THE TIME TRAVELERS: A Science Fiction Quartet

Four more or less famous time-travel novelettes, old (three of the five authors are dead) but still hale. Isaac Asimov's ""The Ugly Little Boy"" (1958) is the touching, mordant tale of a Neanderthal child, hideous in appearance but of normal intelligence, brought to the present as a publicity stunt and, later, callously abandoned to his fate. In ""Sidewise in Time"" (1934), Murray Leinster invented the dazzling idea of multiple, or parallel, strands of time; unfortunately, he neglected to invent a plot to go with it. ""Consider Her Ways"" is the underrated John Wyndham's biting 1961 vision of an all-female future (cf. Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., etc.). And ""Vintage Season"" (1946), by an equally underrated pair, the late Henry Kuttner and his wife C.L. Moore, describes venal, ghoulish far-future time-travelers creating repulsive works of art out of historical tragedies: they refuse to interface or help the victims lest their own society be wiped out of existence as a chronological result. Worthy yarns indeed--certainly deserving of more discussion than the paltry two-page introduction and four tiny blurbs provided by the editors.