The worst are obviously in Star Trek: Voyager, so that’s off limits.
The best is Jack Finney’s Time and Again. The time travel program is discovered to be horribly disruptive but the military wishes to continue to bring Cuba into the US and prevent the Pay of Pigs. The parents of the inventor of Time Travel met at the Opera when Father bought matches from Mother. The protagonist travels back in time and when Daddy to be takes out his cigar, lights a match and says, “Permit me, Sir.”
I admit, I have a fondness for the ones in stories that start out in an alternate timeline, but after the changes are made, the result is our “normal” world. (I can’t think of any examples at the moment, though. Sorry.)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer occasionally uses the time travel/ alternate timeline plot device, but when it does, the end result is usually excellent, as Whedon and Crew inevitably toss in several of their patented twists on the cliche.
Mild spoiler for BtVS: “Superstar” below:
In the episode “Superstar,” for example, a nerdy recurring character changes history to make himself into a combination of James Bond, G.I. Joe, and Bill Gates, and features a (hilarious!) modified version of the intro credits sequence which reflects the altered timeline.
Big-time spoilers for BtVS Season 5 below:
The story arc of the fifth season centers around Buffy’s sister, Dawn, who did not exist in prior seasons. She was, in fact, created by a group of mystical spooky monks, her entire life up to the beginning of the fifth season invented and inserted into place in the world. The great thing about this particular use of the alternate timeline device, of course, is that it, in fact, becomes the “real” timeline! I can’t think of any other sci-fi/fantasy story in which an alternate history is allowed to continue, despite the characters’ awareness of the changes. Thus, there is no reset button at all: the changes in the timeline are permanent, and have lasting repercussions (read: lovely continuity)!
The Dean R. Koontz book Lightning had a few interesting twists on the time-traveling mythos. The first is that the time traveler, who we think is from the future, is actually from the past…he’s a Nazi soldier, from 1944 Germany, where the Nazis had almost perfected time travel.
Then, mostly on a whim, the time traveler visits FDR and Winston Churchill and convinces them to attack Russia after the end of WWII. So he returns to the present to find that not only has the Cold War never happened, but everyone is driving Russian cars and using Russian electronics and complaining that everything is made in Russia today, as well as Germany & Japan.
That wonderful Ashton Kutcher vehicle The Butterfly Effect climaxs with the granddaddy of all reset buttons Ashton travels back to when he was a fetus and kills himself in utero, thus eliminating himself from existence.
And any movie where this happens can’t be all bad!
But, Carni! One of the best ever Big Fucking Reset Button™ examples was in ST: VOY. Year of Hell. All the others sucked, tho. In TNG, we had the Q driven Tapestry. Ask yourself at the very end of it, why does Picard laugh?
The Dirk Gently example is a good one, and I enjoyed the way it was treated in that Kutcher vehicle, Dude, Where Is My Karma? ( aka butterfly yada yada)
My favorite time travel story is David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself. No reset button tho, as Dan Eakin exists in a closed-loop which he himself created.Great story by a much under-appreciated author.
Tarrsk – I think you’re slightly mistaken about the “reset” in “Buffy”; if I recall,
[spoiler]There’s no alteration of the past; Dawn literally didn’t exist before she was created as a teenager. All the memories that her family and friends have of her before that are false memories, not real memories of an altered timeline.
It was great the way she was introduced – as if she’d always been there, with no explanation for several episodes.[/spoiler]
Several stories have involved time travel into the past in an attempt to alter the present, with the denoument being that the time traveller finds that his efforts have only succeeded in creating the present he already had – that is, that his own activities in the past were already a part of the timeline he grew up with. The best example I can think of is “The Red Queen’s Race” by Isaac Asimov.
I hate paradoxes; always preferred the idea that travel into the past creates a completely separate timeline.
I just finished reading Stephen Frye’s Making History. My spoiler is basically going to give away the entire book’s plot, and it’s a good book.
There are two reset buttons. First, the protagonist sends male contraceptive pills back in time to land in the cistern from which Adolf Hitler’s father drinks, rendering him sterile. It turns out later in the book that an even worse guy arises to head the Nazi party, discovers records of the mysterious sterilizing cistern-water, and manufactures the contraceptive in mass quantities by which means he completely eliminates the population of European Jews. So the second reset button involves sending a couple decaying maggoty rats back in time to land in the same cistern, so that nobody drinks from it until it’s been emptied and scrubbed.
There’s a wonderful time travel story by Alfred Bester called The Men Who Murdered Mohammed. It’s about a Scientist who comes home from work one day to find his wife in the arms of a colleague. Instead of shooting her on the spot, he runs back to his lab and invents a time machine so he can go back and kill her father instead. When he gets home, he walks in and finds his wife still kissing his colleague. He runs back to the lab to kill his wife’s mother, figuring that the mother must’ve cheated on his wife’s father. I won’t reveal any more of the story, but there’s a very ingenious reset (of a sort). I recomend this story and all Bester’s work highly.
Another famous time travel story is Robert A. Heinlein’s All You Zombies. I felt that Gerrold’s Man Who Folded Himself took an entire novel to get to the same place as Heinlein"s story. It’s not a bad book but Heinlein’s is much better.
Larry Niven wrote a story called *All The Myriad Ways * which is the best story I’ve ever read explicating the idea of quantum indeterminancy and alternate universes. He’s also written a series of time travel stories about a temponaut named Svetz who works for The U.N. on a future very polluted Earth. His jobs is to go into the past and retrieve animals that have been long extict on his Earth. Niven has gone on record that he doesn’t believe in the possibilty of time travel. Therefore, all his time travel stories are a hybrid of SF and fantasy and great fun. He wrote a novel called Rainbow Mars where Svetz goes to Mars but it’s the Mars Of John Carter and also that of H.G. Wells and also that of Phillip. J. Farmer’s World of Tiers series as opposed to the world of NASA and its tinkertoys.
Technically, the timeline is the same as it ever was. However, I would argue that, because everything we saw in Seasons 1-4 would’ve been appropriately altered by the insertion of Dawn, it’s basically an alternate-timeline plot, albeit a somewhat unorthodox one. Maybe a better term would be a retcon, although since the characters are made completely aware of the changes by mid-season, I’m not sure that’s quite accurate either.
Reminds me, Orson Scott Card used a really neat reset button idea in Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Colombus, which is also the only decent thing he’s written in several years.
James Hogan’s The Proteus Operation is one example, with the wrinkle that it turns out that the timeline where the story starts (the US is the last bastion against a mostly Axis-conquered world) was created by meddlers from yet another timeline (a very peaceful and prosperous world that doesn’t leave much outlet for sociopathic power-hungry types).
