I enjoy the quaintness of classic Science Fiction, its odd mixture of futurism from the past. Starship captains smoke pipes and use typewriters, Mars has water in its canals, and everyone keeps a ray gun handy. Catherine L. Moore’s stories stand the test of time better than most from the Golden Age, perhaps because she eschewed technology in favor of mood, emotion, and sexuality. In her famous time travel novella “Vintage Season”, first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946, there’s actually no time machine at all. The travelers — two women and a man who go by the names of Kleph, Klia and Omerie – arrive in 1940s America off-camera as it were. Our first view of them is swaggering up to Oliver Wilson’s house, which they are renting for the pleasant month of May:
There was a curious air of condescension in the way they moved. Like women in costume. They minced a little on their delicate high heels, held out an arm to stare at the cut of a sleeve, twisted now and then inside their garments as if the clothing sat strangely on them, as if they were accustomed to something entirely different.
Oliver views them with native suspicion, thinking them from some exotic country, and insists on staying in the house himself. Another party (who, we find out later, are rival time travelers) offer more for the house, and his fiancée, a practical, no-nonsense gal named Sue, goads him into schemes to drive his strange tenants away. In spite of this Oliver becomes attracted to Kleph; she invites him to her room, to drink a tea that brings feelings of euphoria and watch a picture on the wall that seems to function something like a plasma TV. When they’re discovered by the other two travelers, Omerie reproves Kleph, hinting at what might be considered the Prime Directive of time travel: you can’t change the past.
“Kleph, Kleph, you silly little fool, can we never trust you out of sight?”
Kleph’s voice then said something that seemed to make no sense. “What does it matter, here?”
The man answered in that buzzing, faraway hum. “The matter of giving your bond before you leave, not to interfere. You know you signed the rules—“
Moore paints Oliver Wilson as an ordinary American—a bit of a rustic simpleton, with no sense of adventure and no desire to broaden his horizons. The travelers from the future get scarcely better treatment though—dilettantes of history, they flit from one season of perfect weather to the next, witnessing events with a detached and superior smugness. As the author recounted in her afterward to “Shambleau” …and Others:
“Vintage Season” was, I believe, the first science-fiction story to ask, “What if time travelers from the future visit epic events of our era simply as tourists, here to make a Roman Holiday of our personal disasters?”
It was not, however, Moore’s first foray into time travel. In an earlier story, “Tryst in Time”, adventurer extraordinaire Eric Rosner agrees to test a scientist friend’s time travel device — a thick metal pack worn over the back, that works by putting “anchors” into inertia when the wearer moves its levers. Traveling through different eras, he continues to meet the same beautiful woman over and over again in different lives. There is, as in “Vintage Season”, a romantic dimension to the story, and this was a hallmark of Moore’s writing from the time her very first story, “Shambleau”, appeared in Weird Tales in 1933. Throughout the Thirties she contributed stories to the Sci-Fi pulp zines, often featuring Northwest Smith, the ruffian hero of “Shambleau”, and a warrior heroine named Jirel of Joiry. The tales were filled with sexuality and dangerous seduction. As Lester del Ray writes in the introduction to The Best of C.L. Moore, “Here, for the first time in the field, we find mood, feeling, and color.”
At the time her first story was published, Moore was a twenty-two-year-old bank secretary living in Indianapolis. She received a fan letter from another Science Fiction writer, Harry Kuttner, who assumed that C.L. Moore was a man. The two began a romance, and married in 1940; from that point on they wrote stories together, publishing them under various pseudonyms. “Vintage Season” appeared under the nom de plume Lawrence O’Donnell. How much Kuttner contributed to the novella is unknown, but judging from Catherine Moore’s earlier work, the tale was mostly hers – there is the same subtlety in emotion and sexual allure we find in “Tryst in Time”, though “Vintage Season” is more mature and multi-faceted. It also, unfortunately, retains Moore’s tendency to the verbose, a common trait for Science Fiction in an era when the magazines paid by the word. Attitudes, feelings and actions are repeated multiple times in a slightly different context, turning what should have been a mid-length short story into a novella.
Kuttner and Moore eventually settled in Los Angeles, where they mentored a young writer named Ray Bradbury. Bradbury carried on and perfected Moore’s brand of sensuous and emotionally charged 
Sci-Fi, writing his own time travel masterpiece, “A Sound of Thunder”, in 1952. But despite its flaws, “Vintage Season” can stand with the best of Bradbury’s works – a charming, refreshingly original pager-turner of a story that illustrates how the deepest of mysteries can be hidden within the most ordinary setting. It has proved to have an enduring appeal, and is widely anthologized. Robert Silverberg’s sequel, “In Another Country”, was published in 1989, and the 1992 film Timescape is loosely based on “Vintage Season”. For those interested in reading ten of Moore’s most successful stories, including “Vintage Season”, they are available in an inexpensive Kindle edition of The Best of C.L. Moore.
I’ll be following up this post in the coming months with features on other “vintage time travel” pieces. In the meantime, feel free to comment and let us know your favorite “vintage” story.
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