Tuesday, October 25, 2016

"So It’s Going To Be Murder in Cold Blood, Is It?"

"The Man Who Saw Through Time."
By Leonard Raphael (?-?).
First appearance: Fantastic Adventures, September 1941.
Reprinted in Fantastic Adventures Quarterly, Spring 1942.
Short short story (5 pages).
Online at UNZ (HERE).
"Gary Fraxer went into the future and saw something that must not happen. So he came back with a plan to prevent a future crime."
We've heard of going that extra mile for a friend, but this one . . . this one takes the cake.

Characters:
~ Walter Yale:
   Side A.
~ Gary Fraxer:
   Side B.
~ Carol Lewis:
   The hypotenuse.

Typo: "at that in stint".
Resources:
- Just about everything you'll need to know about time travel is examined at Winchell Chung's hypersite, Atomic Rockets (HERE).
- As for our author, all that we know about him is what the folks at FictionMags were able to find:
   (1) "The Man Who Saw Through Time," Fantastic Adventures, September 1941 (HERE)
   (2) "The Corpse That Talked," Mammoth Detective, January 1943
   (3) "Mystery of the Crushed Peppermints," Mammoth Detective, March 1943 (HERE)
   (4) "Bad Man’s Picnic," The Saturday Evening Post, February 10, 1951.

The bottom line: "If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make."
   — Douglas Adams

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