The Panchronicon

Copernicus Droop, the village reprobate of Peltonville Center, New Hampshire, turns up in 1898 with a machine left behind by a traveler from the twenty-sixth century who did not live long after landing. Its logic is cheerfully literal: chain the thing to the north pole, circle fast enough against the sun, and the calendar unwinds. Droop talks the Wise sisters into a trip, practical forty-year-old Rebecca and her Shakespeare-mad younger sister Phoebe, promising a hop back fifteen years and a fortune made on hindsight. They overshoot by three centuries into Elizabethan England, where Queen Elizabeth, Francis Bacon, and Shakespeare himself are waiting, and where one question at least gets settled: Bacon did not write the plays. MacKaye published this in 1904, nine years after Wells’s The Time Machine.