As it turns out, H.G. Wells’s “The Time Machine,” published in 1895, wasn’t the first novel about voyaging to other epochs of Earth’s history in a science-fictional contraption. In 1887 — a year before “The Chronic Argonauts,” Wells’s preliminary short-story version of his classic — a Spanish playwright and diplomat named Enrique Gaspar (1842-1902) brought out “El anacronopete,” here translated as “The Time Ship.” It is the most recent addition to Wesleyan University Press’s invaluable “Early Classics of Science Fiction” series.
In a lengthy introduction, characteristic of this series, the translators, Yolanda Molina-Gavilan and Andrea Bell, cover the prehistory of time-travel stories, seeing the roots of the subgenre in the imaginary voyage to strange lands. This is, of course, the most prevalent type of early storytelling — think of “The Odyssey,” the tales from the “Arabian Nights,” Lucian’s “True History.” But it’s clear that the most immediate inspiration for “The Time Ship” can be found in Jules Verne. Verne’s wildly popular “voyages extraordinaires,” a phrase that could be translated as “fantastic journeys,” deftly mixed advanced technology, geographical exploration and, sometimes, comic-opera mishaps and narrow escapes. If you were, in effect, to reimagine the flying machine of “Master of the World” as a time-traveling vessel, then mix in some of the personnel, silliness and chicanery of “Around the World in Eighty Days,” you’d come up with a rough equivalent to “The Time Ship.”
(Wesleyan) - “The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey” by Enrique Gaspar.
Here’s the plot, its basic situation one that Plautus would recognize: A rich, middle-aged pedant named Don Sindulfo Garcia falls in love with his young niece Clara, who naturally enough spurns him. Besides, she has given her heart to a worthy young army officer, her cousin Luis. Clara’s maid and companion Juanita — a brash country girl, who speaks her mind and mangles the language — is simultaneously in love with Luis’s orderly, a good-hearted lunk named Pendencia.
Burning with lust and jealousy, Don Sindulfo dreams of taking Clara back in time to some remote era, when women knew their place and he could compel her to marry him. “Happy were the times when a tutor had the right to impose his will on his pupil. I wish I could transport myself back to that age, mistakenly called dark, when respect and obedience to one’s superiors formed the basis of society! How I wish I could go back centuries!” His close friend Benjamin — a scholar and polyglot, whose role in the action corresponds to that of the clever valet in an opera — chimes in that he himself would like to travel to ancient China to learn the secret of immortality, supposedly possessed by the last empress of the Han dynasty.
Theorizing that the eternal revolution of the earth’s atmosphere creates time, Don quite readily constructs an electricity-powered ship that can navigate air currents back into the past. As he pedantically explains, sort of:
“I rise to the center of the atmosphere, which is the body that we are trying to unmake and that I shall continue to call time. Because time — in order to become wrapped up in the Earth — marches in the opposite direction to the planet’s rotation, the Time Ship, so as to unwrap time, must travel contrariwise to it and in step with the spheroid; that is, from west to east. The globe takes twenty-four hours for each revolution on its axis; my machine navigates at a speed 175,200 times faster, with the result that in the time it takes the Earth to produce one day in the future, I can undo 480 years of the past.”
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