Time-Travel Fiction

Exactly. The Temporal Embassy. How can science live and breathe with such a modifier? It’s a thousand times worse than any of these ancient repressions like the Inquisition, military control, or university trusteeship. You can’t do this—it will be done first a century later; you can’t do that—the sociological impact of such an invention upon your period will be too great for its present capacity; you should do this—nothing may come of it now, but somebody in an allied field a flock of years from now will be able to integrate your errors into a useful theory.

My colleagues, clever as they are, would never dream of the angle I’ll use to get rid of the Fly! I’ll destroy him with beauty!
—the evil Dovi in Adventures of the Fly #22 while bringing

Be just vhat you is, not vhat you is not. Folks vhat do zis are ze happiest lot.

I should like to remind you that all of you who witnessed this demonstration are five minutes younger than you were when we started.

I’ll smash the first guy who says it’s all Greek to him.

And now I shall send you back...hundreds of years into the past! You will have forty-eight hours to bring me Blackbeard’s treasure chest! Do not fail!
—Dr. Doom in Fantastic Four #5

Two scientists are hurled helpless into the lost world of time!
—from the cover of The Time Tunnel 1.

I can visit nine different lives. Anywhere, any time, any country, any century.

The world from which he had come, or any other world for that matter, could dissipate into its component elements at any instant, or could have come into being at any previous instant, complete with everybody’s memories!

Hard to remember. Some time soon now, I think.
—The Doctor answering a police officer’s query as to his date of birth

Yes,” he said to Poul, “you do strike me as very, very faintly introve—no offense meant, sir, I mean, it’s legal to be introved.

Civil War...wonder how it’s going to turn out?

Q. How does it feel to go back a hundred—

The mightiest man battles reds from today, and monsters from yesterday!
—from Blue Beetle #2, Sep 1964

This evening’s tale begins with a nightmare-like experience, but that is only a prelude to the terrifying events which follow. And now, speaking of terrifying events...

Keep an eye out for them. Get as many rocks as you can.

This is all wrong! If I dare change their stone age way of life, it may affect the whole future of their race.

Dropping the letter, she held her head in her hands, closing her eyes as in the curved bone of her skull she heard all her possible courses of action jar together, future lifelines that annihilated each other.

Mike was a recent but ardent science-fiction fan. “I want to change it, Dr. Stuart,” he said earnestly. “I want to go back to four weeks ago and take away Tony’s Flexy.” He meant it, of course.

We’re at the marketplace, master. Oh, and there is Ali, the man who hit me.
—from “My Hero?”

As the first period of math class began, Mr. Komatsu—the fat math teacher—wrote down an equation on the board, and Kazuko began to frown. It was the very same problem they’d solved just the day before. But more than that, Mr. Komatsu had written the problem on the board at exactly the same time before, and Kazuko had been called to the front of the class, where she’d struggled for some time over the solution.

He could be living in yesterday or next week or a million years from now.

It’s about time, it’s about space, about two men in the strangest place.

Peace and long life.

Trapped in the Past!
—from the cover of NoMan #1

Loana: [pointing to self] Loana

The concept of a warp in the fabric of space, a break that could permit an object—or a group of Marco Polos if you please—to enter and go voyaging through space’s unlimited fourth dimension: time.

Dr. Gordon: And since space-time is a continuum, the present is only a point moving along that continuum.
Mr. Stanton: When you put it like that, doctor, even I can understand it.

Suppose, he thought fretfully, some bureaucrat in Class Seven or Nine or thereabouts had gone ahead on his own authority, trying to win a quick uptwitch by dynamic action, and had rounded up a few known hoppers in advance of their departure. Thereby completely snarling the fabric of the time-line and irrevocably altering the past.

“Jim,” McCoy said raggedly. “You deliberately stopped me ... Did you hear me? Do you know what you just did?”
   Kirk could not reply. Spock took his arm gently. “He knows,” he said. “Soon you will know, too. And what was ... now is again.”
—The City on the Edge of Forever

Danger Will Robinson, danger!

Dragons can go between times as well as places. They go as easily to a when as to a where.

Suppose we had a working time device. Would we be able to get back aboard Seaview before the explosion, find out what caused it, and prevent it from happening?
—Admiral Nelson to Mr. Pem in “No Way Back”

I’m afraid you must forgive me, miss. If we have met before, I’m sorry to say that I don’t remember it.
—Barnibus to Victoria Winters when she unexpectedly travels to 1795 for the first time

You mean there were two Pete Maxwells?

Maybe he should call Time Central? No, they were duty bound to give him no help at all. They’d just say that at some point ten years in the future he had gone to them with a request to be backtracked to the present—and that before making the hop his mind had been run through that clear/reset wringer of theirs.

No robot may harm a human, or allow a human to come to harm...
— from the splash page of Magnus #1—by the 60s, Asimov’s first law had become so ingrained that the good doctor was not cited as the source of the law

But don’t you see: If we never take that flight out, there would have never been a crash, and the others would have never been stranded on this planet.
—from “Wild Country”