Another (short) story I loved was about one of those amateur time travelers. What I always remember is two things: (1) what bothered him was that high rise buildings were all fractions of a degree off of vertical. (That was the introductory joke). (2) The government agency fixing up his damage was using simulacrums to replace people who had seen to much: they were desperately trying to get ahead of the story because they didn’t want the simulacrum replacement scheme to wind up “like California”.
(Pretty good in the original. It’s all in the timing, right?)
Perhaps the most famous example of a time traveler finding out why he can’t change the time line is the episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” in Star Trek on April 6, 1967.
So no guesses at the title/author of this one which featured time travel as diving into what seems like a literal stream, needing to surface, dive, and swim in the waters of time?
Isaac Asimov story, person has a time machine. The characters come out, thinking they are in some far future, and they ask a local what year it is. The local says in German the current year, with the narrator offering that “and adding ‘it’s been that way all year’ was not any funnier in German.”
It seems they didn’t time travel, just traveled.
I’m sure it is in one of my many many Asimov collections.
The Brooklyn Project is an amusing short story by Philip Klass writing as William Tenn about a project to send a camera into the past to photograph ancient times. There is discussion about the possible danger of the mere existence of the camera causing changes to the timeline, but the project leaders dismiss such fears as unwarranted. The camera makes its first trip into the past, then returns to the present, where subtle changes to the present are described to the reader but naturally are unnoticed by the characters, since from their point of view that is how the world has always been. More trips are taken, each one producing larger and larger changes to the present, all unnoticeable by the characters. By the end of the story, the human characters are now purple amoeba-like creatures, one of whom cries triumphantly, “See, nothing has changed!”
There was a short story where a inventor bemoans that his time machine project is a failure: it will only go back in time a fixed interval, which at the time of the story goes back to the middle of the Great Depression. The inventor’s pragmatic wife obtains old currency and goes back to buy the household groceries at Great Depression prices.
This reminds me (but isn’t the same novel as) of the Philip Jose Farmer novel The Gate of Time (also published as Two Hawks from Earth) in which the hero finds himself in a alternate time line in which North and South America don’t exist (for some weird reason). He and a secondary character who also comes from a time line in which North and South America do exist. At the end of the novel, the two characters talk about their time lines, and they discover that Hitler never became Führer in one of their time lines.
That makes sense. I was thinking of “Thiotimoline to the Stars” (another Asimov story) in which a space ship returns to Earth, and due to a misunderstanding, one of the passengers thinks that they’ve traveled several hundred years into the past
Related to that is a bit mentioned in Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky. The inventor of the portals thought he had a time machine, and thought he was emerging in the Pleistocene era, when it was actually just a park in the Amazon basin.
There aren’t that many Asimovs issues in the late 1970s, since the magazine started in the late 70s (and was initially quarterly). Any of the titles here look familiar?
The search ran for so long that it became reflexive for me to take an immediate interest whenever I saw any mention of a time travel story. I’ve had to try to recalibrate now to the new level of how much am I inherently interested in time travel stories?
I have a terrible memory for titles and authors of things I read before I became well versed in the genre. Or reading literature of any type for that matter. I remember the plot of the story quite well, I remember where and when I was, I remember I’d just been gifted some relatively recent back issues of Asimov’s, starting my decent into madness. I clicked through all these issues in the likely date range, and no titles leaped out at me as THE one. That site doesn’t have any story plot details, just raw bibliographic data, unfortunately. There are still a lot of potential candidates I couldn’t rule out based on a very mismatched title alone. I did rule out the 1977 issues, since I think I would have noticed at the time if any of those issues I’d been gifted were quarterly, which was uncommon in my experience then.
I clicked through all these issues in the likely date range, and no titles leaped out at me as THE one. That site doesn’t have any story plot details, just raw bibliographic data, unfortunately. There are still a lot of potential candidates I couldn’t rule out based on a very mismatched title alone. I did rule out the 1977 issues, since I think I would have noticed at the time if any of those issues I’d been gifted were quarterly, which was uncommon in my experience then.