I have to admit that "In the Future, They Will Get Us Confused" is not, actually, about time travel. It was published originally in Pulphouse in November 1991.


In the Future, They Will Get Us Confused

Geoffrey A. Landis


Louis Armstrong, Neil Armstrong,
somehow they will think quite fitting that a trumpet player should walk on the moon;

Eugene O'Neill, Gerard O'Neill,
and marvel how a physicist could write such unbearable pain
and yet dream of the stars.

T.S. Elliott Ness,
they will write romances about the policeman poet;

Einstein, Eisenhower,
and tragedies about the soldier scientist
who invented the atomic bomb

--Hitler, Hitchcock--
to defeat the twisted (but brilliant!) filmmaker dictator.

History will remember Thomas Sawyer,
inventing the lightbulb while drifting down the Missisippi to
discover Louisiana;

and the brothers Orville and Wilbur Kennedy,
later assassinated in Dallas, inventing the bicycle.

The twentieth century, a complex and wonderous time:
there will never be another like it
(and never was.)



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