The Futile Flight of John Arthur Benn

John Arthur Benn has a simple plan: escape the twentieth century by traveling backward through time. But time travel is less orderly than he expected, sending him rushing past the Roaring Twenties, the gay nineties, colonial America, and glimpses of England’s legendary past. Along the way, he encounters tantalizing fragments of history—and discovers that even a brief journey can become unexpectedly dangerous.

Then Benn falls asleep. When he wakes, he is stranded in a primitive wilderness with little more than a sandwich, a thermos, and no clear idea of where—or when—he has stopped. A stream, a mushroom patch, and a determined wild boar become part of his struggle to survive, while the strange mechanics of his journey threaten to carry him in the opposite direction. Witty, brisk, and darkly comic, this classic science-fiction tale follows one traveler’s ill-fated attempt to outwit time itself.