Time Traveller’s Shoes by Yuliia Vereta (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) opens with an intriguing short hook before becoming a long description of the narrator’s friend Herbert, a childhood prodigy who is blunt to the point of rudeness with other people. We see this play out in various scenes from Herbert’s childhood, mostly at school, from which he eventually gets expelled. Later in life he gets married, but his wife subsequently divorces him because of the many experiments he undertakes at home.
After more than four thousand words of back-story about Herbert (about half the length of this piece) we eventually get to the science fiction, when he visits the narrator’s house and states that he has managed to make one of his mice disappear but can’t replicate the experiment. Then Herbert vanishes while the pair are in the garden.
Years pass. The narrator’s business thrives and his children grow up. One day, while he is looking in an old book, the narrator sees Herbert in a photograph taken in 1913 (fifty years earlier). Further investigation reveals the man in the photograph invented a revolutionary steam engine and wrote a treatise about time as a fourth dimension.
These discoveries drive the narrator to teach himself science and investigate Herbert’s inventions but, eventually, he realises that his intellect isn’t up to the task. Then a young schoolteacher arrives in town and takes an interest but, at the end of the story, he also vanishes.
I was a bit perplexed at why this story was selected for publication—it isn’t structured like a modern work (the long section at the start detailing Herbert’s character and history feels like something from H.G. Wells), the time-travel idea is unoriginal, and there is virtually no story beyond a couple of people vanishing. Or any resolution. Not only is the story set in 1963, it feels like it was written then too. All that said, I’ve read worse in pro SF magazines.1
(Mediocre). 8,200 words. ParSec website.
1. The writer is Ukrainian, so English is perhaps her second language, but the copy-editor should have asked her to get rid of some of those commas and simplify some of the sentences:
That morning when Herbert, a good friend of mine, came to me, again, the third time that week, was the most usual Tuesday morning one could ever imagine. His theories did not let him sleep at night, which happened pretty often, but this time everything was different. This time it was real.
Since early childhood, I was his only friend and the most appreciative listener—in all honesty, I didn’t always understand what he was saying and what he was even talking about, but, unlike other people, I didn’t have anything against it.
I met Herbert on my first day at school. Those huge thick glasses he watched the world through made his eyes look even bigger than they were and a little goggled. But even without them, he looked pretty weird, which did not do him any good in high school. He was different from all the rest of the children, too different to be part of the crowd and remain unnoticed wherever he went. Frankly speaking, it never mattered to him, just like everything else- everything but science. p. 32