1891 fantasy (perhaps 1885). Tourmalin, bored on a long sea voyage,
discovers the Anglo-Australian Joint Stock Time Bank, into which he
can deposit his unwanted time, only to reclaim and spend it later.
But of course this is a story with a moral, and it's not that
simple: when Tourmalin cashes his time cheques, he does indeed live
the hours he banked, but not in the right order, so he's repeatedly
dropped into situations in which everyone but him knows what's going
on. Still, it's an enjoyable and apparently harmless escape from an
advantageous but stifling marriage to a women who wants him to Improve
Himself… until she finds out about it.
The publication date is unclear; Langford found evidence of it in
1885, but other sources say 1891. This matters, because we get The
Chronic Argonauts (precursor to The Time Machine) and Bellamy's
Looking Backward in 1888, and the Connecticut Yankee in 1889; but
whatever the truth, this is one of the first recognisable stories of
time travel as we now understand it, excepting marginal cases like
Rip van Winkle. In particular it uses the conceit as something more
than merely an excuse for visiting a different world where the actual
adventure will happen; this is time travel into one's own past, that
can't be casually replicated by a spacecraft or a shipwreck on a
mysterious primitive island.
(Thanks to Adam Thornton for pointing out that Sylvie and Bruno
Concluded (1893) also contains the idea of banking one's spare time
and drawing it out again later.)
But it's still fantasy more than SF, insofar as that distinction is
meaningful, and comic fantasy at that; Tourmalin rationalises away his
behaviour as entirely proper while everyone else is being unreasonable
to him, and towards the end the tone shifts increasingly into hopeless
farcical entanglements. The ending is pretty much "and it was all a
dream" (after which Tourmalin has of course learned an Important
Lesson). Yes, all right, untangling situations is harder to make
interesting than tangling them; but nonetheless it feels like that
evasion of responsibility that the same device signifies in fantasy
for children.
In spite of that I'd recommend this if you're interested in the
prototypes of SF or fiction of the period.
I was pointed at this by
BigJackBrass. Freely available
from Project Gutenberg.
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