Re: (ReacTor) Five Stories About Time Travel on a Limited Scale

On 23/06/2025 21:13, The Horny Goat wrote:

On Thu, 12 Jun 2025 12:50:44 -0500, "Michael F. Stemper"
<michael.stemper@gmail.com> wrote:
 

Pal's version of /The Time Machine/ is -- awful. No, seriously, read
the book and forget the film, if you can. (The main problem is that it
is obsessed with Nuclear War which, of course, the book knows nothing
of.)

>
Nuclear war? Wells didn't even know about the Blitz when he wrote it, or
even WWI.

 Heck he didn't even know about aviation - the Time Machine was
published in 1895, the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. So
far as I know, the interrupter gear (that allowed aircraft to fire
straight ahead without tearing off their own propeller) wasn't
invented until the first year of WW1.
 Wells would certainly have known about the Gatling gun since it had
been invented during the US Civil War though Wells probably would have
been more familiar with it due to its extensive use in the UK's Zulu
wars which were late 1870s.
 He didn't write The Shape of Things to Come till 40 years later in the
early 1930s.

Aviation was foreseeable.  And Zeppelins were
coming.  There are aircraft in _The War of the
Worlds_ (1895-1897) and in _When the Sleeper
Wakes_ (1899), although terrestrial industry
of 1897 and 1899 wasn't responsible for them.