Search Worlds Without End

Time travel has long been a staple of science fiction. Removing the bonds of time on a story allows for many interesting possibilities, but it also presents complicated problems and paradoxes.

In this collection, featuring stories from the 1880s to the 1960s, we are taken to the remote future and back to the distant past. We are trapped in an eternal loop and met with visitors and objects from the future. We come face to face with our past selves, and experience the chaos of living out of sync with everyone else in the universe.

These are just some of the thrilling narratives to discover as we unwind the constraints of time.

Contents:

• Introduction (Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound) - (2019) - essay by Mike Ashley
• The Clock That Went Backward - (1881) - short story by Edward Page Mitchell
• The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper - (1932) - short story by H. G. Wells
• Omega - (1932) - short story by Amelia Reynolds Long
• The Book of Worlds - (1929) - short story by Miles J. Breuer, M.D.
• The Branches of Time - (1935) - short story by David R. Daniels
• The Reign of the Reptiles - (1935) - novelette by Alan Connell
• Friday, the Nineteenth - (1950) - short story by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
• Look After the Strange Girl - (1953) - short story by J. B. Priestley
• Manna - (1949) - novelette by Peter Phillips
• Tenth Time Around - (1959) - novelette by J. T. McIntosh (variant of Tenth Time Round)
• The Shadow People - (1958) - short story by Arthur Sellings
• Thirty-Seven Times - (1957) - short story by E. C. Tubb
• Dial 'O' for Operator - (1958) - novelette by Robert Presslie
• Story Sources (Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound) - (2019) - essay by Mike Ashley

Drifting through a party celebrating 400 years since the Spanish Armada's successful invasion of Britain, Don Miguel Navarro -- Licentiate of the Society of Time -- is shaken by the host's possession of a flawless mask from an ancient Aztec festival. 'Imported' from the past, the discovery signals a breach in the Society's policing of time-travel and imminent danger to reality itself. Today, a relic out of time; tomorrow, the rewriting of the course of history? In three ground-breaking novellas, John Brunner weaves an ingenious tale of diverging timelines and a battle for dominance over the fourth dimension.

The Society of Time stories were abridged when first collected. Here, the trilogy is reprinted in full along with two mesmerising standalone novellas: The Analysts and Father of Lies.

Contents:

• 7 - Introduction (The Society of Time) - essay by Mike Ashley
• 15 - Spoil of Yesterday - [The Society of Time - 1] - (1962) - novelette
• 65 - The Word Not Written - [The Society of Time - 2] - (1962) - novelette
• 115 - The Fullness of Time - [The Society of Time - 3] - (1962) - novelette
• 167 - Father of Lies - (1962) - novella
• 239 - The Analysts - (1961) - novelette