The Time Ship

The Time Ship

ANY late 19th century SF book involving time travel will be compared to Wells' The Time Machine and all of them pale in comparison.

There is a reason The Time Machine is considered a masterpiece, a cornerstone of the foundations of SF, and has never been out of print. Just as there is a reason that The Time Ship had one printing, was quickly forgotten, and has only been recently unearthed and is now considered something of a SF oddity, something that only SF scholars might be interested in. The reason is obvious. One book is a masterpiece, the other is a mishmash of styles, with one dimensional characters and contrived situations. The digressions alone, inserted to bring late 19th century Spanish readers up-to-speed are tedious enough since they are simply presented as blocks of information and no effort is made to incorporate any of it into the body of the plot.

Gaspar has a stage background and I for one could see that at work in some of his characters who would say nothing for pages at a time, before stepping forward to offer up a comedic zinger, before stepping back into the barely acknowledged until it was time for another zinger. That's not nearly as bad as a dozen women who had very few lines shared among them, or a dozen military officers, of which only three had any presence at all. One could easily see the stage effect of the speaker of lines and the silent extras at work. For the stage, that's one way of doing it. In a novel, this makes for a certain sloppiness, especially when someone says something in the back half of the book, and he hasn't had a line before then.

The main thing SF scholars might be interested in with The Time Ship is this:

Before Wells, any traveling in time was done in dreams or by the will of some other force, like the gods (ancient aliens?) or something similar. Gaspar seems to have been the first to postulate a machine for doing this, but it was Wells which brought the concept to the general public. (Scholarship feels 99.99% certain Wells didn't know of Gaspar's novel.)

Voyaging around in time is an off shoot of the amazing voyages genre; Gulliver's Travels, Treasure Island and the like, which gave rise to the scientific travels of Verne with 2000 Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon. It's only a small step from there to traveling through time. Wells went the full step, postulating a machine to travel through time (i.e. not relying on the traditional methods of Gods or dreams but using Science). But Gaspar only goes a half step. He's firmly in the adventures genre, using the past as his exotic realm, he postulates a time machine and some scientific gobbledygook to run it and then falls short at the very end since he has it all turn out to be dream. So Gaspar seems like a bridge or transition work. All the former elements, trying to transition into the modern version as Wells would postulate, but falling just short.

In other words, a horrid novel, which got what it deserves (a century plus of oblivion) and now it holds a very slight roots of SF scholarly research interest.

There are far far better things to read, even if it's Wells' novel for the umpteenth time. You have to be a real lover of the time machine genre to be interested in this one. (Which is why I read it.)