Could You Have Thought Up Time Travel On Your Own?

I didn’t discover the concept of time travel until September 25, 1965, when the 1960 film version of The Time Machine was shown on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies. That was two months before I turned 14. It blew my mind. The next day at Cutler Ridge Junior High, kids excitedly talked about the movie. Sometime after that, I read the H. G. Wells novella, but I’m not sure when. I consider The Time Machine by H. G. Wells the most science fictional of all science fiction stories. Not only did it introduce me to the concept of a time machine, but it also introduced me to social evolution, Homo sapiens evolving into different species, the extinction of humankind, the end of the Earth, and the death of the Sun. That’s epic for a 13-year-old in 1965. I’m pretty sure I’d never have imagined time travel on my own. I think if I had learned about astronomy before discovering science fiction, I could have thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat to go to the Moon or Mars?” on my own. But time travel was a…