Time-Travel Fiction

“This country and this century are in horrible shape because of the lack of socialism!”
   “You are absolutely right, Sir Conrad! What is socialism?”

Horace, the hardheaded, practical lout, the organizer, the schemer. Emma, the moaner, the keeper of our consciences. Timothy, the student. Enid, the thinker. And I, the loafer, the bad example, the one who makes the others feel virtuous.

This is totally rad. You’re like my big little brother.

McCoy: You realize that by giving him the formula you’re alterning the future.
Scotty: Why? How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?

The wind in the trees sounded like rain. Patricia shivered and drew the flannelette sheets and heavy satin quilt closer around her neck. She didn’t get to sleep for a long time.

Hi there. You’re not going to believe this, but I’m you of the year 2016, taking part in the first time-travel experiment ever.

Georgia: Very impressive, professor. It’s a small wonder you were considered one of the world’s foremost authorities.
The Professor: [incredulously] Were?

Oh, Randy, neighbors are always strange; those are the rules.

Relax! We’ll be back as soon as we go.

One city attempted to escape their onslaught by unravelling the secrets of time and travelling back in a desperate search for a safer age....they succeeded and time was their friend until the arrival yet again of their relentless enemy.

One of the things he had learned from the experiments in the institute was that reshaping fate was not always easy. Destiny struggled to reassert the pattern that was meant to be. Perhaps being molested and psychologically destroyed was such an immutable part of Laura’s fate that Stefan could not prevent it from happening sooner or later.

He was a clerk.

Make it so.

Most excellent!

Oh boy!

If you build it, they will come.

Dinosaurs large and small fill my junkyard workroom. This one given to me by a friend 30 years ago. These given as toys to my daughters, and when they didn’t play with them I simply took them back. So with dinosaurs coming into my life, I often wondered what would happen if I could go back into theirs. Dinosaurs, time machines, put them together and you have a
tale one billion years old.
—Bradbury’s introduction to “A Sound of Thunder”

The time-traveling is just too dangerous. Better that I devote myself to study the other great mystery of the universe—women!

You see, it’s like...it’s like we’re stuck. You know, like a...like a needle on a scratched record. It all starts at 12:01, and everything goes along fine until one o’clock and then Bam! the whole world snaps back to 12:01 again.

It means your future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has. Your future is whatever you make it.

Now remember boys, you must convince the old Alvin to stick with his musical career, so you can all be stars in the future!

Maybe we can go back and change history, King Dad. All we need is a little time travel.

It sounded nice and simple: allow Ben Franklin to invent the laser and let the technology casade. Grow enough so that in five hundred years we’d have something to get us out of this mess.

Come with me if you want to live.
—The T-800 to Sarah at the Pescadero State Hospital

My god! It could reach up and grab the moon.

This is my boom stick. It’s a 12-guage, double barreled Remington—S-mart’s top-of-the-line. You’ll find them in the Sporting Goods Department.

We rebels have a theory: If the assasination of the 90s never occurred...

Barry: Oh my God. It’s twelve o’clock.
Lisa: No! We’ve got to do something!
Barry: There’s no time. Quick, tell me what your favorite color is.

This is, I believe, a book for the adventurous in spirit.

That left the incest angle, and I asked him about that. He says that making it with your great-great-granddaughter from the twenty-first century is not much different from making it with your clothes-designer neighbor from across the hall.

I can’t go through with this. My theories of time and space were developed for peace, not for your evil schemes.

That plane got sucked back there. Landed in the heart of Nazi Germany.

Make sure nothing changes because of my visit or it will kill everyone in the future.

So: once upon a time when I was twenty-one years old I left my home and came on the NAFAL ship Terraces of Darranda to study at the Ekumenical Schools on Hain.

You brought us up here this morning to look at your—time machine?!

I can’t tell you anything. He’ll send somebody back to wipe out my grandparents. It’ll be like I’ve never existed. My mother, my father, my wife, my kids, my fucking cat.

They’re back there in the past, trampling around, changing things, aren’ t they? They don’t know it. They’re just living their happy lives, but changing small events. Mostly trivial, with no important effects. But every once in a while the effect of some small changed event moves on down to the&mdash

Knowledge, absolute and definite knowledge of the future as it affects yourself, is never any use. Whether it is bad or good, you cannot do anything that will change it. It simply takes away your power to decide.