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No Traveller Returns
Science fiction novelette in which the protagonist 'slips on a mathematical banana skin' and finds himself projected into a future dystopia. Future dystopia brought about by science. All animals are destroyed. All culture eliminated. Dark satiric fantasy, apparently set in a parallel dimension or timeslip (rather than the future), where scientific meddling has destroyed animal life and humans from our plane of existence are trapped for food and eaten.
- GenresShort Stories
62 pages, hardcover
First published January 1, 1931
36 people want to read
About the author
John Collier
349 books81 followersJohn Collier was a British-born author and screenplay writer best known for his short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker from the 1930s to the 1950s. They were collected in a 1951 volume, Fancies and Goodnights, which is still in print. Individual stories are frequently anthologized in fantasy collections. John Collier's writing has been praised by authors such as Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman and Paul Theroux. He was married to early silent film actress Shirley Palmer.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 18, 2020
"Genius!" Ahh, no. But that's what critics and fans often say when referring to the work of Radium-Age science fiction author and all around smartass John Collier, and so I was looking forward to trying a sample of his work. I almost dove in to one of his more praised novels, "Tom's A-Cold," but decided I would start with one of his shorter works before a full commitment.
Perhaps my idea was a mistake or simply saved me a great deal of time, because I found the whole experience quite annoying and pretentious. As another Goodreads review has already noted, this seems to be some sort of snippy response to an academic or political argument to which no modern reader has been privy. Supposedly Mr. Collier, who never attended university, liked to hang out in coffee houses and galleries and act all intellectual, and I think this is the result.
A large bulk of my reading has consisted of late 19th century and early 20th century sociopolitical satire, dystopias, and utopias, and so I understand and appreciate the style and context. But this is one of the worst I've read. It is too heavy-handed and on-the-nose, yet I don't even understand the point he was trying to get across. He mocks all writers of utopian fiction in his prologue, then proceeds to deliver a bland Dante-esque tour of an alternate future dystopia where scientists rule the world and have jacked everything up. In particular, he does not like psychiatrists. Of course. He probably had an analyst who told him just what he thought of him, but his narcissism couldn't handle it. So a pseudo-religious sect of Psychiatrists announced a new world order based on Science, because they were the only ones who could understand what was going on in the mind of the Great Mathematician. Hell, I AM a psychiatrist and most of my colleagues are just like me--we can't even help our kids with 4th grade multiplication. Perhaps that's the joke.
Or perhaps he thought the joke was to include cameos of his contemporaries who he did not like, who appear only to be eaten by the cannibalistic dwellers of the future. He targets mostly conservatives, though he tries to lightly obscure their identities by blanking out the vowels from their names. But if you are a student of this time period, it won't take you long to figure out who he is referring to, nor would you be surprised. Writers like G. K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc are on the menu because they were competitors, and as far as I can see, far better at satire. Also, there's Max Aitken, aka Baron Beaverbrook, who ran the most circulated paper in the world at the time, "The Daily Express," which tended to be very nationalist and conservative, and who also later was intimately involved in the Chamberlain and Churchill administrations. Max Beerbohm is another delicacy, a well known caricaturist who probably made fun of Collier, poor baby.
Who knows? Because there seems to be no point to the whole novellette other than to be a string of flippancy. And that's the best way to describe his writing: flippant.
The novellette was published as a limited chapbook back in 1931, and had not been seen again until it received a copyright renewal and e-book transfer in 2015. This is one that could have stayed in obscurity. I would not go so far as to rate this one star, as I believe if it had been rereleased with some context or modern commentary, there could be some historic value to the work, especially for fans of the author. And there were parts that showed genuine promise, particularly the unsettling abattoir pens that held countless captives from the 20th Century just on the other side of a time breech, but overall the whole thing substituted narrative for bitter, amateurish, and over-the-top parody.
So genius? I don't see it. Collier seems to be that guy who swaggers in to a cocktail party that everyone admires and talks about, telling you that you've got to meet him. You interrupt him holding court with his entourage all holding their drinks with their pinkies out and pretending to kiss his feet. But when you hear him talk, you realize he doesn't know what he's even saying, and he doesn't have the self-awareness to know that he doesn't know, and no one has the courage to tell him he has an anchovy-stuffed martini olive accidentally wedged up his left nostril and a booger in the other.
So am I missing something here? Because I am not likely to try another of his works unless one of my Goodreads friends convinces me that this was just a one-off mistake. Otherwise, I've got too many great books in my queue to waste any more time with this guy.
Perhaps my idea was a mistake or simply saved me a great deal of time, because I found the whole experience quite annoying and pretentious. As another Goodreads review has already noted, this seems to be some sort of snippy response to an academic or political argument to which no modern reader has been privy. Supposedly Mr. Collier, who never attended university, liked to hang out in coffee houses and galleries and act all intellectual, and I think this is the result.
A large bulk of my reading has consisted of late 19th century and early 20th century sociopolitical satire, dystopias, and utopias, and so I understand and appreciate the style and context. But this is one of the worst I've read. It is too heavy-handed and on-the-nose, yet I don't even understand the point he was trying to get across. He mocks all writers of utopian fiction in his prologue, then proceeds to deliver a bland Dante-esque tour of an alternate future dystopia where scientists rule the world and have jacked everything up. In particular, he does not like psychiatrists. Of course. He probably had an analyst who told him just what he thought of him, but his narcissism couldn't handle it. So a pseudo-religious sect of Psychiatrists announced a new world order based on Science, because they were the only ones who could understand what was going on in the mind of the Great Mathematician. Hell, I AM a psychiatrist and most of my colleagues are just like me--we can't even help our kids with 4th grade multiplication. Perhaps that's the joke.
Or perhaps he thought the joke was to include cameos of his contemporaries who he did not like, who appear only to be eaten by the cannibalistic dwellers of the future. He targets mostly conservatives, though he tries to lightly obscure their identities by blanking out the vowels from their names. But if you are a student of this time period, it won't take you long to figure out who he is referring to, nor would you be surprised. Writers like G. K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc are on the menu because they were competitors, and as far as I can see, far better at satire. Also, there's Max Aitken, aka Baron Beaverbrook, who ran the most circulated paper in the world at the time, "The Daily Express," which tended to be very nationalist and conservative, and who also later was intimately involved in the Chamberlain and Churchill administrations. Max Beerbohm is another delicacy, a well known caricaturist who probably made fun of Collier, poor baby.
Who knows? Because there seems to be no point to the whole novellette other than to be a string of flippancy. And that's the best way to describe his writing: flippant.
The novellette was published as a limited chapbook back in 1931, and had not been seen again until it received a copyright renewal and e-book transfer in 2015. This is one that could have stayed in obscurity. I would not go so far as to rate this one star, as I believe if it had been rereleased with some context or modern commentary, there could be some historic value to the work, especially for fans of the author. And there were parts that showed genuine promise, particularly the unsettling abattoir pens that held countless captives from the 20th Century just on the other side of a time breech, but overall the whole thing substituted narrative for bitter, amateurish, and over-the-top parody.
So genius? I don't see it. Collier seems to be that guy who swaggers in to a cocktail party that everyone admires and talks about, telling you that you've got to meet him. You interrupt him holding court with his entourage all holding their drinks with their pinkies out and pretending to kiss his feet. But when you hear him talk, you realize he doesn't know what he's even saying, and he doesn't have the self-awareness to know that he doesn't know, and no one has the courage to tell him he has an anchovy-stuffed martini olive accidentally wedged up his left nostril and a booger in the other.
So am I missing something here? Because I am not likely to try another of his works unless one of my Goodreads friends convinces me that this was just a one-off mistake. Otherwise, I've got too many great books in my queue to waste any more time with this guy.
April 11, 2019
John Collier must have really hated the concept of science creating a utopia, and goes out of his way to make scientists and their work to seem idiotic.
This chap book opens with a multi-page "apology" in which the author sets forth his opinion on writers of stories about scientific utopias. It seems he isn't fond of stories about them, or the science that creates them. He is convinced that science cannot save the world, and then claims he has scientific validation for his own story which follows.
Considering Collier's reputation as a writer, this is a very heavy-handed satire. It seems to have been written with the express purpose of embarrassing someone, or perhaps to validate some lost argument. The liberal use of thinly disguised, famous names (M*x B**rb*hm, Sir J*m*s J**ns, and J*l**n H*xl*y among others) may indicate who Collier was grinding his axe for.
Even for 1931, this story is mortifyingly bad. Professor Wilkinson builds a machine to count people instead of doing it himself. When the results seem wrong, he rebuilds it. When he's sure that his results are correct (and that no one is coming out of the construction site) he investigates himself. Professor Wilkinson is an idiot. When we get to the perfect utopia of the future we can see that it has basically been ruined by science. Scientists are idiots.
Professor Wilkinson was lured into the future because the people there have no animals or vegetables, so they're eating people from the past (better flavour). They're not trying to trap animals, or get food stuffs, just tastier people. Everyone is an idiot. This gets tired very fast.
I can only think that Collier read this again at a later date, and that was the reason why he didn't want it reprinted. I wouldn't want this to be part of my legacy.
This chap book opens with a multi-page "apology" in which the author sets forth his opinion on writers of stories about scientific utopias. It seems he isn't fond of stories about them, or the science that creates them. He is convinced that science cannot save the world, and then claims he has scientific validation for his own story which follows.
Considering Collier's reputation as a writer, this is a very heavy-handed satire. It seems to have been written with the express purpose of embarrassing someone, or perhaps to validate some lost argument. The liberal use of thinly disguised, famous names (M*x B**rb*hm, Sir J*m*s J**ns, and J*l**n H*xl*y among others) may indicate who Collier was grinding his axe for.
Even for 1931, this story is mortifyingly bad. Professor Wilkinson builds a machine to count people instead of doing it himself. When the results seem wrong, he rebuilds it. When he's sure that his results are correct (and that no one is coming out of the construction site) he investigates himself. Professor Wilkinson is an idiot. When we get to the perfect utopia of the future we can see that it has basically been ruined by science. Scientists are idiots.
Professor Wilkinson was lured into the future because the people there have no animals or vegetables, so they're eating people from the past (better flavour). They're not trying to trap animals, or get food stuffs, just tastier people. Everyone is an idiot. This gets tired very fast.
I can only think that Collier read this again at a later date, and that was the reason why he didn't want it reprinted. I wouldn't want this to be part of my legacy.
January 1, 2017
Not having read John Collier, I was nevertheless very intrigued by the premise of this book when I heard of it, doubley so due to it's rarity, never having been reprinted since the original run.
Now I have to say that I am rather disappointed. Instead of exploring the full, beastly, ceramic ugliness that the premise provides, Collier writes such an on-the-nose tongue-so-far-in-cheek-you-need-medical-help-to-extract-it satire that nearly all the potential is lost. Sometimes Collier hovers just above the pit, but he never concedes to dip down in it, and as a result this book is more of a curiosity then anything.
If Tiffany Thayer, the man who didn't so much write his Doctor Arnoldi but rather fashion it out of pure hate and ugliness, had gotten this idea, I am betting it would make you as apathetically miserable as the book previously mentioned.
Now I have to say that I am rather disappointed. Instead of exploring the full, beastly, ceramic ugliness that the premise provides, Collier writes such an on-the-nose tongue-so-far-in-cheek-you-need-medical-help-to-extract-it satire that nearly all the potential is lost. Sometimes Collier hovers just above the pit, but he never concedes to dip down in it, and as a result this book is more of a curiosity then anything.
If Tiffany Thayer, the man who didn't so much write his Doctor Arnoldi but rather fashion it out of pure hate and ugliness, had gotten this idea, I am betting it would make you as apathetically miserable as the book previously mentioned.
October 4, 2012
John Collier (of FANCIES AND GOODNIGHTS fame) is always a delight-- funny, sarcastic, bonechilling. While this is one of his rarer books, it was worth the search and the price.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews