This collection’s four main stories feature time travel by land, sea, air and fire, representing the classical elements, and the three supporting stories also involve people or messages travelling into the past or the future, in very different ways.

Three of the main stories were published in the USA, in Analog, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and the anthology series There Will Be War, and all three were recommended for the Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula Award. The fourth was to be published in Amazing Stories, when the magazine ceased publication, and the others appeared in the UK, in Dream, West Coast Magazine, and the Centre for Contemporary Arts collection To Arrive at Where We Started.

The book is illustrated throughout by Sydney Jordan from Dundee, best known as the creator of Jeff Hawke, the world’s longest running science fiction comic strip  (from 1954 to 1988;  Duncan Lunan wrote or contributed to ten of the later stories).   The ‘air’ story With Time Comes Concord was illustrated by Sydney for its first publication in Analog, and he has now provided illustrations for all the other six stories as well as a colour cover.