short story on time
in engllish 4000 words
Answers
Answer:
Explanati
I'm looking for the title and author of this short story. The premise is that the main character invents a time machine, but when he travels to the past, there is nothing but void and when he travels to the future there is nothing but chaotic, unformed matter.
The conclusion of the time traveller is that the present is like a train on a single track using the unformed matter of the future to create existence in the present, and once the matter has been used it leaves nothing behind, hence the void of the past.
The story was in an anthology and was probably written in the 50s, 60s or 70s, possibly 80s, but not later. I can't remember if it was an anthology from just one author or several.
I have checked the Wikipedia page List of time travel works of fiction but the premise doesn't appear to be there.
I've also tried searching The Internet Speculative Fiction Database but with not much information to go on, my advanced searches were fruitless.
As always your help will be much appreciated.
Edit 2018-01-20
I don't want to send people off on the wrong track but I have a vague feeling the story is either one of Michael Moorcock's or in an anthology he edited.
Edit 2018-02-10
I have been through most of the titles in this advanced ISFDB search, but am no nearer to finding the answer. Unfortunately, a lot of titles do not contain a synopsis.
I want to consider a selection of short stories on the theme of useless time travel. In SF, often a lot of the best work has always been at short lengths. I’m going to talk about Poul Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early” (1956), Alfred Bester’s “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” (1958), R..A. Lafferty “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” (1967), Robert Silverberg’s “House of Bones” (1988) and Robert Reed’s “Veritas” (2002).
All five of these are excellent stories, all of them are thought provoking, and they’re all in dialogue with the novels I’ve been discussing. Most of them have been much collected and anthologized and are easy to get hold of, but the only copy of “Veritas” I have is in an old Asimov’s.
What I mean by useless time travel is time travel that doesn’t change anything—either where somebody goes back in time and stays there without making any difference, or time travel that changes itself out of existence, or time travel that is in some other way futile. I don’t just mean changing time. In books like Butler’s Kindred where the protagonist saves the lives of her ancestors but doesn’t otherwise affect the world, time travel still serves a useful purpose.
“The Man Who Came Early” is notable from being from the point of view of the locals who meet the stranded time traveler and are not impressed by him. Anderson is taking the Lest Darkness Fall model and saying no to it, showing a man from the future failing to make any headway among the Norsemen. His protagonist is even less successful than Tarr and Turtledove’s Nicole who at least makes it home.
In “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” it is the nature of time itself that confounds time travelers—history is personal, in Bester’s memorable metaphor it’s like a strand of spaghetti for everyone, and when you change history you become like the spaghetti sauce, detached from the world. So you can go back in time and change it, and it doesn’t change it for anyone except yourself. Very clever, very funny, and quite chilling when you think about it. Typical Bester.
“Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” is typical Lafferty in that it’s very weird, very clever, and impossible to forget. It’s the traditional three wishes fairytale told with time travel and making changes, with the twist that after the changes have been made the time travelers are unaware of any changes, though the reader can see them plainly. The time travel isn’t useless, but it appears to be, and ultimately everything returns to the way it was.
Answer:
After being institutionalized in a mental hospital, Korean teen Su-mi (Yeom Jeong-ah) reunites with her beloved sister, Su-yeon (Su-jeong Lim), and they return to live at their country home. The girls' widower father (Mun Geun-yeong) has remarried, and the siblings are immediately resentful of his new wife, Eun-joo (Kap-su Kim). As Su-mi and Su-yeon try to resume their regular lives, strange events plague the house, leading to surprising revelations and a shocking conclusion.
hope it will help u