Time-Travel Fiction

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.

Time travel should not be possible in a rational universe.

This is the problem with time. I’m hungry now, but snack time is later. Why can’t later be now?

What if, by some magic, you found the power to really change things? People, events, maybe even your life. Would you even know where to start? Maybe you can’t know. Until it happens.

Richie, look at the date! June 1896!

If something has happened, it will happen.

Do you think that, if someone had a mind to do it—if someone really wanted to and had the connections—that someone back in 1982 to 1984 could have forced Andropov from office—could have replaced him with someone not so dictatorial?

Think of nonlinear time as a pie. We can eat the pieces in any order, but you can’t eat the same slice twice. And baby, I’ve eaten a lot of pie.

You want to classify prime numbers now?

Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke.

I looked at the copy of “Cosmic Corkscrew” I held in my hand, and I looked at the Chronobox.

I don’t mean time travel at all. Time travel is impossible. Everyone knows that.

We think we have a way to record the quantum state of a present-day brain onto a brain somewhere in the past in such a way that the patterns in the receiving brain will duplicate those in the source brain, and that as a result the receiving brain will acquire the memories of the source brain.

It’s called a temporal causality loop. The universe created me, so that I could create it, so it could create me, and so on.
—Stewie in “The Big Bang Theory”

When Smedley Faversham traveled back in time to Munich in 1919, the first thing he saw was a large sign reading “THIS WAY TO KILL HITLER.”

If someone built a time machine, they’d be famous for all time. A magnet for every time traveling historian, media-type, tourist—or just “fans” with no lives of their own, coming back to bask in their idol’s luminous prescence.

Mysterious thing, time. Powerful ... and when meddled with, dangerous.
—Professor Dumbledore

And that is why our time machines are not permitted to travel back farther than the middle of the twentieth century.

The shaman sent for me. He brought me here to help you.

I was stupid. I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know how to take care of her.

Larado: Your orders, sir? [pause] Sir, your orders?
Commander Taggart: Activate the Omega 13. [To be continued...]