Alienation

Julian West experiences time travel, not space travel, so he does not awaken to a world of aliens. Nonetheless, he finds himself in a different world, for the Boston of 2000 is as foreign to him as another planet might have been. Nationalism has transformed America into a culture foreign to that which West knew in his own time. He feels alienated as all strangers do and asks Edith, "Has it never occurred to you that my position is so much more utterly alone than any human being's ever was before that a new word is really needed to describe it?" He then calls himself a "strange uncanny being, a stranded creature of an unknown sea." But in his dream that takes him back to the nineteenth century, he realizes that he has become estranged from that time, too. Knowing that Edith's love will cure his loneliness, he then...