I don’t think the time-dilation in Planet of the Apes (good book, by the way) has any real importance to the plot, especially not in the way this thread has been discussing the effect.
Are there any stories that use gravitationally-caused effects?
This reminds me of a YA novel I read 10+ years back. It wasn’t that great and I can’t remember the title or author, but it inverted the usual time-dilation idea.
The protagonist is an adolescent boy who’s always felt outshined by his twin brother. After either moving or going to stay with a relative, he discovers that if he goes inside a shed on the property then time passes at a different rate. I think he goes in and spends (to him) hours reading and then comes out to find that only seconds have passed outside. He decides to take advantage of this and in one night does the equivalent of taking a year off to study from books and work out in the shed. It’s a pretty Spartan lifestyle for that year, but he’s satisfied when from the perspective of the outside world he literally overnight becomes taller, stronger, and better educated than his brother.
I think it was The Bus that Couldn’t Slow Down.
Did the passengers experience time dialation?
Singularity, by William Sleator
Star Trek teaches us that if you approach a star really, really fast and then pull away from it at the very last instant, you can travel through time. And actually decide where/when you’re going. :rolleyes:
Well, traveling faster than light is physically equivalent to time travel. So if you’ve got warp drive, you’ve got a kind of time machine.
I wasn’t counting that in my mind as it’s a combination of gravitation and velocity.
Actually, I think I just came up with an example for my question. There’s a second-season episode of Stargate SG-1 where an unlucky SG team gates to a world being affected by a black hole. The effect of the extreme gravity affects radio transmissions back through the gate. Of course, the episode also has gravitational waves being transmitted through the the gate as well, thus giving a reason for the rest of the episode.
Alan Moore’s comic The Ballad of Halo Jones book 3. A large section takes place on a rocky planet the size of Jupiter, where the high gravity causes time dilation. The soldiers leave their shielded base to fight a battle for ten minutes, when they return a couple of months has passed inside.
While not about relativity, it does deal with the effects of different rates of time.
Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson. Earth is encapsulated in a field of some sort that shuts out the sky - no stars, no moon, but the sun* shining. Turns out Earth is going immensely slower than the rest of the universe, so time outside is racing past. This has interesting repurcussions.
*Yes, it is explained how the sun is visible and not the moon.
That’s it! Thank you, I tried to search for it before I posted but just kept coming up with a fantasy novel called Time of the Twins.
If we are including songs I will throw in “Benson, Arizona” from the movie “Dark Star”:
“Between the strokes of night” by charles sheffield
very good book about time dilation and some ways around the negative aspects.
Has anyone mentioned the MST3k movie favorite “Women of the Prehistoric Planet” (origin of the phrase Hikeeba!) - Time Dilation is definitely a major plot point here, as one starship of a fleet traveling near light speed is hijacked and crash landed on a planet, and by the time another ship of the fleet can travel back to the planet to perform search and rescue (a short time relativistically), it encounters a (teenage) descendant of the original ship’s passengers - which makes you question why the rescue ship even bothered to return
Glad to help
As did “Galactic North” by (flip flip flip) Alastair Reynolds.
In the original French novel Planet of the Apes they actually end up on another planet that has similar lifeforms to Earth (uncannily similar if you ask me) with apes eventually supplanting humans. At the end of the book one of the astronauts returns to Earth along with a newly acquired good-looking wife, but due to time dilation effects returns much later and is quite shocked to see that the Earth people coming to great him are … wait for it … apes!
There was a science fiction book I remember reading as a teenager (in French, but probably translated from the English) with a story that fits the OP very well: the main character is a young boy who is shanghaied aboard a spaceship (during a drunken scene in a bar following a fight with his girlfriend), and is taken on his first “long trip”. During his first trip his time accounting is wildly optimistic (he is encouraged in this by the ship’s captain) and he convinces himself that he will be able to find his girlfriend upon his return and continue his life on Earth. Upon his first return to Earth he finds his girlfriend again but she is very old. He sadly returns to the ship, has several other trips and adventures (he eventually realizes that the ship is now his world, every time he returns to a place he has already visited things have changed so much that he can’t adapt), and at the end, after the ship’s captain dies, our young hero, no longer young, becomes the new captain. The book ends with the new captain talking to a young man who has also been shanghaied to join the crew, the young man is saying “after I make it rich on this first trip, I will return and marry my girlfriend, she’ll be older than me but I won’t care” and the new captain humours the delusion.
This won’t help you much because I have no idea of the title or the author. Also I read it so long ago that my synopsis is probably wrong on several points. And I liked the book as a teenager but it probably wasn’t that great - I was young then and this was my first time travel book so I though it was sad, poignant etc.
C.J. Cherryh uses relativistic effects properly in most of her SF, along with inertia, momentum, etc. even though she also has hyperdrives. It’s a given background problem that the characters have to work around, so much so that she mentions time lag in local communications and negotiating paths for docking at stations. Her strongest stuff is in the Alliance-Union subset of her SF universe, I think, but any of her books are worth a read.
It shows up in Walter Jon Williams’ work too, particularly the Praxis books. There’s also a story, I think it’s by him anyway, where a girl on a ramship visits a planet a few times separated by months of relativistic trips (from her frame of reference) and carries on a relationship with a local man over that time. Of course, he goes through years in the interludes between her visits, but for her it was a few weeks ago. Probably in his short story collection “Facets.” I’ll check when I get home.
Greg Bear makes use of relativity in “Legacy,” the sequel to “Forge of God,” along with machine intelligence.
That story wasn’t in “Facets,” but I still think it was WJW who wrote it. Just can’t remember where the hell I read it. It’s going to bug me until I figure it out.
Joan D. Vinge wrote a few stories making use of time dilation. “The Outcasts of Heaven Belt” is a novella which features partially asynchronous communications because of the logistical problems of managing a strict democracy over distances with light-second to light-minute delays. No surprise that her then-husband Vernor Vinge also wrote about Usenet-style communications to solve the same kinds of problems in “Fire in the Sky.”
She also based an entire culture and government on a more or less eternal emperor who travels to his different planets on fast ships in “Snow Queen.” It’s more complicated than that, actually, she built a deep and realistic world in the novel, but that’s the seed that the whole situation started from.
“The Inverted World” by Christopher Priest includes time dilation and compression as a cause of a character’s two marriages falling apart, though the plot does not include space travel but rather other effects that cause the time warps.
What about Peter Pan by James Barrie? Not SF, but includes time warp effects.
The Anime “Soko no Strain” includes time dilation, but the heroine is already distraught over the effects before we see anyone undergoing it, as she realizes that unless she goes to academy to become an astronaut, she is never going to see her big brother ever again.
Also, within anime, the classic Aim for the Top! Gunbuster also includes time dilation and some distress to the heroine as a result of this.