The man who mastered time

Matter, Space, and Time

by Ray Cummings

Third in the Matter, Space, and Time trilogy

Genres: Science Fiction

351 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Raymond King Cummings. His career resulted in some 750 novels and short stories, using also the pen names Ray King, Gabrielle Cummings, and Gabriel Wilson.

See Wikipedia

Reviews

[Tony Ciak · Rating 4 out of 5]

A time travel piece , with what we would consider rather strange by 21 century approach, but very entertaining.

[Patrick Jones · Rating 1 out of 5]

I try to find something redeeming in everything I read, but that's a particular challenge with this incredibly derivative and dated time travel story. I guess the speculative "science" is plausible enough for the era (a couple decades before nuclear energy or space travel would become reality), and that's always nice. But there's little else pleasing here. The characters seem motivated solely by hormones to travel through time and get involved in a future war they really have no business in. The women they meet in the future seem inexplicably eager to abandon their own time and their place in it just to accompany the men from the past back to their time.

More importantly, the future war that our time traveling heroes quickly take a side in seems incredibly ambiguous. It's basically an unkempt barbarian horde with an ambitious leader threatening the last organized society on Earth. Problem is, that society seems to have a rigidly oppressive class structure, where allowing the peasant class to have more than one child is played as a great concession to human rights.

This great society is explicitly described as "Anglo-Saxon with a strain of Latin" who "fought against the pollution of their blood by others." And while the leader of the barbarians seems obviously megalomaniacal, the basic thrust of the conflict seems to a be bunch of future "Anglo-Saxons" with an orderly society shutting out a bunch of "others" (who we know little about except to presume that they are non-Anglo-Saxon).

So, given all that, I'm not sure why anybody would fly across the millennia in a time machine to defend a culture like that -- except, of course, the promise of hot chicks at the end of it all. ;-)

I'm aware that the 1920s culture that produced this was far from perfect and that eugenics (largely rejected today) was a hot topic for many, many people at the time. So in that respect, I guess I'd recommend this to people interested in history -- to get an example of casually accepted values that (I hope) we've largely grown out of. But otherwise there's not much to recommend in this one.

[Anne Patkau · Rating 3 out of 5]

NYC. Battle. Sacrifice. Volcano. Boys are smart; girls are pretty. Of the 1950s pulp magazine times. Love in future.
Slow start. Rogers lectures Banker, Big Business Man, Science Club on space time. Action better.

52-2022 #31 tech overfills start