Time-Travel Fiction

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.

A small piece of paper fell out of the book and onto the table. Adele picked it up and examined it. It bore one line: “http://www.general-slocum.com.” She had no idea what it meant; “http” was clearly not a word, although she presumed she knew what the “general-slocum” part referred to.

We don’t know how it works. Or even what its energy source is. When the field is on we’ve detected minor fluctuations in certain astronomical objects.

The future is not immutable—you can print that!

History tells us this is where the path to oblivion began.

And then there are the days when she tells me that we’ve traveled through time, that we have come from the future and are trapped here. She tells me that she was a temporal scientist, that I was her project. That I am modified and enhanced for survival, for time travel, for perfection. Those are the bad days.

The odd truth of working as a temporal interventionist is that some there-and-thens are better than others.

There were eight good prospects back there, and I’d have had them all if this bitch hadn’t shown up.

Did you ever wish you could keep doing the same thing over and over again?

You wouldn’t want to cause any of those nasty paradoxes, would you?

Roxanne smiled awkwardly, and looked over Julien’s shoulder at the open stall. It looked unremarkable now, drab green-painted metal walls and a white porcelain toilet. Hardly the thing you’d expect from some sort of door in time. At least proper English children in books got to travel through wardrobes and garden holes, not through unhygenic high school bathrooms.

What? The British Empire started coming apart in the 1920s?

“We’ve done it,” he said. “Three times with a mouse and five times with a monkey. The university has approved my request for a manned test run. We’re going into the future!

Ever wonder how three kids from Brooklyn got their hands on a time-traveling book?

Alice’s was not the first birth I witnessed, nor even the most unusual. The first time I saw Alice’s birth, I bypassed the event, skimming ahead to the advent of the automobile. Gears fascinated me more. But on reflection, something drew me back to Alice in the garden, newborn on the rain-wet grass. The world seemed to move beneath her.

Apparently I inherited Mama’s looks and Papa’s brains. Again and again in my life I’ve gotten the best of a bad bargain.

So you figured that if you kept Franklin’s biological mother and father from meeting, he would never have been born, your parents’ marriage would have remained happy, and your life would have remained wonderful.

A butterfly caused all this?

A pack of chips was constantly pursuing and reuniting with the giant, but moonlight glinted off of one largish piece that seemed in danger of being left behind, lodged in a groove between cobblestones.
   “Wait,” Danny called out softly and although the creature was obviously too far off to hear, and lacked ears besides, it immediately paused long enough for the chip to free itself and join the others.

If I, today, had finished constructing a device, in this room, which allowed you to travel even a day into the past, and you used it to travel into the past to kill or otherwise distract me from completing the device, how would you have been able to travel in the first place into the past, with no device then constructed?

Sayid: Radio waves at this frequency bounce off the ionosphere. They can travel thousands of miles. It could be coming from anywhere.

Hurley: Or any time...

“Mammoth ivory,” the old man said, as if it was a proposition put up for debate. “I have hunt mammoth.”

1. As a boy, Kip Wolverton’s best friend is crushed in a tragic accident in a bell tower.
2. Then, because Kip is too shy to ever approach the bell-ringer of his dreams, the girl goes and marries his other best friend, so Kip goes off to America to drown his sorrows and become an expert physicist studying time.
3. Finally, 25 years later, Kip returns to England to do time experiments in bell towers where he finds girl grown and unhappily married. [Sep 2012]
   
   

“Research money is difficult to come by these days,” said Neville. “There is a lot of good science lanuishing because more meretricious projects get the funds.”

And then, when you came to, you’d gone back a few minutes in time.

Or, I can change things for the better...ooh, there’s a whole side of my family that my dad doesn’t doesn't know about. I have the chance to change that, the chance to reverse the last twenty years and redo everything without the lies, the secrets, the being grounded every other week.

Save the cheerleader, save the world.

There’s this entire other version of my life without you. I went through this whole year of my life believing you were dead.

Thou shalt UN-kill, whenever possible.

Danny: Whatever you did, you did it already. Whether you send this note or you don’t, it doesn’t matter. You cannot change the past. It’s physically impossible.
Agent Carlin: What if there’s more than physics?

Getting Scorsese off drugs means he never did all the cocaine that fueled him to make Taxi Driver, which means he never cast Jodie Foster, which means John Hinkley never obsessed over her, and he never tried to impress her by shooting President Reagan, which means Reagan was never empowered by surviving an assassination attempt—he must have lost to Mondale in ’84. Bingo! Forty-seven days into his presidency, Mondale handed complete control of the U.S. over to the Soviet Union.
—from “The Best Christmas Story Never Told”

Miss, oh Miss!! There’s a dinosaur on the playground.

They’ve been sending other Mimzies to the past to look for it, but none of them have come back.

Remember, I’ve got a time machine. You mess up again, and I’ll just keep coming back ’til you get it right.

Jason: Is this a dream?
Lu Yan: No, where you come from is the dream, through the gate of no gate.

A planetarium on the Moon. It’s like a zoo in the jungle, or building a swimming pool under water. What’s the point?

From the future? A wino from the future?!

Unfortunately, while I was becoming more adept at making the business decisions that repeatedly benefited my shareholders, I had also been informed by my mentors and closest friends that the proliferating global acts of terrorism—along with the economic catastrophe which had ended only a few years earlier—had been engineered by a power-hungry madman whose sole objective was to become a diety, thereby ruling the entirety of space and time.

Has viajado en el tiempo.

Don’t ask me to explain time travel paradoexes. All I do is fix the time gates when something goes wrong. Paradoxes are argued over at a much higher pay grade than mine.

Haven’t you noobs read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler?!

The steath-suited TI leveled a weapon, then droped as a stun charge hit. Moments later the other TI weo’d fired the stun charge fell, then two more TIs appeared and took out whoever had nailed the second TI. But then the stealth-suited TI reappeared, having recovered somewhen in the future and jumped back to try to finish the job.

I just went back in time to save Sophia’s girls, so I should be able to save my girls! I concentrated with all my might on waves that went back in time, and then I felt a Herculean wrench.

“I’m talking time travel,” William went on. “You could go back in time and meet Jesus. Assuming he existed.”

Kinda like I did live my life, but now I gotta live it all over again.

We did not know the man standing before us, but he spoke with much excitement and passion. Over time, we came to know him as the Time Traveler.