Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Study 155 - The Men Who Murdered Mohammed (Patreon)

Published:
2026-01-22 21:19:03
Imported:
2026-01
Tags:

Downloads

Content

Travel along as we clock a new take on time travel with Alfred Bester's The Men Who Murdered Mohammed!

Special thanks to our reader, Casem AbuLughod!

Have a relisten to Fondly Fahrenheit - IF YOU DARE!

Comments

Grackles

I LOVED this. Just loved it! It surprised me and actually for a few moments jolted me out of this depression. I think what it means is that your anger and your self importance and your jealousy can screw you up and destroy your soul to the point where you don't even exist anymore except as a memory of who you were perhaps, but ultimately you can't destroy anyone elses soul. I don't know if this is true, but I'd like to think so. I hope so, anyway.

Ben Gilbert

My older brother had an paperback with this story. It was one of the first SF stories I ever read. Probably 55-60 years ago.

Science Doctor, PhD

Just wanted to post to, once again, thank this podcast. I've been listening since the first run of Lovecraft stuff, through the crazy forum problems with sex and pharmaceuticals, through the original $6.66 subscription. I say that all so folks know that I am both fascinating and amazing. About a six months or so ago I realized that I wanted to start reading the stories; I went back and made a list of the full run of things that I hadn't read and wanted to, and ended up with an insane list of poetry, stories, novellas, and novels. I had just finished my PhD (a Science Doctor), and was trying to get back into reading. Anyway, as of this week, I'm all caught up, so I figured I'd post because surely such a touching and heartfelt comment would make it into the comments show, and "sex and pharmaceuticals," I think, stands out as a contender for the comments show title! Also, I guess, to thank you folks for creating a really interesting, if asynchronous, community that has fueled my love for literature over a decade and a half at least. Thanks (I guess).

Science Doctor, PhD

After all the time travel, multiverse, etc., books, shows, and movies out there I honestly didn't think there was any new way to explore these concepts. Little did I know there was a story out there from 1958 that had already done it... I particularly enjoyed it when it paused midway through to shoot down all the theories I might have had about what "twist" was going to come down to explain everything. Also to the, I assume, nod to Bradbury's time-travel tale. Excellent read.

It's a Ghost.

I also thought Mohammed was a curious choice. My guess was maybe Bester chose Mohammed because choosing Jesus would have been too controversial for 1958.

Akeel1701

As the Tenth Doctor described it, "Time is a great ball of wibbly, wobbly, timey-wimey, .... stuff..."

Matt Shank

“This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.” Classic time travel story reaction.

Rick Hound

A wild prequel to Ghosts of the future

James Anthony

You know I have to wonder if the unknown University was perhaps the inspiration for the unseen university. The timing works out about right

Jon Maness

I first read this in college for a class on science fiction literature. I'm pretty sure it was right after reading "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" and something else incredibly dense. It reminds me of how Marvel Comics usually treats time travel as just creating an alternate reality or the episode of SeaLab 2021 where they go back in time so much that there ends up being dozens of Stormy and Dr. Quinns.

Mark Simmons

I really like your interpretation - it ties together the angry tone of the story with the time-travel mechanics. And I'm glad that it gave you some personal solace, too.

Mark Simmons

Coincidentally, our house just started rewatching the fairly obscure and now-unstreamable time-travel satire "Future Man." (My wife found an all-region Blu-ray set.) They go through a lot of different permutations of time-travel mechanics, ending with a pretty major reveal at the end of the second season. Anyways, early on, the hero angsts about the "Back to the Future" ending. If you changed your own past you'd have to bluff your way through every personal interaction for the rest of your life, since you wouldn't have the same memories as everyone else in the world - the life you remember no longer exists. In that sense, I guess any form of backward time travel would be a kind of self-destruction.

Newk

The story would be better if it was a time traveling werewolf ghost

Thunk

Taking 7 minutes to make a time machine only goes to show that you did it right.

MonsterTalk

I am such a fun ruiner. I tell my kids all the time* - never time travel if you love your kids. There is ZERO chance you'd ever get the same kids again. "One extra pause, one extra thrust - and you bozos would be entirely different people. Well - at least 50% different, presuming the egg is gonna be the same..." Point being, it is so unlikely that any of us are any of us at all - no time travel story makes sense where the traveler goes to the past and changes anything and then comes back to a basically "same" world. We're all extraordinarily unlikely and precariously dependent on absurd circumstances. The weather, the number of steps dad took, the incredibly preposterous idea that mom said yes - there are just too many risks! *yes, really.

Casey

Looking forward to your coverage of Interstellar.

Jim Cannon

The subjective timestream thing and your discussion of "what about the plants and animals" reminded me of the Cliff Simak story "The Street that Wasn't There," where reality is consenual and breaks down when there are not enough people left to agree about it. The mad professor in this story kind of pulls the trick in reverse: his personal reality no longer agrees with everyone else's, and so he is pushed out of the narrative.

Jim Cannon

Marvel's approach to time travel was worked out by Mark Gruenwald in the 80s - so much of what we take for granted in shared universes just "happens" along the way, rather than being baked in from the start.

Jim Cannon

Plus, dying was famously a big part of Jesus' claim to fame.

Drix

Story driven science fiction huh? I know a few of us were just shilling for it this month, but I'd be remiss not to mention Roadside Picnic, again. What if the remnants of an alien civilization could grant you any wish?

Richard Horsman

Great story, but the word “co-ed” from someone from Bester’s generation always tickles me. And takes me out a little. Suddenly I’m seeing Red Skelton chasing after a “liberated woman” half his age. It’s the slightly less grimy version of stories from the 70s that use “screw” as a sexual verb: you can really smell the polyester and chest hair on those.

Robert Smith

I may be over-simplifying - I'm a simple man (I'd be the sheriff in the excellent and much-missed "Eureka", but much less competent). That said... isn't "memory" as mentioned by the narrator the key here? Basically, the time machine gives our psychotic protagonist the ability to "remember" everything that has ever happened, and then to selectively change those memories - but all he is changing is how he remembers the world, not the reality of the world itself. By doing so, he gradually divorces his own physical form from reality. If we want to look at it from the "real" world, he goes home, sees his wife kissing a guy, leaves without saying anything, goes to his lab, "travels through time" goes home with new memories, doesn't disturb his wife, repeats, disappears. From his wife's perspective, he left for work and never came home - she couldn't see his ghost, after all. He never once impacted anything but his own memory. In other words, the time travel bit seems complicated, but is actually very simple. Just don't ask me to try to explain why this all made him become a time ghost - that bit is madder than a bucket of frogs. Chad, enjoy Interstellar - I'm finally showing it to my daughter for the first time tonight. I look forward to your thoughts!

Falconhoof

I'm sure they appreciate being made to picture their own conception and how many thrusts were involved

Pete Williams

I wonder if Terry Pratchett read this? What made me think of it is the main university in the discworld is the Unseen University occasionally shortened to the UU. He also affectionately skewered the genre he worked in.

Alex Beal

Spoilers for the movie “About Time”, but that is the only time travel media I can think of that I’ve seen that addressed in. A surprisingly good time travel movie that was presented to me as a romantic drama. Plus it’s got Bill Nighy in it.

Alex Beal

For a good part of the story I honestly expected the punchline to be that the main character was such an asshole that in all multiverses or timestreams his wife had an affair no matter what.

Jb Lee

When I saw AVENGERS: ENDGAME and Smart Hulk started trying to explain Marvel Time Travel -- " Changing the past doesn't change the future. If you travel to the past, that past becomes your future. And your former present becomes the past. Which can't now be changed by your new future..." I IMMEDIATELY knew that someone somewhere in the writers' room had read THE MEN WHO MURDERED MOHAMMED. His utterly nonsense explanation is only a tiny degree from what's revealed here. And you travel into the future every moment of your life -- until you come to the end of the strand, I guess. In other news: I'll bet Harlan Ellison would have been a bagger at Shop A Minit if he wasn't PERPETUALLY FURIOUS about something. Well, have fun with INTERSTELLAR, which has the best Philip Glass score that Philip Glass never wrote --- I've got some spaghetti sauce on to boil, so toodles -- or noodles, as it were!

John Rowe

I feel like Roadside Picnic has slowly become one of the most important Sci Fi novels. Thinking about it, it is almost an expansion on "The Colour Out of Space."

Drix

I think the comparison to The Colour Out of Space is dead on.

Science Doctor, PhD

I wonder-sume that part of the reason that science fiction, as a genre, is more focused on revising itself, changing itself, etc., IS the intersection with science-fact and how (most folks) approach that. Science fiction attempts to define itself by having some level of verisimilitude with the real world; that's why Dr. Frankenstein didn't just use an eldritch tome to resurrect the monster, and as science changes, the genre changes (excluding things like throwbacks, parodies, etc.). Other genres certainly change and grow too, you have weird fiction, new weird, etc., but I think in most cases they are growing in the normal way genres do, through invention and iteration, playing on the existing engre conventions (which sci fi also does of course) but usually not trying to integrate any real world elements into play, beyond perhaps thinking about what people are afraid of (for exapmle, nuclear war, disease, etc.). I wonder if romance has a similar evolution as science fiction, given how connected it must be to social norms. It's not a genre my wife or I are into enough to know its history, but our relationships with other people is one of those things people can be very introspective about, and romance is often intended to be, at some level, based in reality. But now I'm going in circles. Ultimately, I just don't want to do work today. My very normal university and research are much less interesting (though, helpfully, also much less violent) than this story's..

Stacey Cahan

Men would rather build a time machine and time travel themselves into non-existence than go to therapy

Science Doctor, PhD

You have one convert at least. I've heard it mentioned many times and somehow have not read it despite reading a lot of these kinds of stories. Got a copy and it's on my list :)

Drix

Glad to hear it! I'm a bit keen on a reread myself so I'll probably get cracking on that in the coming weeks

Runninghead

My college also- I may have to kick off a discussion on the relative merits of various genres tomorrow just to start a fight. 🙂 Perceptive post, BTW- Steve Neale would approve, I'm sure. 👍👍

Science Doctor, PhD

"Good morning class! Today we are going to reflect upon, and then discuss, how access to time travel and a handgun would influence our perception of nursing leadership."

lazyelvis

I had this episode on in the background while working on a story for my own podcast called “Strabismus” by Stefan Grabiński when that word - ‘strabismus’ - popped up in “The Man Who Murdered Mohammed.” I hadn’t heard of the word ‘strabismus’ (the condition of being cross-eyed) before I started reading Grabiński, so, honoring the dictates of cosmic coincidence, I downloaded the Bester story from the Internet Archive to read the full story. Really glad that I did. Almost every sentence is comedy gold tinged with a creeping sense of unease. I’ve been a fan of Bester ever since reading “The Stars My Destination” (aka “Tiger! Tiger!”) back in ‘82. Not sure if you’ve covered him in the past but if not, you might want to check out Stefan Grabiński. Often called “ The Polish Poe” or “The Polish Lovecraft” he has his own unique writing style. One big difference between Grabiński and either of those two authors is that sex often figures prominently in his stories, both as a way to advance the plot and often as part of the horror element. There’s an anthology of his short stories with an excellent translation by Miroslaw Lipinski on Amazon called “ The Dark Domain.”

Exanimus

Was his wife with another man BECAUSE the guy wrote himself out of existence?

Aaron La Vene

He still exists in her timeline. A him that didn’t time travel. In her timeline, he still exists and was likely very angry

Ben A

Yay! I'm glad that you all followed up on my recommendation (among other listeners) to read this story. And I agree with you that Bester wrote this in part to respond to the contrivances of time travel fiction and the logical silliness of bootstrap paradoxes. I've always read it as satire. If you get around to it, I still also recommend Time is the Traitor, especially since you all enjoyed Fondly Fahrenheit.

Our old pal Brendan Gardiner

I love the non-explanation of how time travel was worked out. It’s the least important part of the story. Reminds me of a very neat piece of plot sidestepping that Jim Jarmusch did in his 1986 movie Down by Law. His three characters spend the first act barely getting along in a prison cell and then bust out and we see them trying to navigate those same relationships in the wild and forbidding environment of a swamp. He gets us there by skipping from an interior shot of normal prison existence to a nighttime exterior scene at the edge of the swamp with the prison in the background, alarms blaring. The Italian immigrant character played by Roberto Benigni says to the others with amazement: “We are escay-ped, just like in American movie!”

Jason Paul

Casem's reading is stellar. those other two guys are okay or whatever but bring Casem back in the future! good episode all around tho, interesting story & made for good discussion.

Anne Ominous

Would also rather murder everyone unrelated to the plot

Anne Ominous

I really liked the unorthodox take on time travel: warts and all. Even moreso after hearing your discussion. Most of the time travel stories I consume have that objectivity element baked in. Besters' satire turns it on its ear. Thanks again for all the enlightenment (past and future). All 3 thumbs up for Interstellar.