Sometimes writers write messages for their future selves. A great example of one who did this was Clifford D Simak. The March 1955 Galaxy published a Simak story called “Project Mastodon.” And it was a worthy time travel tale about creating new countries in time, not space. Three friends invent a primitive time machine that can make 50,000 year leaps, but find it very hard to profit by it when nobody will take them seriously. The US military treats them like a bunch of crackpots. When the men get stranded in the past after a mammoth crashes into their helicopter, they wrack their brains for someway to get back. The problem isn’t the time machine, but the height. If they were to go back standing in Mastodonia they would end up under tons of earth. In the end, one man manages to get home but we have to wait to see if he can save his friends, even with the help of the military man who never lost faith that the travelers would return.
As time travel stories go, it is typical of the 1950s. No Morlocks here, only a puzzle story and a little action with sabertooths and mammoths. But buried in that story is a nugget, a time-release seed that will twenty-three years later become the novel Mastodonia. That little, almost unimportant fragment is a character named Pritchard, who is studying Law while the time machine inventors study Engineering. During a bull session on time travel, Pritchard pipes in: “If you guys ever do travel in time, you’ll run up against more than you bargain for. I don’t mean the climate or the terrain or the fauna, but the economics and the politics.” In the scope of “Project Mastodon” this means the stuffy military men who poo-poo their suggestion of recognizing Mastodonia as a country and using it as a sanctuary in the case of a nuclear strike.
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https://www.michaelmay.online/2015/11/mastodonia-message-from-past-guest-post.html
