{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03078817733990148, 'fraction_numerical': 0.008004926108374385, 'mean_word_length': 4.398671096345515, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
An Experiential Act.

Scratch any science fiction or fantasy writer and the red wound of argument appears: sf is the subgenre of fantasy or fantasy is the subgenre of science fiction. It is an old fight. However, there is one kind of writing in which the two are so intermingled, it is hard to know which is which and that is the time travel story. Essentially there are two kinds of time travel into the future or into the past. Sometimes the viewpoint character does the traveling: back to King Arthur's court, back to the Children's Crusade, forward to converse with the Eloi. Occasionally it is another character who comes forward or back in time to interact with the main players: Mayne's drummer boy in Earthfasts , the child Hatty in Tom's Midnight Garden, or Nesbiťs psammead. The implements of travel those things which allow the traveler to slip through the streams of time like a minnow in a brook, are many. There is Taliesin's tuning fork in Nancy Bond's A String in the Harp' there is an elaborate device in H.G. Wells' Time Machine and in Crusader in Jeans. There are silver pins, magic mirrors, wardrobe cupboards, and conjunctions of moons, planets, stars. In my new book, The Devil's Arithmetic (Viking, 1988), a young Jewish girl of the 1980s opens the door for Elijah at the family seder and finds herself back on a shtetl on the Polish-German border in 1942. She is propelled back into a past that she has been steadfastly refusing to remember by three things: the great neediness in her family of Holocaust survivors, the open seder door, and the familiar childhood chant 4 'Ready or not, here I come."