Roman Holiday

Read/Watch 'em In Order #91

Our journey through the August 1939 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories now takes us back in time to ancient Rome. "Roman Holiday," by Kelvin Kent, is perhaps my favorite story so far in this issue.

The idea is to send both a college professor and a carnival barker back in time to imperial Rome. Which of them would prosper? Would the academic knowledge of the professor be more useful than the practical street-smarts of the barker.

The barker is our protagonist. Peter Manx is an average guy in most ways, but was picked for this experiment because he learned Latin from his high school teacher mother. His personal motivation for agreeing to time travel is the promise of one hundred dollars.

The time travel method projects the traveler's mind into the random body of a person in ancient Rome. Manx ends up in the body of a sneak thief about to get beaten up by a soldier, but a little ju-jitsu gets him out of that. With the few coins in his pocket, a knife and a few marbles he bought off some kids, he makes a primitive pinball machine and soon has most of Rome clamoring to give him money for a chance to play.

By the way, kids did play marbles in Rome. I looked it up because I suspected the writer has slipped in an anachronism, but I was wrong.

Manx is quite a success for a time, buying interest in a tavern has he expands the pinball operation and even getting himself elected magistrate. But street-smarts fail him when he mis-gauges the attitude of the common Roman citizen. He and the professor end up in the arena, facing hungry lions. But Manx has one more trick up his sleeve that just might get them out of there alive.


"Roman Holiday" is fun and funny, written in a straightforward prose with real wit and a reasonable understanding of human nature. It's rare to find a funny science fiction story that doesn't parody science fiction tropes & cliches directly, but draws the humor out of the situation and characters.

It wasn't until I got to this point in writing my post that I realized I hadn't looked up the author yet to learn a little more about him. Well, Kelvin Kent is a pen name used by Henry Kuttner and Albert K. Barnes. They co-wrote this one, then used the pen name for 11 more stories about Peter Manx running time traveling errands, working together again on one story and dividing the remaining 10 stories between them as solo efforts.

One of the joys of studying the pulp magazines is that it's pretty much impossible to know about every story and you are always stumbling on something fun to read that you previously had no idea existed. The Peter Manx stories were all published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, which are available online. So when I finish the stories in this issue, I may spin the "In Order" series off to look at the rest of Peter's adventures.

In the meantime, this particular issue is available HERE.