one – a beautifully imaginative story, this one. Dark humour and ethical quandaries. Like Meteor, it’s about disorientation when one cannot even begin to understand one's circumstances, but Terry is fully aware of his ignorance, and the plot and dilemmas are more complex. It also posits that government paternalism removing the need to adapt could cause the slow demise of humanity.

Fawleys peepholes - tourists from the future make people feel like they are living in a goldfish bowl. What can you do when you cannot touch physically? loved how they turned the tables in the end. The Dumb Martian, is about a chauvinistic and venal outpost worker, Duncan who buys a wife, a Martian woman, Lellie, for the duration of his isolated stint. In fact what he bought is a slave, but he has neither the humanity nor the perspicacity to realise that belying her passivity and apparent limited emotional intelligence she is unhappy at her treatment, capable of learning, much to Duncan’s disquiet and unhappily for him, practical and strategic in responding to her tormentor. This scenario could have been placed on Earth with identical protagonists. Lellie does not have to be a Martian, but the planetary setting makes the story bright and clear. One has to be so careful; the results of the least action are incalculable… Let one seed fall out of place, and who can say what may come of it?” Pawley's Peepholes: hilarious and prophetic in its vision of tech-influenced tourism, in this case via a kind of cinema/time travel conceit This seems like a cliché, but it predates most of the sci-fi it brings to mind. It contrasts some very misogynistic characters with a woman who is unafraid to make and defend her choices. As it’s a survival story, she’s not the only one with difficult decisions about priorities. The punchline is humorous horror.

Dumb Martian": an Earthman and his Martian wife take a temporary job isolated on a moon of Jupiter. Themes are equality and (interplanetary) racism. Great story.

Time To Rest", depicting the life on Mars of a human survivor of the destruction of Earth. A sequel "No Place Like Earth" [1] appears in the collection No Place Like Earth (2003), which contains both; both also appeared dramatised together in 1965 as “No Place Like Earth”, the first episode of the BBC2 series, Out of the Unknown. [1]