I’m trying to remember the name of a science fiction story with time travel as a central theme that I read at least 15 or 20 years ago, and that might be much older than that. I think it was part of an anthology, pretty sure it wasn’t a stand-alone novel:
The story revolved around a guy who built a time machine that could go forward in time and then return to the present…except not quite to the present. For example, if he went a day into the future, he might only be able to go back 23 hours. This was acceptable until he accidentally went so far into the future that the closest he could return to his present would be months or years off. So, he decided to travel into the future as a one-way trip. The bulk of the story recounts events at increasingly distant time points as he travels into the future. At some point, a large structure is built at the location of the time machine so that he cannot stop or get out for hundreds or thousands of years.
In case anyone wants to read it, I won’t spoil the ending, but I think this should provide enough information to identify it. I’d like to re-read it.
This sounds a lot like Joe Haldeman’s “The Accidental Time Machine” except in that story, the machine only went forward - in steps of increasing length, and that book came out only a year or so ago. If you put the ending in a spoiler-box, that might trigger some memories.
That reminds me of a time-travel story I read in the '80s. IIRC, the machine could only go forward. I don’t remember what happened, but for whatever reason the guy had to keep going. He nearly starved before…
… what he was counting on, that Time is cyclic/circular, he went through the future and back into the past, returning to when he left.
Okay. My memory is that it ended something like this:
Eventually, billions of years into the future some godlike entity prevents him from stopping the time machine but communicates directly with the main character as he travels forward through time inside it. Continuing onward, the main character witnesses the rebirth of the universe, formation of galaxies, Earth, and eventually returns to right about when he departed.
Sounds very much like a Poul Anderson story from a collection called “Past Times”, but I can’t remember what the individual story was called.
Once he discovers he can’t go back, he keeps going forward searching for someone who might have discovered the technology to go back in time. Once he has gone forward a few times, on increasingly bigger jumps, he realises this will never happen - everyone he meets has only encountered time-travellers from the past, and not the future. He ends up in a period of declining galactic empire and decides to stay and help the remnants of the empire fight against the invading barbarians, using the time machine’s ability to make short jumps backwards in time as the deciding factor against the enemy. But in the end, just when things are hotting up between him and the Empress, he gets locked in the time machine by a rival who is jealous of the relationship he has been developing with her, and is stuck flying forward through time. By the time he gets back control of the time machine and lands, it is impossibly far in the future, and he encounters god-like beings who transform his time machine into something that will survive what lies in the future. He flies further forward, witnesses a big crunch, a big bang, and then watches as a world forms around him. It is Earth, just as he left it, and he arrives home just moments after he left.
Wish I could remember the name. I always loved that story.
