The Toynbee Convector

The Toynbee Convector is a science fiction short story by American author Ray Bradbury. It was first published in 1984, in Playboy Magazine, and again in 1988 as part of collection of short stories that bear its name. The story is about a reporter who goes to interview a man who claims to be a time traveler. The title of the story is a reference to historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who was famous for his idea that all civilizations develop by responding to outstanding challenges in their environments that require them to rise to new levels of ingenuity and effort. This relates to the story's focus on how mankind has come together to address its former issues, if for an unexpected reason.

It is the year 2100 and a reporter named Roger Shumway is flying to an interview with a notoriously reclusive 130-year-old man named Craig Stiles. Craig is also, and perhaps better known as the Time Traveler – and the name is not figurative. He claims to have traveled to the future when 30 years old, using a time machine of his own design. He traveled, his story goes, a hundred years into the future, where he saw many astounding things: importantly, he claims that in the future mankind has resolved most of the issues plaguing the day (which is given to be sometime in the roughly 1980s). He brought back proof, as well, in the form of records and videos of the inventions of the future. Then he destroyed his time machine (which he at one point calls, in passing, a Toynbee Convector, as it was inspired by “a historian named Toynbee”: “that fine historian who said any group, any race, any world that did not run to seize the future and shape it was doomed to dust away to the grave, in the past.”) to prevent anyone else from tampering with time.

At first, Craig explains, people looked askance at him, his story, and his “proof” of time travel. But on closer inspection, no one could disprove or otherwise explain the records, and slowly people began to accept his story. Indeed, inspired by the Time Traveler's optimistic tale of humanity's future attainment of utopia, the people began to rally, devoting themselves to realizing his vision of the future. At about this time, Craig himself retreated from the public eye, and has since lived largely as a hermit. But his legacy was already secure. His hopeful tidings gave back to humanity a faith in its future and the march of progress that it had long abandoned. The return of this faith proved a turning point; now, a century later, and the utopian world Craig had seen in his time travels has become a reality.



There's only one catch – it was all a lie. Craig admits to Roger that he'd completely made up the story about the time machine, and about humanity's utopian future. He did, he says, to give humanity hope, and a goal to work towards. A tactic that, after all, worked: his lie provided the impetus man needed to achieve a formerly unimaginable level of peace and prosperity. He explains to Roger: “You see the point, don’t you, son? Life has always been lying to ourselves! As boys, young men, old men. As girls, maidens, women, to gentle lie and prove the lie true. To weave dreams and put brains and ideas and flesh and the truly real beneath the dreams. Everything, finally, is a promise. What seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born. Here. Thus and so.” After calmly telling the truth about his actions, and passing off the evidence of his deception to Roger, Craig enters his fake time machine one last time, and dies there. But not only does Roger decide against exposing the truth of Craig's deception, and he actually burns the evidence Craig had left him on his way out of Craig's house. Stepping out in the world, he sees it anew, describing it as “what one man with one lie had created.”

Although Craig Stiles' “Toynbee Convector” is fake, its effects are overwhelmingly positive, and Roger Shumway doesn't hesitate to preserve Stiles' lie for the sake of the good it has done humanity. Whether there would have been any benefit to revealing the truth of Stiles' trickery to humanity at large is one of the main questions raised by the ending. Aside from its original format,  The Toynbee Convector was also filmed for TV as an episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater in 1990. The episode starred James Whitmore as Craig Stiles, and Michael Hurst as Roger Shumway.