Time-Travel Fiction

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...]

If the Time Traveller sold his wares directly from the maker, modern tests would show that they are only a few years old. They are stored in an underground cavern somewhere in the Pliocene to rack up the appropriate number of centuries, so that tests for thermoluminescence and cosmic ray tracks give the right answer.

It’s September 29, 2239.

Tomorrow’s Lotto drawing is for forty-five million dollars. The winning numbers will be 17, 19, 30, 32, 42, and 51.

I’m not sure. A device to excite time quanta, I think. Into the past, of course.

Wanted: Time traveller to please give me a ride in a time machine. Please meet me at 342 E. Snow Way, New York, NY, at noon, July 1, 2000.

So, I’m forty, I’m not married, I don’t fly jets, and I don’t have a dog? I grow up to be a loser.

Tell me, how many copies do you think a book would sell if it proved your belief that Shakespeare was a fraud?

Wait a second, let’s recap. Last night, we lost my car, we accepted stolen money from a transsexual stripper, and now some space nerds want us to find something we can’t pronounce. I hate to say it, Chester, but maybe we need to cut back on the shibbying.

If I can’t rule the present, then I’ll just rule the paaaaaast!

Not only are you a person rescued from a tragic death, but your removal is supremely unlikely to trigger any change in the time-stream, since your body was lost: presumed frozen solid, entombed in a glacier for eons ...

Then a vice clamped her upper arm. A surge. A tremendous force, and she was clear of the stream. Air! There was air to breathe, but all she could do was cough. She was being carried. Her cheek rested on skin. Hough arms wrapped her close until they were on the bank. Gently, her rescuer put her down. Rock warmed her back; her hands lay flat in the heat, her head dropped onto the warmth. Against the sky stood a figure stragely shaped. Weena’s vision swirled—she could barely focus—but before she passed out, she saw in wonder, he was a giant.

You could tell from the petulant arch on his furrowed brow that he was not in route to a good deed.
—narrator

Come with me if you want to live.
—John Connor to Kyle Reese in T2: The Future War

Imagine that I had the technology with which to visit my grandfather in his youth. Once there, what is to stop me from killing him before he’d had the opportunity to reproduce? But if I did succeed, who was it who had travelled backward...

In this temple as in the hearts of the apes for whom he saved the planet the memory of General Thade is enshrined forever 

Break the causal chain.

Old T’Pol: There’s a human expression: Follow your heart.
Young T’Pol: What if my heart doesn’t know what it wants?
Old T’Pol: It will, in time, it will.

It had seemed such an easy thing to do. Beguile hungry children with food, ship their dirty young butts off to colonial America and return to the twenty-third century to become the first researcher ever to use time travel for humanitarian purposes.

Via, concursus, tempus, spatium, audi me ut imperio. Screw it! Mighty forces, I suck at Latin, okay? But that’s not the issue. I’m the one in charge, and I’m telling you open that portal, now!
—Willow in “Get It Done”

When it became clear that time travel was even a remote possibility, the government bought a lot of scientists. Those who didn’t play got discredited.

How can he tell you what you’ll do, like some kind of robot executing a program? You’re a human being with free will, for heaven’s sake. What happens if you plumb decide you’re not going to do it?

A marvelous tool for research has been abused and twisted to a vicious purpose.

At top speeds, Trans-Galactic flight regressed a human body, so for quick T-G jumps to the outer limits of the Earth Protection League borders, they had to use old people to start.

This is a repair I think you must make. It is irresponsible to leave something broken when it can be fixed—

The goal of this device is nothing less than complete knowledge, knowledge of everything that ever has been, that ever will be, that ever could be.

Time even passes differently at the top of a high building than at its base.

Autographed copies of Minus Men #121? Practically nonexistent in 2059, at least until we got home with some.

Live your life as if you were already living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.
— Danny’s mother (possibly quoting Victor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning).

In June’s reality her grandfather was an inventor, too, but his parents settled in New York, where the boys grew up in the tenements not far from where the Marx Brothers were born.

Maybe the dead did use mist as a means of getting around—so many movies had already figured that one out ... and maybe they did travel in time.

You could steal all the cells you wanted to use in cloning, or some sperm and ova. Anything, provided that the interaction changed nothing about their time-stream. We could even pull some of the bodies forward.

Your Majesty, starting at small forward from Englewood High, two-time all-county conference player of the year, the messenger from Normandie—Jamal “Skyyyyyy” Walker!

Time, it has been proposed, is the fourth dimension. And yet, for mortal man, time has no dimension at all. We are like horses with blinders, seeing only what lies before us, forever guessing the future and fabricating the past.

What we should do is gather up a group of people, and train them, and then travel back in time and conquer the Roman Empire.

As I said, I’m calling you from the twenty-fifth century. I am also a physicist. In fact, I’m the leader of a research group that’s studying space-time contortion phenomena. Recently, we discovered a way to make phone calls into the past.

Next time be a more responsible time traveler.
—Meghan to Felicity

The time traveler—for so I must call him—emerged from his laboratory with a small wooden box cradled in his hands.

Powers: Where’s Goldmember?!
Dr. Evil: Not where, Mr. Powers—when!

Could I? Do I have kids, Henry? In 2006 do I have a husband and a house in Winnetka and 2.5 kids?

You keep saying I’m Emma. But Emma’s long gone. You say that you’ve replicated Emma from all those records or something.

One man with a sunstroker can be overwhelmed by savages equipped with nothing more than neutron bombs—if there are enough of them, and they don’t mind dying!

I tried not to think about what was at stake. The pressure was bad enough without telling her this was for all the marbles: if we lost this Indy 500, she was gone. Sayonara muchacha. Hasta la bye-bye, and good night, Babs. That’s the way it is when you race the B’arada. They put up a piece of tech, you put up a piece of tech. Winner takes all, Indy 500 style.

Wally didn’t need to see the pyramids getting built, or sail with Columbus, or even watch JFK’s assassination. What Wally wanted to do, more than anything, was get to work on time.

Oh, the Bible is true, only it may not always be factual.

Get in! Do you wanna live?! Come on!
—John Connor to Kate Brewster while fleeing the T-X

Have a little faith in your sister.

Aaron snorted. “I remember that conversation from over six months ago.”
    Gabe shook his head. “It happened this morning.”

The bizarre beast that rounded the bend in the road made Maker’s mouth drop in surprise. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, a top-heavy, lopsided creature having four legs, a narrow head atop a long neck, and a huge shiny lump on its back.

Hey man, I’d think twice about what you’re doing. You could wake up a lot more fucked up than you are now.

Heading down for the NT site. More later.

They want to be heroes. They think war brings glory and makes them men. I think they’re crazy. Our society up then thinks they’re crazier than your society thinks you are.

Gentlemen, this person tells me that in many years, the Almighty will allow men to journey through time. He says that he has come from the far future with a message for me.