Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky starts out well, but he blows it: his hero is sent into the future, and there’s a good deal of reasonable disorientation for about half a chapter; then he’s put into some sort of brain-boost machine and that entire issue is dropped. It always seemed to me to be a cheap way out.
I loves me some Madeleine L’Engle, but An Acceptable Time was just ludicrous. The heroine discovers a portal that takes her back something like 3,000 years in Connecticut. So she meets all these Native Americans and learns their language in about 2 nanoseconds, while they, of course, pick up a lot of English from her. AND her reaction to the portal isn’t shock or terror, but sort of “Oh, wow, cool. I think I’ll go explore around in here.” All casual-like.
vibrotronica:
That was you??
I would think that a reasonable thinking man would believe he was on candid camera until about a year has passed.
The last reasonable thing for him to believe would be that he’s gone crazy.
A really interesting book about a relationship between a man and a woman is The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s not exactly science fiction but the entire plot hinges on a strange affliction of a man who is spontaneously and involuntarily transported into the past, then a little while later goes back to where he came from (his present). I say it’s not science fiction because there is never any attempt to deal with the science of it.
He has no control over it or advance notice, and in fact it can be downright inconvenient. But you get habituated to this as a reader, start to see it as just a normal part of his life, and then focus on the human aspects of the story.
On one trip to the past, he meets a young girl who helps him out. He realizes it’s his wife as a young girl. He continues to travel back to that time; he, of course, knows everything about her and her family, and they develop a friendship. When she grows up she finds him in real time, a younger version than the one she got to know earlier. At the time in his life when she finds him, he hasn’t yet met her, so the tables are turned and she knows all about him but he has no idea who she is. He figured something like this was bound to happen. That’s just the first part. Typical time travel paradoxes occur, like him meeting himself as a young boy, and meeting himself as an adolescent and having a sexual experience with himself.
I remember one of the ‘expected but went wrong’ vein I read recently. I think is was a short story in an anthology of Australian authors. Guy decides that society is doomed to implode at some point in the future (set in roughly 1968). So he decides that he will invent a timetravel machine to avoid it. He doesn’t even try to figure out how to go backwards, he only wants to go forwards. So he builds the machine, hops in and turns it on. During his ride he sees some sort of blast, and assumes that was the end of the world. When the stops the machine, he finds himself in a world going backwards–turns out that after the last war, humanity decided that more technology would do more harm than good, and institute a 10,000 year plan to go backwards to a race of hunter-gatherers.
Our hero decides this is absurd, and starts the machine again to try and find a time after this plan went to pot, because surely something so absurd wouldn’t last, would it? When he finally stops it again, the machine sinks into a swamp, leaving him stuck…in an ancient Roman-style civilisation. When he realises where he is he starts laughing (fortunately, he knew Latin and could converse with the locals). He joins the Caesars court, but for the rest of his life is prone to random fits of laughter.
The whole time I was reading this I was thinking, “wow, this sounds like a cool book. Woa, I gotta read this book. Huh, think I’ll mosey on over to Amazon.”
Then I read the part I bolded and you could pretty much hear the “record scratching to a halt sound” go off in my brain. :smack: 
-FrL-
(No seriously, actually, it sounds like a book I’d like to read. Still, that was jarring.)
Uh, they spoke Latin?
Well, other than that, this sounds like a cool story.
-FrL-
I think. I can’t remember. At any rate, he was able to converse with them, though what language I can’t say for certain. They weren’t speaking English at any rate.
One that I read eons ago (and have since forgotten useful things like author and title) was about a time traveler who certainly intended to time-travel, but thought he was headed into the future and instead cast himself into the past. Something about possibilities diverging in one direction and converging in the other, and he’d thought it self-evident that they diverge looking forward, but no, there are an infinite number of pasts converging towards a single inevitable future. And his technology only worked in the diverging-direction so there’s no getting back. So there’s your unexpected part.
He has a career as Merlin (whose magic wand was a Colt 45 revolver or some such thing) back in the early middle ages before getting in a political jam and escaping it via time travel (back farther into the past). Builds Stonehenge to find out when the hell he’s gone to, there being no one around using a compatible calendar to tell him or anything.
Cutely written.
In the excellent Time After Time, Jack the Ripper is transported into modern-day San Francisco, and H.G. Wells pursues him. The Ripper is delighted to find that he fits right in: he has come to a place where pornography, prostitution, and serial killers are commonplace.
In response to Wells’ entreaty that the two of them should return to their own time, the Ripper says “We don’t belong here? On the contrary, Herbert. I belong here completely and utterly. I’m home.”
Of course, the classic exploration of what it would mean to have a time machine and go back in time to meet your earlier self is David Gerrold’s “The Man Who Folded Himself”.
The protagonist’s mysterious uncle leaves him a box after he dies. The box contains a time belt. The minute the kid puts on the time belt and tries to figure out how to use it, an older version of himself appears and explains how to use it. And then explains that since older versions of himself will always have better knowledge of what to do than the present version does, he’d better get used to the idea of always having older versions of himself around.
I was going to mention this. Wells was pretty good, too. Being a scientist, he didn’t seem to have much trouble adapting. He figured out things by copying other people: hailing a cab, ordering at McDonald’s, etc. I especially liked how he knew the Ripper would first go to the First National Bank of London.
I loved that movie. Malcolm McDowell as a good guy for a change, the always reliable David Warner as the Ripper, an extremely cute looking Mary Steenburgen, an actual good thriller plot, genuine humor elements, that great wristwatch music, which I’m humming right now…
“Do you still maintain that this is all poppycock?”
“That isn’t exactly the word I had in mind…” 
You are not alone.
And I found it amusing that Gerard Butler, who played André Marek, went on to play the movie version of Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. I would never have guessed that he had that good a singing voice. Granted, he ain’t Michael Crawford, but still…
If they answer anything other than “2006”, I won’t have feign a look of astonishment.
As I recall, his cab hailing technique involved copying a woman: standing on one foot, leaning forward, waving one hand daintily.
And hitting on Mary Steenburgen, with the come-on line that he once wrote an essay advocating ‘free love’. To which MS just laughs, with a comment how she went through a phase like that when she was younger.
Great movie.
He also (not to spoil it more) travels to the future. The main point is that his time travelling has no rhyme or reason behind it besides the fact that he sometimes (but not always) travels to events or people who are central to his life. It’s decribed as similar to epilepsy except that the seizures result in time travel.
I was just re-reading it today. It is an interesting book, even though I occasionally want to shake Clare and punch Henry.
Sure…but only because a truly crazy person would quickly accept that they’ve time-traveled. It’s unlikely that someone having such a complete, detailed, and all-encompasing hallucination could lucidly recognize it as such, and realize that they’ve suffered some mental breakdown. Therefore, because he’s almost certain he’s gone completely insane, it’s almost certain that he isn’t.
The “stuck in a coma, with a tumor the size a softball snaking through one’s brain” option does, however, still seem to be on the table. :smack: 
Maybe it’s the movies and TV I watch, but something that annoys me is that people who undergo even expected type 1 time travel have a very limited knowledge of what was invented when or who was popular at the time even if they end up within 30 years of the time they came from. They can’t help themselves from referring to people and things that either don’t exist yet or have yet to become popular.
This is the exact opposite of doing things like inventing something before its time or ‘discovering’ a band right before their breakout hit*: Those are examples of using knowledge unavailable to others to make yourself seem smart. What I’m railing against is using knowledge unavailable to others to make yourself seem like a moron who babbles nonsensically about things nobody else has ever heard of.
*(Neither of which is anywhere near as easy as it sounds, obviously. Both invention and pop culture seem to follow rather strict causal pathways that can only rarely be hurried along even by someone who knows the desired result intimately. Try inventing the Jenny biplane early enough for it to be of use to Sherman, or popularizing the Ramones as an alternative to pre-Hendrix Beatlemania.)