An Infinite Summer

An Infinite Summer

Release Date:  6//1979
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Medium:  Literature
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Description:  Time travelers from the future journey through the 20th century and use a device to "freeze" small groups of people into "tableaux" which they find interesting. The people in each tableau then become invisible and permeable to others, until the effect wears off, sometimes after many years. "An Infinite Summer" was originally published in the anthology Andromeda 1 (1976, ed. Peter Weston, ISBN 0-86007-891-4). A time travel story, it was reprinted in later anthologies, such as Trips in Time (1977, ed. Robert Silverberg, ISBN 0-8407-6574-6), and in translation.[2] It was selected for The Best Science Fiction of the Year 6 by editor Terry Carr. Priest says that he interrupted the writing of his 1976 novel The Space Machine ("somewhere in Chapter 13, to be precise"), and chose to publish the story separately "because there was one strong feeling that would not fit in the novel: the sense that layers of time exist, that places do not change so much as people."[3] In August, 1940, protagonist Thomas Lloyd daily visits the Thames Bridge in Richmond, London, England. He spots "freezers" around the park; freezers is his term for people from an unknown future who, for unknown reasons, will occasionally use a device to freeze people out of time. These frozen people remain visible only to the freezers and to others, like Thomas, who were once frozen. In June, 1903, Thomas was frozen at the very moment of proposing to a lovely young lady, Sarah, who accepted him. Thomas remained frozen in this tableau until 1935, after which he finds that the frozen are considered, by their contemporaries, to have vanished. He is now disinherited and poor; he learns that freezing may "erode" after minutes or years; and he finds what work he can in the vicinity so that he may visit Sarah, in her radiant immobility, every day. "Thomas Lloyd, of neither the past nor the present, saw himself as a product of both, and as a victim of the future." After long, patient waiting, he sees Sarah unfreeze during the The Blitz. The freezers have watched Thomas; when Sarah awakes, blissful but baffled by the bombing, they restore their tableau, presumably so that the lovers will wake again in a kinder future. If so, this is one of Priest's happier endings.