This is an odd reference in one of C. L. Moore’s letters, about a story never published:
Well, have just received my first flat rejection from Wright. A harmless little fable about a sorcerer king of antediluvian times, his mysterious witch-queen and a time-traveler with a startling resemblance to a certain Mr. Smith whom I may have mentioned once or twice before, tho no names were named in the story. Ah, well, life is full of disappointments.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 31 May 1935
We get no more than that—though Northwest Smith would eventually star in a time-travel story, “Quest of the Star-Stone” (Weird Tales Nov 1937), written with Henry Kuttner. However, before she collaborated with Kuttner, Moore published another time-travel story, one which features a very Northwest Smith-like protagonist: Eric Rosner, hard-bitten adventurer and world-traveler:
ERIC ROSNER at twenty had worked his way round the world on cattle boats, killed his first man in a street brawl in Shanghai, escaped a firing squad by a hairbreadth, stowed away on a pole-bound exploring ship.
At twenty-five he had lost himself in Siberian wilderness, led a troup of Tatar bandits, commanded a Chinese regiment, fought in a hundred battles, impartially on either side.
At thirty there was not a continent nor a capital that had not known him, not a jungle nor a desert nor a mountain range that had not left scars upon his great Viking body. Tiger claws and the Russian knout, Chinese bullets and the knives of savage black warriors in African forests had written their tales of a full and perilous life upon him. At thirty he looked backward upon such a gorgeous, brawling, color-splashed career as few men of sixty can boast. But at thirty he was not content.
—C. L. Moore, “Tryst in Time” (Astounding Dec 1936)
Did Moore take that rejected story and resubmit it for Astounding? Or did she just take the idea of the story and re-write it for the science fiction magazine (whose editor and fans were not fond of sorcerers and witch-queens)? There is a certain similarity between this tale and Moore’s previous work in Astounding, “The Bright Illusion” (1934) and “Greater Glories” (1935), a romanticism of a male protagonist finding or recognizing love under unusual and somewhat cosmically tragic circumstances. It wouldn’t be surprising if Moore had married the idea of a rejected tale to the general outline of what had sold successfully in the past.
The temporal physics behind the tale are no better or worse than that of many time travel stories, and if Moore isn’t necessarily erudite in physics, she is well-read in basic time travel literature, having no doubt read a great many stories in the pulps or elsewhere. When she writes, for example, of the idea of how moving through the fourth dimension (time) means the other three dimensions go along without you:
“Yeah, and find yourself floating in space when you let go.” Eric grinned. “Even I’ve heard that the universe is in motion through space. I don’t know about time, but I’m pretty sure space would block your little scheme.”
—C. L. Moore, “Tryst in Time” (Astounding Dec 1936)
Clark Ashton Smith had addressed just this problem in “The Letter from Mohaun Los” (Wonder Stories Aug 1932); Smith’s solution was that if you waited long enough, another planet would pass by the point in space you occupied and you’d have your adventure that way. She also addresses the idea of changing the past:
There must be many possible futures. The one we enter upon is not the only way. Have you ever heard that theory explained? It’s not a new one—the idea that at every point of our progress we confront crossroads, with a free choice as to which we take. And a different future lies down each.
—C. L. Moore, “Tryst in Time” (Astounding Dec 1936)
Murray Leister’s “Sideways in Time” (Astounding Jun 1934) had played with the idea of parallel timelines and alternate futures, so Moore wasn’t the first to address the idea, but the fact that she did further shows familiarity with the mechanics of time travel in fiction.
Moore squirms around that by letting Rosner stay on terra firma, even as the ages pass around him, skipping through time like a rock on a pond. The result is reminiscent of the Futurama episode “The Late Phillip J. Fry,” (or, if you prefer, the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations a la Olaf Stapledon’s classic Last and First Men (1930)), with Rosner zipping through future (and past) ages, from advanced civilizations to barbarisms and back again. At least one scene may involve a tongue-in-cheek poke at a certain Providence gentleman she corresponded with, who had a tendency to use the word “Cyclopean”:
Even at this distance he recognized those darker blotches upon the tremendous walls as the sign of a coming dissolution. It was a city more awfully impressive than any he had ever dreamed of, standing gigantic under the low, gray sky of this swamplike world—but its glory was past. Here and there gaps in the colossal walls spoke of fallen blocks and ruined buildings. By the thick, primordial air and the swamp smell and the unrecognizable architecture he knew that he gazed upon a scene of immortal antiquity, and his breath came quicker as he stared, wondering where the people were whose Cyclopean city this was. what name they bore and if history had ever recorded it.
—C. L. Moore, “Tryst in Time” (Astounding Dec 1936)
For the most part, however, this is a piecemeal narrative, a succession of brief, fragmentary scenes and images punctuated by a character that reappears, again and again—a woman, Maia, who is always separated from Eric Rosner by something. Until the end. Without ever using terms like “reincarnation” or “soul mate,” there is a distinct and heavy hint that these two were meant to be together, and that they will be—eventually.
While the story isn’t bad, it also apparently involved some editorial interference and a couple of cuts, which she complained about to her friend in Providence:
Which bring us to the memory of your distress over the butchery of your two tales in that magazine. I ahd somewhat miraculously escaped much injury in my experiences with them up to the publication of my last story, “Tryst in Time” which was so mangled and dismembered that I could scarcely bear to look upon the bleeding remnants. Typographical errors ranged from the careless to the ludicrous—I remember a brook ‘tickling’ through a meadow, for one. And with the most uncanny precision they eliminated and ruined the only two parts of the story for which I felt real affection. My paragraph referring to the mysterious urge which drives races upon migration was left out entirely. I had mentioned the great prehistoric hegiras of our remote fathers across vast areas of Europe, perhaps over the land-bridge into America, the recent fever to “Go West” that burned in our immediate ancestors, and hinting wisely that mayhap the fever which my hero felt to travel in time might be the beginning of a new race-migration somewhere. It didn’t mean anything much, but it was kinda fun and I bitterly resented its omission. And in the last of the story a sentence whose “well-greased perfection”, to quote yourself, gave me a great joy was utterly butchered. I had it, “Wherver you adventured the knowledge of my presence tormented you, and through all my lives I waited for you in vain.” Perhaps it verges on blank verse in its extreme unctuousness, but who are they to cut it in their vandalism to—“Wherever you adventured the knowledge of my presence tormented you—and I waited in vain!”??? If they don’t like the way I write why don’t they go back where they came from? I am burning up.
—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 24 Oct 1936, Letters to C. L. Moore 195
“Race-migration” was a popular historical concept during the 1930s, and makes its appearance in stories like Robert E. Howard’s “The Children of the Night” (Weird Tales Apr/May 1931). The reference to time travel as a form of race-migration might be a nudge-wink-nudge reference to Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time” (Astounding Jun 1936). The cuts might have been for space, or because the editor disagreed with the ideas expressed—there are many possibilities, but no firm answers. Pulp editors could be merciless and incomprehensible.
There isn’t much feedback on this story; Lovecraft apparently never read it, or at least doesn’t mention it in surviving letters. Fans, however appreciated it, with one fan letter noting:
I was glad to see Miss Moore has begun to write ‘science-fiction. Everything else I have read by her was purely weird. Her story seemed real and plausible, in spite of the unusual plot.
—Richard Creecy, Astounding Feb 1937
Which shows how Moore’s reputation was developing.
“Tryst in Time” was published in the December 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. Scans of this issue are available on the Internet Archive.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 