Einstein’s Bridge by John Cramer.
The protagonists live in a timeline where the Superconducting Super Collider gets completed, and various nasty things result. They find a way to travel back in time to stop it being finished, thus causing our timeline.
Actually, I thought Time and Again was pretty bad, since it totally ignored the paradox: if he stops the inventor from ever being born, then there is no time travel and he can’t go back to stop the inventor from ever being born. Finney acted as though such a paradox had never been pointed out.
In my story “Nothing Changes,” time travelers keep changing the past, but as far as anyone is concerned, nothing at all has changed. So things get weirder and weirder and no one thinks anything is different.
I’m also fond of that Twilight Zone episode where the guy goes back to save Lincoln. He fails, but as a side effect, one person changes from a waiter to a millionaire.
I’d like to see that.
“Technically, you’re only one and a half.”
My favorite Star Trek related time travel stuff would have to either be “Trials and Tribble-ations” or “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”
Spoilers for Trials and Tribble-ations:
[SPOILER]Trials and Tribble-ations basically had Sisko and the Defiant’s crew going back in time to prevent Captain Kirk from being assassinated by a tribble packed with explosives. Great in that it changed the past in only nonconsequential ways (O’Brien and Bashir replace two low-ranking Enterprise officers in a lineup where Kirk is giving a right-proper ass-chewing after a bar fight with some Klingons). In fact, in some ways, they ensured the timeline played out as it did, such as with the tribbles landing on Kirk’s head.
Oh yeah, and Dax in a TOS uniform. WHOOP! 
[/SPOILER]
And more for Yesterday’s Enterprise:
Yesterday’s Enterprise, my most favorite TNG episode ever, is an Alternate Timeline story where the Federation and the Klingons never make peace, and in fact end up in a 22 year long war that the Federation by TNG’s time is on the verge of loosing. Lots of big changes (no kids on the Enterprise, dimmer lighting, Tasha Yar instead of Worf), and lots of little changes too (stairs instead of an inclined floor on the bridge, everyone wears close-collared uniforms, only Picard, the helmsman, and the navigator sit down on the bridge, everyone else stands). Basically, the Enterprise investigates a temporal anomaly which spits out the USS Enterprise, NCC 1701-C (the current Enterprise’s predecessor in this episode), crippled from a recent battle with much of her crew dead. Turns out that 22 years earlier, the Enterprise C had come to the aid of a Klingon outpost that was beign attacked by 4 Romulan Warbirds. The Enterprise disappeared in the midst of the battle, and the Klingons accused the Federation of cowardice, eventually leading to an all-out war. Of course, this was all fixed up after the C was sent back through the temporal whatzit, to face her certain destruction at the hands of the Romulan force.
Raguleader: Well, it wasn’t ALL fixed up, what with Sela and all (whom Picard and company will probably never be able to fully understand or explain).
Me too!
To me, it has an absolutely terrible title, but out of all the time traveling stories I’ve read or seen, The Time Traveler’s Wife is by far the best. Look at the picture on the cover, and this will tell you a lot.
With vivid characters and carefully structured storytelling, author Audrey Niffenberger came up with a premise I’ve not come across before.
Henry is a man is afflicted with a chronological disability; he’ll go to the past and future at the drop of a hat. His wife has grown up getting to know him, she has a list he dictated to her which tells him which dates he’ll be dropping in. A few friends and family know of Henry’s situation. He can end up in some awful predicaments.
It is quite a love story.
But they weren’t trying to do the same tyhing. Heinlain, in this and in his other Don A. Stuart Time Travel story, was trying to write a wholly consistent time travel story and make it interestingly convoluted. Gerrold was, by his own admission, trying to fit every time travel cliche he could into a single story.
This seems like an asppropriate time to recall one of my first sigs:
“Of course,” said my Grandfather, pulling a gun from his belt as he stepped from the Time Machine, “There’s no paradox if I shootyou.”
…
It’s not quite a reset button, but in the vein of “changing history so it becomes our timeline”, there was the JFK-centric arc on Quantum Leap, where Sam thinks he’s failed to change history for the better, but learns he was able to spare Jackie the assassin’s bullet.
That’s hysterical!
I remember that, because I hated it so much. What the hell difference would that have made?
No way to tell, really. I liked it.
In Chrono Trigger, the main party intervenes repeatedly on behalf of their ancestors so that the present is the way it is. (They also accidentally unexist one member near the beginning of the story. Oops!)
There’s also the mother of all time travel paradoxes in Chrono Cross that would probably win someone a Nobel Prize if they could make sense of it and explain it to the rest of us. (And I’m not entirely sure if I really needed to see Serge’s naked butt.)
There’s an anthology out there somewhere (saw it at Barnes and Noble but didn’t buy it that trip for some reason, now it’s gone) that has what the editors considered the best ever Sci-Fi time travel stories ever. Covered several decades of writing, authors both well known and obscure. Anyone have it?
Found it! The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century
Silverberg’s Up the Line had some intersting paradoxes and solutions, tho not really a “reset button” type of story. One of the best ever time travel stories ever pened, it’s still worth a read.
Well, it would have made a difference to her.
But I think you’re talking about the big picture – the world view. Remember, one bit point of Quantum Leap was that he wasn’t making huge world changes. He was out there righting wrongs one life at a time.
Candid, that’s the first one that popped into my mind, too – on the “changing history so that it becomes our timeline” idea.
A bit of surprisingly good science-fiction plotting from an episode of Red Dwarf had the crew going back in time (while attempting to restock the galley with curry) and accidentally disrupting Oswald’s shot at President Kennedy. Kennedy survives, and ends up totally disgracing himself and the office during his second term (something about Mob influence and sex scandals).
The Red Dwarf crew goes to Kennedy at the nadir of his presidency, and convinces him that it would have been better had the assassin succeeded. So they take Kennedy himself (from 5 years in the future) to the grassy knoll, where he acts as the second gunman and shoots himself. Then the older president just fades away, leaving no trace of the mysterious shooter.
No mention of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror. Can’t be a defective toaster.
Yeah, great episode. IIRC it was after JFK had been impeached and was ob his way to prison that the fab four visited him.
Best moments:
Lister telling the ex-prez how Idlewyld airport (where they were at the time,) had been named after him, and how JFK assassinating himself would “drive the conspiracy nuts crazy.”
A little earlier, when Lister is thinking how the only way to get history back is to have someone else shooting “from just behind that little hill over there covered in lawn…” “You mean the, er, the grassy knoll, sir?”
Time Without Number is one of those “things are different, but get reset to our world”
In it, the Spanish Armada destoyed the British fleet and Spain ended up doing most of the colonizing of the New World.
In Spanish America, time travel is invented. There’s kind of a bad guy trying to change history and a good guy trying to change it back.
At the end, the good guy arrives in an English speaking America and realizes that time travel had never been invented.
The idea of the book is that time travel couldn’t happen because if it did, it would eventually change the world into one in which it hadn’t.