LITMIR.BIZ

      Before that, in 1881, a newspaperman, Edward Page Mitchell, published “The Clock That Went Backward” anonymously in the New York Sun. Old Aunt Gertrude, spectral in her white nightgown and white nightcap, has a mysterious bond with her eight-foot-tall Dutch clock. It seems defunct—until one night, when she winds it up in the flickering light of a candle, the hands begin to turn backward, and she falls dead. This becomes the occasion for a philosophical disquisition by one Professor Van Stopp:

      Well, and why should not a clock go backward? Why should not Time itself turn and retrace its course? … Viewed from the Absolute, the sequence by which future follows present and present follows past is purely arbitrary. Yesterday, today, tomorrow; there is no reason in the nature of things why the order should not be tomorrow, today, yesterday.

      If the future is different from the past, what if we reverse the mirror or rewind the clock? Can destiny carry us toward our beginnings? Can effect influence cause?

      The device of the backward-running clock reappeared in a 1919 story, “The Runaway Skyscraper,” by the pseudonymous Murray Leinster. “The whole thing started when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backward” is its opening sentence. The tower trembles, the office workers hear ominous creaking and groaning, the sky darkens, night falls, the telephones produce only static, and all too soon the sun rises again, at high speed, and in the west.

      “Great bombs and little cannon-balls,” shouts Arthur, a young engineer who has been worrying about his debts. “It looks awfully queer,” agrees Estelle, his twenty-one-year-old secretary, who has been worrying that she will become “an old maid.” The landscape transforms at a rapid pace, wristwatches are seen spinning backward, and finally Arthur puts two and two together. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he explains. “Have you ever read anything by Wells? The Time Machine, for instance?”

      Estelle shakes her head no. “I don’t know how I’m going to say it so you’ll understand,” explains Arthur manfully, “but time is just as much a dimension as length and breadth.” The building has “settled back in the Fourth Dimension,” he decides. “We’re going back in time.”

      These stories were multiplying. Another way to do the trick: bring in the devil. “A tall, flashy, rather Mephistophelean man whom I had seen from time to time in the domino-room” makes his appearance in Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames,” published in the Century illustrated magazine in 1916. Enoch Soames is a “dim” man, stooping and shambling, an unsuccessful striver in 1890s literary London. He is, like some other writers, concerned about how posterity will remember him. “A hundred years hence!” he cries. “Think of it! If I could come back to life then—just for a few hours …”

      That is the devil’s cue, of course. He offers a bargain—the Faustian kind, updated.

      “Parfaitement,” he says Frenchily. “Time—an illusion. Past and future—they are as ever present as the present, or at any rate only what you call ‘just round the corner.’ I switch you on to any date. I project you—pouf!”

      The devil is au courant: like everyone else, he has been reading The Time Machine. “But it is one thing to write about an impossible machine,” he says. “It is a quite other thing to be a supernatural power.” The devil says pouf and poor Enoch gets his wish. Transported to 1997, he materializes in the Reading Room of the British Museum and heads straight for the S volumes of the card catalogue. (How better to gauge one’s literary reputation?) There he learns his fate: “Enoch Soames,” he reads, was an imaginary character in a 1916 story by a mordant writer and caricaturist named Max Beerbohm.

      IN THE TWENTIES the future seemed to be arriving daily. News had never traveled so fast, and there had never been so much of it, with the advent of wireless transmission, and by 1927 Wells himself had already had enough. The technology of communications had reached maturity, he felt, with wireless telegraphy, the wireless telephone, “and all the broadcasting business.” Radio had begun as a glorious dream—the finest fruits of the culture, the wisest thoughts and best music, transmitted into homes across the land. “Chaliapin and Melba would sing to us, President Coolidge and Mr. Baldwin would talk to us simply, earnestly, directly; the most august in the world would wish us good evening and pass a friendly word; should a fire or shipwreck happen, we were to get the roar of the flames and the cries for help.” A. A. Milne would tell stories to children and Albert Einstein would bring science to the masses. “All sporting results before we went to bed would be included, the weather forecast, advice about our gardens, the treatment of influenza, and the exact time.”

      Yet for Wells the dream had turned sour. Asked by the New York Times to assess the state of radio for its readers, he ranted bitterly, disillusioned as a child finding lumps of coal in the Christmas stocking. “Instead of first-rate came tenth-rate music, played by the Little Winkle-Beach Pier Band,” he wrote. Instead of the wisest voices, “Uncle Bray and Aunt Twaddle.” Even the static irritated him. “Across it all dear old Mother Nature cast her net of ‘atmospherics’ with a humor all her own.” He did enjoy hearing a bit of dance music after a long day—“but dance music only goes on for a small part of the evening, and at any moment it may give way to Doctor Flatulent being thoughtful and kindly in a non-sectarian way.”

      His assessment was so harsh that the Times editors were clearly taken aback. They emphasized that Wells could speak of radio broadcasting only “as He Encounters It Abroad.” Wells was not only disappointed in the present state of radio. His crystal ball showed him that the whole enterprise was doomed to fade away. “The future of broadcasting is like the future of crossword puzzles and Oxford trousers, a very trivial future indeed.” Why would anyone listen to music by radio when they could have gramophone records? Radio news vanishes like smoke: “Broadcasting shouts out its information once and cannot be recalled.” For serious thought, he said, nothing can replace books.

      His Majesty’s Government had created a “salaried official body to preside over broadcasting programs,” Wells noted—the new British Broadcasting Company. “In the end that admirable committee may find itself arranging schemes of entertainment for a phantom army of expiring listeners.” If any audience remained at all, it would comprise “the blind, lonely and suffering people”—or “probably very sedentary persons living in badly lighted houses or otherwise unable to read, who have never realized the possibilities of the gramophone and the pianola and who have no capacity for thought or conversation.” The BBC’s first experimental television broadcasts were just five years away.

      Others could play the futurism game, though. David Sarnoff of RCA retorted by calling Wells a snob; the inventor Lee de Forest told him he needed a better radio—and perhaps the most unusual rebuttal came from the publisher of Radio News and

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