If I may be allowed a slight hijack: how are the other works of C.L. Moore? Your description makes me interested in not only reading Vintage Season but possibly checking out her other works as well.
Her ”Mimsy were the Borogives” is another classicby her and fits the theme of this thread, as it’s about toys sent back from the future to the preeen.
She and Kittner wrote “The Twonky,” which is also about an object from the future sent to the present.
Cyril Kornbluth has “The Little Black Bag,” set in the same universe as his “The Marching Morons,” which Idiocracy ripped off shamelessly.
“When the Bough Breaks” by Kurtner and Moore also features time travelers from the future bothering present day (1950s) folks. See also The Nostalgianauts by S. N. Dyer
Only a short story, but Compounded Interest by Mack Reynolds is told entirely from the perspective of people encountering a time traveler repeatedly over centuries. He invests a small amount of money, and gives apparently precognitive advice on how to make it grow, then shows up every century to give more advice. Eventually future generations figure out he’s a time traveler, especially as his once-outlandish clothing becomes more recognizable as modern men’s wear.
Dan Simmons’s Hyperian Cantos features various sorts of time travel, from both the point of view of the traveler and of the non-traveler. One key storyline is that of a soldier who has a series of affairs with a mystery women, who later turns out not only to be an older version of another character from the book, but also travelling backwards in time relative to him, so that his first encounter with the older her, is her last encounter with him, and vice versa.
To maybe take that a step further: The Paradox Men is a novel about a guy who — like other guys in the story — is trying to find out what happened to the occupant or occupants of what may or may not have been a timeship that crashed here years ago.
Since he’s an amnesiac, he may or may not be a survivor of said crash — he doesn’t know if he’s from the future, he doesn’t know if anyone is from the future — and so his point of view, like that of various other people in the story, is Hey Look Man I’m Real Sorry But Well I Only Ever Recall Living In This Here Era Where That Ship Arrived Is All.
It’s “Kuttner”. And while C L Moore was a wonderful writer and notable for being one of the first women writing in the sci-fi and fantasy genre, virtually all of her work from her marriage to Henry Kuttner in 1940 to his untimely death in 1958 was a collaboration with him, sometimes credited to the two, but more often published under a variety of pseudonyms, and I wish people would stop crediting either one of them as the sole authors – they were a wonderful writing team. Indeed, I don’t think Moore wrote anything particularly notable after Kuttner’s death.
In response to someone’s query, there’s no particular book or collection I can recommend. I have a wonderful collection of their stories on my Kindle, but it’s something I hacked together from many different sources and turned into a KIndle ebook for my own use. All I can say is that two of their most fantastic stories are Vintage Season and Mimsy Were the Borogoves, but pretty much anything this pair wrote between 1940 and 1958 would be a great read.
Thanks. My misspelling was just a typo
Moore stopped writing after she remarried. It’s believed her second husband forbid it. Her family had always discouraged it; it was Kittner (no typo this time) who encouraged her.
BTW, I am responsible for Kuttner’s next to last published story, a bit of juvenalia, for Haffner Press. I wrote a blog post on Kuttner and someone contacted me about it. I put him in contact with Haffner Press.
never mind