What do you think?
Rate this book
Three Go Back
When an airship crashes in Mid-Atlantic, the few survivors find themselves dazed and apparently alone on a vast beach. The three, Clair Stranlay, a young Londoner and the author of deliciously decadent romances, Sir John Mullaghan, an arms manufacturer, and Keith Sinclair, an idealistic American, venture inland and stumble upon animals extinct thousands of years before. When they are confronted with a group of hunters they can scarcely believe their situation: they have travelled 25,000 years back in time, to the lost continent of Atlantis. Lewis Grassic Gibbon's classic adventure story offers a dreamlike vision of prehistoric life and opens up new vistas to the imagination.
- GenresScience FictionFiction
204 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1932
34 people want to read
About the author
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
73 books55 followersLewis Grassic Gibbon was the pen name of the Scottish author James Leslie Mitchell.
Born in Auchterless and raised in Arbuthnott, then in Kincardineshire, Mitchell started working as a journalist for the Aberdeen Journal and the Scottish Farmer at age 16. In 1919 he joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served in Iran, India and Egypt before enlisting in the Royal Air Force in 1920. In the RAF he worked as a clerk and spent some time in the Middle East. He married Rebecca Middleton in 1925, with whom he settled in Welwyn Garden City. He began writing full-time in 1929. Mitchell wrote numerous books and shorter works under both his real name and nom de plume before his early death in 1935 of peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer.
Born in Auchterless and raised in Arbuthnott, then in Kincardineshire, Mitchell started working as a journalist for the Aberdeen Journal and the Scottish Farmer at age 16. In 1919 he joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served in Iran, India and Egypt before enlisting in the Royal Air Force in 1920. In the RAF he worked as a clerk and spent some time in the Middle East. He married Rebecca Middleton in 1925, with whom he settled in Welwyn Garden City. He began writing full-time in 1929. Mitchell wrote numerous books and shorter works under both his real name and nom de plume before his early death in 1935 of peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 11, 2020
This time travel book was published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1932, and may have been serialized before that. It features a strong female lead character and lacks the sexism of most books of that era. No method is given for time travel - and it is more a soapbox anyways.
Our protagonists are travelling via airship across the Atlantic. The crossing is marred by a major event, leaving them with no radio connection and ultimately crashing into a mountain in the middle of the ocean - or what we later find out is Atlantis. The surviving three passengers quickly leave the area of the wreck and get on with interacting with their surroundings - beasts, starvation, and weather.
These, and the humanoids introduced later, seem more a means for the author to focus on his philosophy on the nature of humanity. This is done through character discussion primarily, and those chapters drag a bit. I found it good, not great, and the ending was most irritating of all.
The book is out of copyright and freely available, through archive.org and project Gutenberg. It is a quick read, and I probably put it on my reading list because of the time travel aspects - one of a handful of early 20th century books in this genre.
Our protagonists are travelling via airship across the Atlantic. The crossing is marred by a major event, leaving them with no radio connection and ultimately crashing into a mountain in the middle of the ocean - or what we later find out is Atlantis. The surviving three passengers quickly leave the area of the wreck and get on with interacting with their surroundings - beasts, starvation, and weather.
These, and the humanoids introduced later, seem more a means for the author to focus on his philosophy on the nature of humanity. This is done through character discussion primarily, and those chapters drag a bit. I found it good, not great, and the ending was most irritating of all.
The book is out of copyright and freely available, through archive.org and project Gutenberg. It is a quick read, and I probably put it on my reading list because of the time travel aspects - one of a handful of early 20th century books in this genre.
November 20, 2017
(Read in the Project Gutenberg version.) Not the book I was expecting. I was gunning for an adventure novel; I bagged philosophy. No surprise--given that it was published in 1932--that Mitchell meditates on the true nature of humanity, as characters recover from World War I and are dismayed at the prospect of the next war. Darn those evolutionists, telling everybody that human nature is brutal and vicious! When we have these light-eyed, golden-skinned (my, but I got tired of that description) "true men" living peacefully together. Religion comes in for a smackdown, too, as it's pointed out that these peaceable beings have no apparent religion or concept of sin.
There's a lot that reminds you that the book was published in 1932: "Neanderthalers" are brutish and eat people and have no culture (though they wear fur hides and make tools). There are some hoot-worthy bits: Piltdown man listed as a genuine specimen of early human (the hoax wasn't verified until the 1940s); the artifacts at Gozel, France (a hoax I was unaware of), held up as verification that 20th-century people might have influenced Neolithic culture (though Mitchell hedges his bets; the wikipedia article will tell you why). And, oh, the fiddle-daddle about Atlantis!
And the characters in the novel don't exactly react the way real people probably would in a world where suddenly you have to run down and bloodily butcher your own food and suddenly you're prey instead of just predator and suddenly you have to interact with all these people you can't understand; but this is probably because Mitchell is pushing everybody along to get to the real point of the book.
I do have to wonder how pajamas are going to hold up to life in the wilderness and why it takes so long for our 20th-century heroes to make moccasins, given that they're running around barefoot over stones and snow. (And there is a scene where a man explains that he's going to use his underwear to light a fire and goes off to modestly remove the underwear and then is described as "stripped to the waist"; and I don't think Mitchell realized which part a hasty reader was going to imagine was now exposed.)
But some marvellous stuff here, too. Words like "buccaning" and "shoggle." That neither Sir John Mullaghan or Keith Sinclair ends up being some sort of cardboard villain.
And Clair Stranlay. She's believably haunted by the image of her fiance screaming her name all night as he slowly dies on the battlefield. No swooning Victorian maiden, Clair is perceptive and mature and level-headed and takes care of herself even after being separated from the others. And when she participates in a certain Neolithic ritual, she doesn't become the object of scorn by her 20th-century companions.
The ending is ... convenient.
I'd still like the adventure novel, with the same characters. More trying to survive. (Good grief: make those moccasins, people!) A more recent version of Neanderthals. Less Atlantis. This was an interesting and somewhat engaging read, though.
There's a lot that reminds you that the book was published in 1932: "Neanderthalers" are brutish and eat people and have no culture (though they wear fur hides and make tools). There are some hoot-worthy bits: Piltdown man listed as a genuine specimen of early human (the hoax wasn't verified until the 1940s); the artifacts at Gozel, France (a hoax I was unaware of), held up as verification that 20th-century people might have influenced Neolithic culture (though Mitchell hedges his bets; the wikipedia article will tell you why). And, oh, the fiddle-daddle about Atlantis!
And the characters in the novel don't exactly react the way real people probably would in a world where suddenly you have to run down and bloodily butcher your own food and suddenly you're prey instead of just predator and suddenly you have to interact with all these people you can't understand; but this is probably because Mitchell is pushing everybody along to get to the real point of the book.
I do have to wonder how pajamas are going to hold up to life in the wilderness and why it takes so long for our 20th-century heroes to make moccasins, given that they're running around barefoot over stones and snow. (And there is a scene where a man explains that he's going to use his underwear to light a fire and goes off to modestly remove the underwear and then is described as "stripped to the waist"; and I don't think Mitchell realized which part a hasty reader was going to imagine was now exposed.)
But some marvellous stuff here, too. Words like "buccaning" and "shoggle." That neither Sir John Mullaghan or Keith Sinclair ends up being some sort of cardboard villain.
And Clair Stranlay. She's believably haunted by the image of her fiance screaming her name all night as he slowly dies on the battlefield. No swooning Victorian maiden, Clair is perceptive and mature and level-headed and takes care of herself even after being separated from the others. And when she participates in a certain Neolithic ritual, she doesn't become the object of scorn by her 20th-century companions.
The ending is ... convenient.
I'd still like the adventure novel, with the same characters. More trying to survive. (Good grief: make those moccasins, people!) A more recent version of Neanderthals. Less Atlantis. This was an interesting and somewhat engaging read, though.
March 24, 2015
"Three Go Back" is far more interesting than a great many of the pulp science fiction novels of the thirties. Indeed it is questionable if this is science fiction in the strict sense. It is a time travel novel; however it uses what is, in effect, a time slip technique--here, associated somehow with a submarine earthquake--which is a plot mechanism more associated with fantasy. In addition, the setting is a prehistoric Atlantis. Even in the thirties the existence of a great mid-Atlantic continent contemporary with homo sapiens was not taken seriously by scientists. The author himself in a preface admits to some inaccuracies and fictionalisations which he used for dramatic purposes. So what we have here is part of the genre of “fantastic literature” with some of the qualities of both science fiction and fantasy.
All that said, this is a quite entertaining bit of fiction and it is competently written, though with some oddities of style and vocabulary, e.g. words such as “chilledly” and “untrumpeting”.
The story, however is well plotted and the characters are well conceived. This is particularly true of the heroine, Claire Stranlay. She has an enegetic flexibility of character that allows her to adapt to the very strange world in which she finds herself far more quickly and effectively than either of the two males that accompany her.
There is a considerable amount of emphahsis on the author’s political and social values. He attempts to show the past as a “Golden Age” superior to the twentieth century from which the three visitors came. He does not minimise its dangers but he does emphasise its sanity. One should bear in mind that Mitchell was writing this in 1932 and at the time he was aware that there were already signs of the possibility of another terrible conflict. It is true that he doesn’t really offer a practical answer but then, who did?
James Leslie Mitchell died in 1935 in his early thirties. On reading this rather undervalued and obscure novel, one must feel that he could well have been as significant a writer as H G Wells--whom he admired and emulated.
I have reviewed the abridged (and Bowdlerised} 1953 edition published by Galaxy Novels. It is still available as "Galaxy Science Fiction Novel No. 15". The original full length Hard Back is difficult to get. But I found just recently that there is an eBook available through Kindle which reproduces the original and is quite inexpensive. I’ve obtained it and am interested to discover whether the abridged version was an improvement on that edition--sometimes that happens.
All that said, this is a quite entertaining bit of fiction and it is competently written, though with some oddities of style and vocabulary, e.g. words such as “chilledly” and “untrumpeting”.
The story, however is well plotted and the characters are well conceived. This is particularly true of the heroine, Claire Stranlay. She has an enegetic flexibility of character that allows her to adapt to the very strange world in which she finds herself far more quickly and effectively than either of the two males that accompany her.
There is a considerable amount of emphahsis on the author’s political and social values. He attempts to show the past as a “Golden Age” superior to the twentieth century from which the three visitors came. He does not minimise its dangers but he does emphasise its sanity. One should bear in mind that Mitchell was writing this in 1932 and at the time he was aware that there were already signs of the possibility of another terrible conflict. It is true that he doesn’t really offer a practical answer but then, who did?
James Leslie Mitchell died in 1935 in his early thirties. On reading this rather undervalued and obscure novel, one must feel that he could well have been as significant a writer as H G Wells--whom he admired and emulated.
I have reviewed the abridged (and Bowdlerised} 1953 edition published by Galaxy Novels. It is still available as "Galaxy Science Fiction Novel No. 15". The original full length Hard Back is difficult to get. But I found just recently that there is an eBook available through Kindle which reproduces the original and is quite inexpensive. I’ve obtained it and am interested to discover whether the abridged version was an improvement on that edition--sometimes that happens.
actually-want-to-read
December 7, 2021Later re-publications may be "mutilated" per the SFE.
March 20, 2015
...."come on,hurry up!The ship's a flaming wreck!....."He tugged at the door.It was jammed.Now,out in the corridor,above the babel of sounds,one sound sharp-edged and clear came to them:a moan like that of trapped cattle.For a moment it rang in Clair's ears in all its horror,and then-the floor of the cabin vanished from beneath the feet of Sinclair and herself.Below,the Atlantic.And Clair thought,"Oh,God",and fell and fell,with a flaming comet in wavering pursuit........ And so,with the wreck of the airship our three characters get sent back in time through a time spiral to the dawn of mankind.Written in 1932,by an author who died very young only a few years after,its well worth reading.Yes,its dated in some respects,but with the rumblings and darkness of the next war coming,prophetic too.And musically written,with passages that stay with you.
August 11, 2016
While very different in context to his best known work, Sunset Song, this shares common central themes - the corruption of human nature and the longing for an older, more lyrical way of life. It is radically political in both its depictions and its themes.
The language is naturally dated, though Clair Stranlay is a surprisingly modern heroine.
An interesting book, which must have been controversial when it was first published.
The language is naturally dated, though Clair Stranlay is a surprisingly modern heroine.
An interesting book, which must have been controversial when it was first published.
November 28, 2016
I had read this SF novel many years ago (from my parents' library) and, a few thousand books later, I could still remember it. Not all the plot, of course, and that's why I wanted to reread it.
The language is outdated, but it's still quite interesting.
In fact, for a book that was originally published in 1932, the female character is quite forward thinking and courageous.
Very enjoyable (re)reading.
The language is outdated, but it's still quite interesting.
In fact, for a book that was originally published in 1932, the female character is quite forward thinking and courageous.
Very enjoyable (re)reading.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews