The idea of time trav­el is prob­a­bly as old as the feel­ing of regret, but the desire to go back in time is not the same as the the­o­ret­i­cal notion that it might actu­al­ly be pos­si­ble to do so. Where, the Nerd­writer won­ders above, did this idea orig­i­nate? And where did time trav­el nar­ra­tives come from in gen­er­al? Time trav­el, he argues, “as a device to tell sto­ries, is a rel­a­tive­ly recent phe­nom­e­non.” And time trav­el as a spe­cif­ic genre of lit­er­a­ture is just a lit­tle over a hun­dred years old.

An impor­tant point of clar­i­fi­ca­tion: We find instances of time travel—or at least a kind of parallax—in many ancient texts, where some char­ac­ters expe­ri­ence time dif­fer­ent­ly in dif­fer­ent realms and dimen­sions and can thus see the past or future in our world. In the Ramayana, a fig­ure named Kakb­hushub­di lives like the Watch­ers in the Mar­vel Comics’ universe—outside of time, observ­ing mil­len­nia pass­ing. (It is said he sees the same events hap­pen over and over, with dif­fer­ent out­comes each time.)

This is not strict­ly what we mean by time trav­el. Yet many ancient sto­ries do show humans going back in time, or going to sleep and wak­ing up in the future, through divine agency. In the Bud­dhist Pali texts, we learn that the Devas expe­ri­ence one hun­dred human years as a sin­gle day (an idea echoed in the Bible). In the Japan­ese leg­end of Urashima Taro, a man vis­its the palace of the Drag­on God, and when he comes back 300 years have passed. But the Nerd­writer is talk­ing about some­thing dif­fer­ent than these many nar­ra­tive instances of time dila­tion (hun­dreds of years before Ein­stein elab­o­rat­ed the con­cept), though the same devices appear in mod­ern time trav­el sto­ries.

A sig­nif­i­cant dis­tinc­tion, the video sug­gests, lies in the very con­cept of time. Many ancient peo­ple believed that time was cyclical—hence the many vari­a­tions on the same themes in Kakbhushubdi’s experience—or that time was mal­leable, sub­ject to divine inter­rup­tion and dis­rup­tion. After Darwin’s Ori­gin of Species and the rapid accep­tance of evo­lu­tion (if not nat­ur­al selec­tion), pop­u­lar notions of time changed. The mod­ern time trav­el genre begins with broad­ly Dar­win­ian ideas as a cen­tral premise. In the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion, evo­lu­tion meant inevitable, lin­ear progress, and thus was born a form of lit­er­a­ture called the Utopi­an Romance.

One such nov­el, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Look­ing Back­ward, has the dis­tinc­tion of being the third-largest best­seller of its time, after Uncle Tom’s Cab­in and Ben Hur, with over one mil­lion copies sold. Why haven’t you heard of it before? Prob­a­bly because the book envi­sions a char­ac­ter who falls asleep and wakes up in a social­ist utopia 113 years in the future (the year 2000). It exert­ed sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on the many social­ist move­ments of the time, and “Bel­lamy clubs” sprang up around the coun­try, advo­cat­ing for the nation­al­iza­tion of pri­vate prop­er­ty. Few Amer­i­cans, at least, have learned about the wide­spread pop­u­lar­i­ty of social­ism in the U.S. dur­ing the late 19th cen­tu­ry because… well, you tell me.

But Bellamy’s ideas are embed­ded in the genre, in work after work we are famil­iar with (take the par­o­dy ver­sion in Futu­ra­ma). In the mod­ern time trav­el nov­el, utopias “are no longer on a lost island or a dif­fer­ent world, they were in the future.” This obser­va­tion applies most read­i­ly to a more famous foun­da­tion­al text from 1895, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which bor­rows from Swift’s Gulliver’s Trav­els, but sets the action not in a dis­tant land but in the very dis­tant future, the year 802701. Wells’ “sub­ter­ranean work­ers, the Mor­locks, and the deca­dent Eloi” who prof­it from their labor, notes the British Library, do not dif­fer that much from humans of the past or the present—they have evolved tech­no­log­i­cal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly, but are still sub­ject to exploita­tion and vio­lence.

Where Gulliver’s Trav­els can be read as a mis­an­throp­ic under­min­ing of notions of cul­tur­al supe­ri­or­i­ty, Wells’ nov­el sat­i­rizes the idea that human evo­lu­tion implies an improve­ment in human benef­i­cence. The book set a pat­tern “for sci­ence-fic­tion to cri­tique extreme devel­op­ments of class.” In both Bel­lamy and Wells, time travel—whether achieved by sci­ence or a Rip Van Win­kle sleep—presents an occa­sion for utopi­an or dystopi­an alle­go­ry. The time trav­el genre took on a new dimen­sion after Ein­stein, when the sci­ence of rel­a­tiv­i­ty replaced Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion as the cen­tral pre­oc­cu­pa­tion, and para­dox­es and rules became cen­tral con­cerns. This shift high­lights anoth­er impor­tant fea­ture of the mod­ern time trav­el genre—its obses­sion with cause and effect, and there­fore with the very nature and pos­si­bil­i­ty of sto­ry itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.G. Wells’ 1930s Radio Broad­casts

George Orwell Reviews We, the Russ­ian Dystopi­an Nov­el That Noam Chom­sky Con­sid­ers “More Per­cep­tive” Than Brave New World & 1984

How to Rec­og­nize a Dystopia: Watch an Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Dystopi­an Fic­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Until yes­ter­day, had you asked me to name my favorite liv­ing writ­ers, Ursu­la K. Le Guin’s name would appear near the top of the list. As of yes­ter­day, I can no longer say this. Le Guin passed away at the age of 88, and left mil­lions of fans bereft—fans with whom she had shared some of the finest sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy writ­ten in the 20th cen­tu­ry, and with whom she hap­pi­ly shared her wis­dom and advice in the free online work­shops she held in her lat­er years, her way of con­nect­ing with read­ers when she retired from writ­ing.

Like many peo­ple, I first came to Le Guin’s work through her 1969 Neb­u­la and Hugo-win­ning nov­el The Left Hand of Dark­ness, a book that explod­ed ideas about what sci­ence fic­tion could be and do. That nov­el is part of a series of sto­ries called the “Hain­ish cycle,” which—like C.S. Lewis’ Space Tril­o­gy—are deeply philo­soph­i­cal and deeply sen­si­tive to the emo­tion­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal res­o­nances of the ques­tions they grap­ple with.

But unlike Lewis, Le Guin sought not to res­ur­rect old mytholo­gies, but to show how the bound­aries and divi­sions we take for grant­ed might eas­i­ly become arbi­trary and unfa­mil­iar; how we might become some­thing entire­ly new and dif­fer­ent.

There are many oth­er writ­ers who come to mind when I think of Le Guin—Octavia But­ler, Frank Her­bert, Iain Banks, and, of course, Tolkien. Like many of the best writ­ers in her gen­res, Le Guin’s fic­tion is con­tem­pla­tive as well as spectacular—she could write space opera, sword and sor­cery, and adven­ture sto­ries just as well as any of her con­tem­po­raries, but her sus­tained focus on the nuanced inter­re­la­tions of char­ac­ter and theme—on the agony of choice, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of free­dom and con­nec­tion with­out coer­cion, the social and eco­log­i­cal con­se­quences of blind acqui­si­tion and thought­less action—gave her work a depth many of her con­tem­po­raries lacked.

Le Guin’s anar­chist envi­ron­men­tal­ism and “tough-mind­ed fem­i­nist sen­si­bil­i­ty” opened up paths for dozens of writ­ers who came after her and who also did not fit the typ­i­cal molds estab­lished by the pulpy mag­a­zine sto­ries of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. She was a schol­ar, earn­ing an M.A. in French and Ital­ian lit­er­a­ture and doing doc­tor­al work in France on a Ful­bright in the mid-fifties. But unlike cer­tain, more inse­cure, writ­ers, Le Guin did not wear her learn­ing on her sleeve. She wove it into the tex­ture of her nar­ra­tives and the allu­sive lyri­cism of her prose.

Le Guin’s high­ly dis­tinc­tive qualities—her poet­ry and inquiry, tough­ness and sensitivity—are evi­dent in even minor, less­er-known sto­ries. Today, to cel­e­brate her life, we bring you a few of those sto­ries, as adapt­ed into radio dra­mas by the 70s pro­gram Mind Webs and the late 80s NPR show­case Sci-Fi Radio. At the top of the post, hear “Diary of a Rose,” below, “Field of Vision,” and, above, “The End.”

And, just above, hear part one of a CBC drama­ti­za­tion of Le Guin’s nov­el The Dis­pos­sessed, the fifth nov­el in the Hain­ish cycle, though chrono­log­i­cal­ly the cycle’s begin­ning. (Hear all six parts of the dra­ma­tized nov­el here.) Sub­ti­tled “an Ambigu­ous Utopia,” the nov­el, writes DePauw University’s Judah Bier­man, is “a prize­wor­thy con­tri­bu­tion to the debate about the respon­si­bil­i­ty of knowl­edge, of the vision­ary and of the sci­en­tist, in a planned soci­ety.” But like all of Le Guin’s fic­tion, it is so much more than that, a work that bears repeat­ed read­ing, and lis­ten­ing, and that nev­er exhausts its pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Note: If you’re inter­est­ed in get­ting pro­fes­sion­al­ly read ver­sions of Le Guin’s nov­els, con­sid­er sign­ing up for a 30-day free tri­al to Audible.com. When you sign up for a free tri­al, they let you down­load two audio­books for free, and keep the books, regard­less of whether you become a long-term sub­scriber or not. Get details here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Hear Inven­tive Sto­ries from Ursu­la LeGuin & J.G. Bal­lard Turned Into CBC Radio Dra­mas

Sci-Fi Radio: Hear Radio Dra­mas of Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Ray Brad­bury, Philip K. Dick, Ursu­la K. LeGuin & More (1989)

Ursu­la Le Guin Gives Insight­ful Writ­ing Advice in Her Free Online Work­shop

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

Lis­ten to 188 Dra­ma­tized Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ries by Ursu­la K. Le Guin, Isaac Asi­mov, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Bal­lard & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness