Larry Niven did it in “Singularities make me Nervous”. Not time dilation, but IIRC travel around a rotating black hole. The astronaut returns to Earth before he left so he can give his previous self stock tips.
The problem with this plot is that it really destroys relativity. In relativity theory. time dilation is related to movement below the speed of light. Time travel is related to movement faster than the speed of light. You should never use both in the same story and you certainly shouldn’t mix up the two.
I haven’t read the story in a long time, but I seem to recall that Tricentennial by Joe Haldeman used time dilation as a plot element.
Damn…can’t remember the title.
The story centered around a guy that volunteered to enter an alien civilizations ‘stargate’…these gates were located at the outer edge of the solar system. When you entered it you appeared at the other gate light years away. However, while it was instant to you, it was like you traveled the distance at light speed.
He said goodbye, put some money in the bank and left. When he came back, much time had passed and he wasn’t rich because Congress had passed a law in his absence enforcing no interest for people like him. He didn’t know anyone and was out of date…So, he went out again and again.
Each time he came back, things were changed. I remember once was an ice age, and people evolving into a form different from him and so on. He felt more and more disconnected every time he came back.
It was awhile ago and my memory is fuzzy…but I think this is the kind of book desired by the OP.
There’s also “The Long Way Home” by Anderson. Several astronauts go cruising through the galaxy, thinking they’ve got a newly developed/poorly understood instantaneous hyperdrive. Turns out it’s only lightspeed, though its instantaneous for the people travelling on it, so they return to Earth some 3000 years after they left, instead of 1 year. Oops.
I also remember a mid-Eighties book of politically-themed sf short stories. In one of them, an American starship returns after a short but very successful almost-lightspeed voyage. The young captain is hailed as a hero and his many fans beg him to run for President. He isn’t yet (biologically) 35 years old, as required by the Constitution, even though to everyone left back on Earth he’s pushing 90 if you counted from his birthdate. IIRC the Supreme Court finally decides he can run - so he does, and wins.
Another I-can’t-recall-the-title story. In the story I’m thinking of they use the telepathic-twins bit, a brother and sister pair. At the end of the short story, the vessel containing the brother is falling into a black hole. It is mentioned that because of time dilation, from the viewpoint of the outside universe he’ll never actually enter the hole; just fall in terror forever, and that “telepathy isn’t constrained by range anymore than it is by the speed of light. He will be with her…always.”
That has to be a Niven story.
That “Kyrie” by Poul Anderson, already mentioned by CalMecham in this thread.
That’s Anderson’s Kyrie, which I mentioned above. Only it’s not brother and sister – it’s a human and a space-traveling alien that resembles a comet. But the denoument is the same, so I’m pretty certain you’re misremembering the same story.
Pushing Ice from Alastair Reynolds plays with time dilation and a few counterintuitive concepts that follow. It focuses on a crew that experiences a close to c flight.
Pretty hard Sci Fi, as far as I can tell.
You shouldn’t mix them, but I see no reason not to be able to use both in the same work. You do the regular time dilation first, and, then use FTL travel to get him back (after a point where it was assumed impossible). Or you use time travel, break your time machine, and use relativistic effects to get back to your original time.
Yeah, both of these are happy endings, which a lot of people don’t seem to like in this type of science fiction. But I’m sure you could still make the ending bittersweet. For example, she gets only one chance to fix it, and wants to go back to when she left, but she’s so much older that no one believes its her. (Or she returns to the appropriate time, and finds that her family had moved on.)
One Face, also by Niven. Not technically a relativistic time dilation story but the same effect - in this case a hyperdrive malfunction causes an almost-instantaneous journey, ship’s time, to last billions of years, external time, and the travellers have to try to make a living in a universe that’s almost aged itself to death.
Re: “Time for the Stars”. If I’m remembering Chronos right, he objected to the notion that the twin on the starship experienced less duration than the twin on earth–during the flight out.
But of course, since there’s no preferred reference frame, who’s to say that the twin on the starship is traveling faster than the twin on Earth? From the perspective of the starship twin, it’s his brother that is traveling away. The only time you can tell which twin has traveled faster is when you bring them back to the same reference frame and compare clocks.
Maybe I’m getting this wrong.
But the twin on the starship can cell that he’s accelerating, since the starship experiences 1.25 g’s. The twin on Earth knows that he’s not accelerating relative to his twin. Hmmm. Are the twins back in the same reference frame when the starship twin ends up at Tau Ceti? After all, he accelerated halfway to Tau Ceti, then decelerated to match velocity with Tau Ceti. Tau Ceti probably has a very similar velocity to our solar system, close enough that the difference is negligible.
So without FTL telepathy, one twin accelerates, travels halfway to Tau Ceti, then decelerates, and ends up at Tau Ceti. He then sends a message via com laser to his twin on Earth, asking him for the time. The message takes 8 years to get to earth, then earth twin tells him “it’s 5:30 on Saturday morning, July 27th 2132 AD”, and that message travels 8 years to Tau Ceti. When it reaches the Tau Ceti twin, he knows for sure that his brother is now older than him.
But–why wouldn’t he have known in advance that he was the younger twin? The key is that he’s accelerating. If he were zooming past Earth at .99c, then there’s no way to tell which one is traveling .99c. From the perspective of the starship, Earth is traveling .99c. From the perspective of Earth, the starship is traveling .99c. But if the starship accelerates to a stop…that’s the same from the starship’s reference as accelerating to .99c to match velocity with the speeding Earth. Hmm…
That it did. IIRC, the ship’s control systems break down so they can’t stop accelerating, and by the time they’re celebrating the US tricentennial (2076), Earth is a barren cinder wasteland.
Another one that might fit the bill, come to think of it: “Houston, Houston, Do you Read”, by James Tiptree, Jr. A crew of astronauts (all male, of course) in the not-too-distant future end up catapulted a few hundred years into the future by a Macguffin, to find a world where human males have all died off.
No Stephen Baxter fans? Timelike Infinity uses dilation in a unique way; one end of an Eistein-Rosen bridge (wormhole or “Interface” as it is described in the novel) is left in the Solar system while the other is taken by a powerful vessel for a returning it to the Solar system 1,500 years later in the inertial timeframe, but only 100 years have passed for the non-inertial side of the Interface, making it a topological connection not between two distant points in space, but in time, and thus, a “time machine” of sorts. Unfortunately for humanity, the Earth of 1,500 years in the future has been conquered by a race called the Qax, who destroy the Interface, but not before a group of humans known as the Friends of Wigner escape to the original Interface point and attempt to encode information in a singularity formed by the collapse of Jupiter by carefully coordinately polarized gravity beams. The Qax build their own time-like interface to their future, seeking advice from their successors, much to their lament.
Stranger
LeGuin also invented the concept of the ansible, a device for communicating instantaneously across arbitrarily large distances, and I think she also describes telepathy (which she also uses) as working the same way. Physical movement, however, is constrained by the speed of lightThus the above would work - in a properly relativistic universe such as ours (probably!) the message about the person coming in 200 years would reach us at the same time as the person.
@BlinkingDuck - in the story you were thinking of, was there a scene where the hero is sentenced to death, only it turns out it’s a “temporary” death penalty - he’s going to be ressurected later, because they’ve worked out the technology for that for a while. Only he doesn’t know that and doesn’t realise why everyone is taking this so casually
Yeah, stuffed if I remember the title either 
Nah, it’s easy to send a message at the speed of light, and the ship will be at least somewhat slower than that, so the message should always reach the destination before the messenger. How much before depends on just how fast your ship is and just how far away you are.
Feel a bit out of place for recommending it but “Toms Midnight Garden” is a great children’s story that plays with time.
Tom goes back to the garden every night and remains the same age, Hatty waits for him every night but only sees him sometimes and out of sequence, getting older.
There’s the movie about an astronaut who learns about time dialation the hard way when his ship crash lands on an Earth that’s ruled by damned, dirty apes!
The name of the movie escapes me, though.