A Little Uchronia

Jack Finney's Time After Time is a very nice little book. The SFnal gimmick is a species of time travel, but the real beauty of the story lies in atmospherics rather than plot; Finney works hard to evoke late 19th-century New York, and for the nostalgia-prone (guilty, yerroner!) succeeds admirably. That's not what I want to talk about; I want to go off on a tangent from one plot point. For the sake of those who might read it in future, and who want to avoid spoilers, I'm going to put it under a cut.

( A Secret Plot )