science fiction hall of fame volume one story eight: Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Lewis Padgett (pseudonym of Henry Kuttner and his wife C. L. Moore), 1943
in the distant future, scientist Unthahorsten has been hard at work building a time machine. he needs something to put in the machine that will be affected by entropy and etc of the machines target time so he can figure out when it went, and so uses some of his son's old toys. when the machine fails to return, he builds another and does the same, and when that too fails to return, he considers the experiment a loss and moves on to other things. unbeknownst to him, the machines had landed in the 19th and mid-20th centuries.
in 1942, 7 year old Scott Paradine was skipping class when he found an odd box filled with interesting toys. he took these home and began to play with them, sharing them with his toddler sister Emma. their parents take interest in these toys, at first because of their odd natures (an anatomical doll mostly accurate but with strange alterations, an abacus-like toy with rules they can't figure out, a small cube they can only see kaleidoscope colors in but Scott says has pretend people inside, etc), and later because their children begin acting strangely. they consult with child psychologist Holloway, who theorizes that the toys are perhaps alien, and that they're instructing the children in a whole new way of thinking, incompatible with Euclidean geometry, that only young children can grasp because they haven't been taught to understand non-euclidean geometry as nonsensical. the toys are taken away, and the children continue to develop mostly normally, but continue to communicate with each other in ways their parents can't understand, and have begun to build something- Emma using her better understanding of this X logic, and Scott sourcing the parts for the machine and putting them together.
in the latter half of the 19th century, the young girl who found the other machine recites a verse from the contents to her "uncle charles" (these are implied to be Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson). when asked what the verse means, she says she's not sure besides that it's "the way out". uncle charles says he will put this verse in the book based on the stories she's told him.
back in 1942, Scott and Emma have been hard at work assembling their machine, and, finally, have gotten it to work. their father hears their excitement and comes to see what's happening- just in time to watch them disappear. left behind is their "machine"- pebbles, candle stubs, and other junk laid out in a random pattern- and a page torn from a book, scrawled over to be near illegible but still recognizably part of the jabberwocky poem from through the looking glass:
'twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimbel in the wabe.
all mimsy were the borogoves
and the mome raths outgrabe.
the dad puts together that this passage was key to getting the formula to work- and that he'll never be able to replicate it and follow them, having been conditioned to Euclidean logic.
my thoughts: this one is.... interesting! I was honestly with it up until the Alice inclusion which i just found a little silly not to mention, as far as I understand, antithetical to the jabberwocky poem which is meant to be nonsensical so assigning it some deep meaning is a bit... well. but I found the foundation of the story, of children being given toys from the future that instruct them in a way of thinking incompatible with present-day logic, to be quite interesting.
there was also this paragraph which I just had to sit and admire for a minute for being such a perfect compact example of misogynistic prose:
Dennis Paradine and his wife Jane were having a cocktail before dinner, downstairs in the living room. He was a youngish, middle-aged man with gray-shot hair and a thinnish, prim-mouthed face; he taught philosophy at the university. Jane was small, neat, dark, and very pretty. She sipped her martini and said:
like its so artful the difference in how they're described and then of course the immediate establishment of the facts: women be shopping. down the same page she calls one of her husband's young students "that hussy" because the two have agreed that she is trying to seduce him for a better grade. just incredible.
women count: two women (small neat dark very pretty Jane and the familys nondescript cook Rosemary) and two girls (toddler Emma and young Alice Liddell)
plausibility: I don't think the jabberwocky poem is a secret code key for human ascension.
