Wanderers of Time

Wanderers of Time

First edition
Author John Wyndham
Cover artist Chris Foss[1]
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre Science fiction
Publisher Coronet Books
Publication date
 1973
Media type Print ()
Pages 158
ISBN 0-340-17306-8

Wanderers Of Time is a collection of five science fiction short stories by John Wyndham, published in Coronet Books in 1973. The stories were early works, originally published in magazines in the 1930s and written under the name of John Beynon.

Contents

An introduction by Walter Gillings, a UK editor and journalist active in Science fiction fandom since the 1930s.[2]
In 1941, Roy Sabre's girlfriend Betty mysteriously disappears. Ten years later he has constructed a time-machine and his first trip is to go back and save her. But his arrival is observed and his machine attacked and damaged as it departs; instead of returning to 1951, it travels to the far future where mankind has disappeared and the Earth is under the control of machines controlled by insects. Roy finds that several other time-travellers have been cast forward by damage and malfunction to the same time...
The salvage of the Excelsis, a spaceship reported lost 50 years earlier, ends in disaster when it breaks free of the magnetic hawsers attaching it to the space-tug Dido, and instead of splashing down in the North Atlantic, it impacts a German town with great loss of life on the ground. The captain and crew of the Dido are arrested and the German authorities demand their extradition to answer accusations that they stole the wreck's valuable cargo and hid it on the moon before deliberately crashing the hull as part of an anti-Nazi plot...
During a discussion on the next step in human evolution a doctor reveals that one of his patients, the son of a quarryman in Derbyshire, was born was 'electro-sentient' - that is, he was able to directly sense electromagnetic radiation, able to tune in to radio programs and diagnose problems with electrical equipment. The doctor goes on to expand the opportunities and problems this presented to both the boy and his unimaginative working-class family, especially when the boy reveals he can also sense unknown languages emanating from outer space...
Due to a mechanical problem, the Scintilla is forced to land on the edge of the Sea of Serenity whilst performing a survey for the Lunar Archeaological Society and discovers an entrance to what appears to be an underground tomb for members of the extinct Lunarian race. But the assumption that it is just a tomb proves wrong with tragic results as the Lunarians are woken from their slumbers and determine to use the Scintilla to escape their dead world...
The leaders of Ghangistan resolve that they cannot hope to defeat the West using conventional warfare and must seek an alternative. In Cornwall and west Devon, hundreds of keen gardeners are contacted individually to perform a field trial of a new plant. The seeds grow rapidly into bulbous fungi, feet across but weighing only a pound or so. Rashes break out in people nearby and there are several deaths, but by the time a causal link to prematurely ruptured fungi is suspected it is too late: the puff-balls are nearing maturity, ready to spread their deadly spores, and a storm approaching from the west threatens to blow not only the spores but the puff-balls themselves them across the whole of southern England...

References

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