Viewpoint

"Viewpoint" by Randall Garrett is a science fiction short story written in the early 1960s. The narrative explores themes of time travel and memory, focusing on the character Richard Broom, who finds himself transported to an unfamiliar future. The story delves into his attempts to understand his surroundings and the nature of his journey through time. In "Viewpoint," Richard Broom awakens in a strange and advanced world, disoriented and lacking complete memory of how he arrived. As Broom investigates his surroundings, he experiences a vivid cityscape filled with unfamiliar architecture and technology. The internal struggle of reconciling his current reality with fragmented memories intensifies as he grapples with fear and the potential reason for his presence in this time. Ultimately, Broom realizes he must confront his past to return home, leading to a poignant conclusion about the ties that bind us to our identities. Through his interactions with another prisoner, Contarini, the story offers a philosophical exploration of fear, memory, and the human experience across the continuum of time. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Gordon Randall Phillip David Garrett was an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was a contributor to Astounding and other science fiction magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. He instructed Robert Silverberg in the techniques of selling large quantities of action-adventure science fiction, and collaborated with him on two novels about men from Earth disrupting a peaceful agrarian civilization on an alien planet.