# Time travel in fiction **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 13, 2006, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987 "2006-12-13T17:51:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2012, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/41 "2012-06-12T20:36:56Z")
Time After Time, a movie about Jack the Ripper using H.G. Wells’s time machine to travel to 1980’s San Francisco and being followed by Wells. One of the bes time travel tales ever. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2012, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/42 "2012-06-12T21:28:44Z")
The only reason Bill and Ted had a deadline is because they’re too dumb to realize they don’t have a deadline. Actually, the presentation they give at the end would have taken quite a while to prepare. Like, days or weeks. And they have lighting effects and everything, so I assumed that later/earlier Bill and Ted were acting as crew for onstage Bill and Ted. ---
**Author:** ![randwill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/a3d4f5/32.png) [@randwill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/randwill)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2012, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/43 "2012-06-12T21:49:38Z")
One of my favorite animated films is “The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya”. It contains some mind-bending time travel convolutions. It wouldn’t mean much unless you’ve seen the Haruhi Suzumiya television series, especially the time travel episode titled “Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody”, but I love the show and think it’s well worth watching too. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2012, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/44 "2012-06-12T22:29:01Z")
> [@](#): > > The only reason Bill and Ted had a deadline is because they’re too dumb to realize they don’t have a deadline. Because they _and utopian George Carlin_ were too dumb. He’s the one who told them that the deadline was still in effect. ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2012, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/45 "2012-06-12T22:29:37Z")
Unless I’m remembering wrong, in **Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency** , by Douglas Adams, an elderly professor uses his time machine to watch TV shows because he can’t figure out how to program a VCR. Other things also happen, of course. ---
**Author:** ![Ranchoth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranchoth/32/1066_2.png) [@Ranchoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranchoth)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2012, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/46 "2012-06-13T02:44:53Z")
I’d just like to pop in to generally nominate _Star Trek_’s later series’ (_Voyager_ and _Enterprise_) time travel episodes and arcs. For not doing a particularly good job at them writing-wise, repeatedly inserting more time travel into a setting regardless of tepid audience response (at best), _and_ for trying to do them on a TV budget, run time, and production deadline. _Excelsior!_ ---
**Author:** ![Balance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ccd318/32.png) [@Balance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balance)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2012, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/47 "2012-06-13T03:00:30Z")
> [@Rysto](#): > > _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_ gets time travel right. Harry goes back in time, but his efforts don’t actually change anything. Not true at all. His actions make all the difference–had he not gone back in time, Buckbeak would have been executed, and Harry, Hermione, and Sirius would have had their souls eaten. You are allowing yourself to be misled by the fact that the effects of his changes were already in effect at the point from which he traveled back. What it actually means is that there is at least a limited form of predestination in the Potterverse; meddling with time, either by time traveling or via prophecy, appears to have the potential to lock people into certain courses of action. > [@OneCentStamp](#): > > I can think of plenty that don’t (starting with the “bottomlessly stupid”): > > **Back to the Future:** Marty travels back in time and inadvertantly interferes with his parents’ falling in love. The result is that he and his siblings begin to disappear from the family photo (starting with the oldest) one body part at a time. The fact that you disparage _BttF_ time travel so strongly suggests to me that you have not thought it through properly. It’s actually a reasonable, subtle, and largely internally consistent take on the subject. I have gone into considerable detail about it in a number of threads. ---
**Author:** ![Syme](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@Syme](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Syme)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2012, 3:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/48 "2012-06-13T03:50:33Z")
> [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > Time After Time, a movie about Jack the Ripper using H.G. Wells’s time machine to travel to 1980’s San Francisco and being followed by Wells. One of the bes time travel tales ever. A sweet movie, the most interesting part being to see Malcom McDowell play the good guy after seein him in A Clockwork Orange. Read a short story where a bank is started in Venice in the late Middle Ages. This bank grows and grows throughout the centuries having a secret agenda which is once it reaches our present to have accumulated enough wealth to fund research to build a time machine to go back to the past and start a bank in Venice … ---
**Author:** ![Rhaegar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/51bf81/32.png) [@Rhaegar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rhaegar)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2012, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/49 "2012-06-13T05:21:46Z")
> [@Ranchoth](#): > > I’d just like to pop in to generally nominate _Star Trek_’s later series’ (_Voyager_ and _Enterprise_) time travel episodes and arcs. For not doing a particularly good job at them writing-wise, repeatedly inserting more time travel into a setting regardless of tepid audience response (at best), _and_ for trying to do them on a TV budget, run time, and production deadline. _Excelsior!_ Star Trek went a little overboard with all the time traveling back and forth. Saving the whales was just a bit much. No one has mentioned all the time traveling from The Terminator movies either. I thought that the first movie in the series was very well done and thought provoking, some of the later movies, not so much. ---
**Author:** ![Grestarian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grestarian/32/3227_2.png) [@Grestarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grestarian)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/50 "2012-06-14T03:35:11Z")
> [@Rhaegar](#): > > No one has mentioned all the time traveling from The Terminator movies either. I thought that the first movie in the series was very well done and thought provoking, some of the later movies, not so much. Wow! I was surprised they didn’t get mentioned until now, as well. [ul] [li]I saw T1 and thought it was perfectly consistent within itself. I was actually a bit irritated that anyone thought to make a T2 – but really enjoyed the romp as a fun movie on its own (in spite of the anti-violence preaching).[/li][li]I saw T3 and thought it knocked things back on-track as far as consistency, but it wasn’t as strong of a flick.[/li][li]I didn’t bother with T4 or the TV show; I’d grown tired of it all and it seemed to have turned into a gun-fest instead of a time-travel SciFi piece.[/li][/ul] Really, after T1 I figured an appropriate sequel would have been to dwell on the War Against the Machines and maybe just show a cameo appearance of Arnold\* in a flashback and eventually close the movie with Reese stepping into the machine to chase T1. It would have been best not to even hint that it was a Terminator movie; just make a great movie about two guys in a distant future who become war buddies for some reason… As for other great time-travel pieces, I enjoyed Poul Anderson’s Annals of the Time Patrol short stories and the novel The Shield of Time. I also enjoyed this relatively obscure book I found in the 1970’s called The Overlords of War by Gerard Klein. – so much so that I hunted down another copy and I’m reading it again. —G! \*White-coated geek: Uhh…Nice Inauguration speech, Governor! Now we’re just going to take a sample of your skin and blood – DNA sequences in case an impostor tries to kidnap and impersonate you. It’s all standard for our new political representatives. If you don’t mind holding out your index finger… ---
**Author:** ![Bakhesh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/3da27b/32.png) [@Bakhesh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bakhesh)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 9:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/51 "2012-06-14T09:19:31Z")
No-one mentioned Primer yet? The time travel logic is so tight that it is almost impossible to fathom on the first watch. Its so complex that people have to draw diagrams to understand what is actually going on in that film… > **[Primer (film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film))** > > Primer is a 2004 American independent psychological science fiction film about the accidental discovery of time travel. The film was written, directed, produced, edited and scored by Shane Carruth, who also stars with David Sullivan. > Primer is of note for its extremely low budget, experimental plot structure, philosophical implications, and complex technical dialogue, which Carruth, a college graduate with a degree in mathematics and a former engineer, chose not to simplify for the sake of the... ---
**Author:** ![With\_Rye](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/838e76/32.png) [@With\_Rye](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/With_Rye)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/52 "2012-06-14T19:47:17Z")
The most satisfying time travel story I’ve read recently is [The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_and_the_Alchemist's_Gate) by Ted Chiang. I’ll have to read it again to see if I can find any faults with it. ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/53 "2012-06-18T19:32:48Z")
The Novels of The Company, starting with [In the Garden of Iden](http://www.amazon.com/Garden-Iden-Novel-Company-Book/dp/0380731797), by Kage Baker, explore the actions of the immortal cyborg employees of Dr. Zeus, Incorporated, the company that created them to be time travel agents. If you poke about on the [Kage Baker Website](http://www.kagebaker.com/), you can find the first chapters of more than a dozen novels, although not all of them are Company novels. I’ve read the first three and enjoyed them. From the Iden exerpt online: > [@](#): > > Once, there was a cabal of merchants and scientists whose purpose was to make money and improve the lot of humankind. They invented Time Travel and Immortality. Now, I was taught that they invented Time Travel first and developed Immortals so they could send people safely back through the years. > > In reality it was the other way around. The process for Immortality was developed first. In order to test it, they had to invent Time Travel. > > [snip] > > But the experiments didn’t exactly pan out. Immortality is not for the general public. Oh, it works. God, how it works. But it can have several undesirable side effects, mental instability being one of them, and there are certain restrictions that make it impractical for general sale. For example, it only really works on little children with flexible minds and bodies. It does not work on middle-aged millionaires, which is a pity, because they are the only consumers who can afford the process. > > [snip] > > Time travel is only possible backward, for one thing. You can return to your own present once you have finished your business in the past, but you can’t jump forward into your own future. So much for finding out who’s going to win in the fifth race at Santa Anita on April 1, 2375. > > Still, Dr. Zeus played around with the field and discovered what could at first be taken as a comforting fact: History cannot be changed. You can’t go back and save Lincoln, but neither can you erase your own present by accidentally killing one of your ancestors. To repeat, history cannot be changed. > > [snip] > > However - and listen closely, this is the important part - this law can only be observed to apply to recorded history. See the implications? > > [snip] > > Overnight they discovered assets they never knew they had, administered by long-lived law firms with ancient instructions to deliver interest accrued, on a certain date in 2335, to a “descendant” of the original investor. > > [snip] > > Over the next few months in 2335, previously unknown works of art by the great masters began turning up in strange places. > > [snip] > > In May of 2336, people turned on their newspapers and learned that a small colony of passenger pigeons had been discovered in Iceland, of all places. In Christmas of that same year, four blue whales were sighted off the coast of Chile. In March of 2337, a stand of Santa Lucia firs, a primitive conifer thought extinct for two centuries, was found growing in a corner of the Republic of California. > > [snip] > > The orders began to come in. > > Obsessive collectors of art and literature. Philanthropists sentimental about lost species. Pharmaceutical companies desperate for new biological sources. Stranger people, with stranger needs and plenty of ready cash. There were only two or three questions. > > Who was running Dr. Zeus now? Even its founders weren’t sure. Its most secretive inner circle couldn’t have said positively. Suddenly they were surrounded by the prearranged fruits of somebody’s labor on their behalf - but whose labor? Just how many people worked for the Company? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/54 "2012-06-18T19:53:55Z")
> [@](#): > > Time travel is only possible backward, for one thing. You can return to your own present once you have finished your business in the past, but you can’t jump forward into your own future. So much for finding out who’s going to win in the fifth race at Santa Anita on April 1, 2375. Any author who places restrictions like this on time travel hasn’t been paying attention to reality. Of _course_ you can travel forward in time. It’s easy. It’s so easy, in fact, that it’s impossible or nearly so to do anything else. ---
**Author:** ![GargoyleWB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gargoylewb/32/199_2.png) [@GargoyleWB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GargoyleWB)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/55 "2012-06-18T21:14:54Z")
> [@randwill](#): > > One of my favorite animated films is “The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya”… Seconded. Also, from the anime genre, [The Girl Who Leaped Through Time](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808506/) is superb, as she continuously tries to rewrite time to stop a deadly accident. ---
**Author:** ![drewtwo99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d07c76/32.png) [@drewtwo99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewtwo99)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/56 "2012-06-18T21:27:42Z")
The episode “Roswell that ends well” from Futurama was one about time travel that seemed logically consistent. Definitely put a whole new spin on the idea of a “grandfather paradox!” I think it won an emmy, too. Bender’s Big Score also used time travel as a plot device and it was handled very logically and consistently as far as I remember. (First Futurama movie) ---
**Author:** ![bldysabba](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ecccb3/32.png) [@bldysabba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bldysabba)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/57 "2012-06-18T22:09:54Z")
> [@jjimm](#): > > _The Time Traveller’s Wife_ was wholly consistent - and it is in fact that very consistency that makes the book so painfully moving. Yeah. This was a fantastic book. Just the pure mind bending nature of the narrative structure would have made it an interesting experience, but the way the story fits onto that skeleton makes it a great one. ---
**Author:** ![Uncle\_Jocko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/uncle_jocko/32/2932_2.png) [@Uncle\_Jocko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Uncle_Jocko)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/58 "2012-06-18T23:48:18Z")
> [@Sapo](#): > > 12 monkeys is, by far, the way I see time travel actually working. > > serious unavoidable spoiler alert: > > I read a short story with a pretty similar take on it. The character travels to the past to kill a guy who started a religion. He travels to an approximate date (they didn’t know the exact date in his future), checks the obituary on the paper for the details, travels further back and kills the guy. He is aprehended and lynched by a mob but gets to deliver a speech before he dies where he claims to be god. Few days later, there he is buying the paper and everybody goes crazy and the religion he was supposed to squash gets started because of him travelling to the past to kill it. > > Does anyone know the title and author of this story? I read it as a teen and been looking for it for the longest time. I realize this poster asked the question almost six years ago, but since I actually know the answer, I wanted to put it out there just in case anybody else was curious. It’s a short story by Philip K. Dick called “The Skull.” I got it along with several other Dick stories for free when I started filling my iBooks library after buying my iPad last year. That is all. It is a good story, by the way, although anybody paying the least bit of attention will figure the ending out about three pages in. ---
**Author:** ![TPWombat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbce88/32.png) [@TPWombat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TPWombat)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2012, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/59 "2012-06-19T12:18:19Z")
The 2007 spanish film [**Timecrimes**](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480669/combined) is IMO a perfect example of time travel done properly. One man goes back by about an hour several times trying to fix something, and in doing so causing it to come about, but then there is a superbly chilling ending as the protaganist puts the pieces together and realises that he has a way out of his dilemma. It’s not a nice way out, but it fits beautifully. Clever, clever, film. I think that this film is **exactly** what you are looking for. It’s apparently being remade but I bet they drop the ending. Pah. ---
**Author:** ![yoyodyne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/a9a28c/32.png) [@yoyodyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yoyodyne)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2012, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987/60 "2012-06-19T16:57:48Z")
> [@Bakhesh](#): > > No-one mentioned Primer yet? The time travel logic is so tight that it is almost impossible to fathom on the first watch. Its so complex that people have to draw diagrams to understand what is actually going on in that film… > > [Primer (film) - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)) [Like this one](http://xkcd.com/657/). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-travel-in-fiction/383987.md?page=4)