E. P. MITCHELL / H. G. WELLS (Annotated)

Volume 3 in the Series "TIME TRAVEL IN LITERATURE". - Seven short stories (1874 to 1881) by Edward Page Mitchell: The Tachypomp / The Soul Spectroscope / The Man Without a Body / The Ablest Man in The World / The Senator's Daughter / The Crystal Man / The Clock That Went Backward. --The Chronic Argonauts (1888) & The Time Machine (1895) by H. G. Wells. - Annotation: "From Newton to Einstein" (Extract) by Benjamin Harrow. Edward Page Mitchell (1852-1927) was an American editorial and short story writer for The Sun, a daily newspaper in New York City. He became that newspaper's editor in 1897, succeeding Charles Anderson Dana. Mitchell was recognized as a major figure in the early development of the science fiction genre. Mitchell wrote fiction about a man rendered invisible by scientific means ("The Crystal Man", published in 1881) before H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man, wrote about a time-travel machine ("The Clock that Went Backward") before Wells's The Time Machine, wrote about faster-than-light travel ("The Tachypomp"; now perhaps his best-known work) in 1874, a thinking computer and a cyborg in 1879 ("The Ablest Man in the World"), and also wrote the earliest known stories about matter transmission or teleportation ("The Man without a Body", 1877)."The Chronic Argonauts" (1888) is a short story by the British science-fiction writer H. G. Wells. The story concerns an inventor who builds a time machine and then travels in time on it. The story pre-dates Wells's best-selling time travel novel The Time Machine by seven years. The story was first published in the Royal College of Science student magazine the Science Schools Journal, in instalments from April-May-June 1888. It became the first story to use an inventor-built machine to travel in time. Despite extensive biographical work on Wells over more than a century, there is no evidence to suggest that Wells saw or was influenced by the 1881 New York newspaper story "The Clock that Went Backward", in which an antique clock served as a time-travel device. In "The Time Machine", An inventor creates a time machine and travels to the year 802,701 AD. There, humans have evolved into two species, Morlocks and Eloi. About the Series: Notable novels and short stories in which time travel is central to the plot or the premise of the work. Volume 1. W. IRVING / C. DICKENS - Rip Van Winkle Illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1819) by Washington Irving A man falls asleep on a mountain side and wakes twenty years in the future. He finds he has been forgotten, his wife has died and his daughter is no longer a child.- A Christmas Carol Illustrated by John Leech (1843) by Charles Dickens The heartless Ebenezer Scrooge, an old miser, is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, in order to teach him the consequences of his selfish ways. Volume 2. . E. BELLAMY / W. MORRIS. - Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888 ) by Edward Bellamy In the late 19th century, Julian West falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes 113 years later. - A Dream of John Ball (1888) by William Morris John Ball travels between mediaeval and contemporary worlds.-Annotations: "From Newton to Einstein" by Benjamin Harrow. Volume 4. L. CARROLL. / M. TWAIN.(Illustrated)-Sylvie and Bruno (1889) by Lewis Carroll. A watch both tells and determines time. -A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark Twain. A man of the 19th century travels back to 528 AD in King Arthur's time.