What are some of YOUR greatest Time Travel Stories/Ideas that YOU yourself came up with?

Cafe Society
1

We’ve seen countless Time Travel Stories, books, movies, tv shows, and video games; some are praised more highly than others, of course.

Some are praised for being entertaining, some, for being emotionally powerful/sentimental, some, for being mind-blowing, some, for actually containing realistic and complex scientific ideas/theoretical physics…

Okay, so to put those items into a list of four categories in which a time-travel story can excel and rise above the average mediocre time-travel tale:

  1. Entertaining/well-written

  2. Emotionally powerful/sentimental

  3. Mind-blowing

  4. Actually accurate or steeped in scientific knowledge/theoretical physics

In this thread, I’m asking you to share YOUR (dreamt up by YOU yourself) best Time Travel Stories OR “Ideas related to Time Travel but not fully fleshed out into a full story/narrative.” And when I say “best”, I mean that it excels in one or more of those four categories above.

I’ll start us off by sharing a couple of mine:

I’ll start with the weakest: a few years ago I started dreaming up some Back To The Future fan fiction, and, long story short, one cool idea I came up with was the idea of having hoverboards with built-in flux capacitors (obviously future advanced models of the flux capacitor are contained in much thinner boxes :grinning:), so once you get the board up to 88…

Also, the dozen or so “episode” ideas I came up with were really cool because they involved travelling to times and places that are not just cliche time-travel time-periods and situations that we’ve seen ad nauseam (“Ooh, I’m getting chased by a dinosaur! Ooh, George Washington! Ooh, everyone on every street corner in the 1970s sported an afro while wearing bell-bottoms!”)

Okay, now for my good and original and fleshed-out idea: I have an idea for a story series called Band Of Busters. Here’s why this Time-Travel narrative really floats my boat:

  1. A group of about 12 guys are sent back in time on a mission, and their mission involves them being in Europe in the early to mid 1940s with WWII happening all around them, and yet they’re mission has nothing to do with WWII!! :smiley: A good 85% of the narrative involves them interacting with WWII or being hindered by WWII, but they are not there to change anything about WWII.

  2. Moral Ambiguity: these guys are getting paid vast sums of money to complete this mission, and yet their mission is one that is not actually some heroic or epic one; they’re not saving the world, they’re not preventing a big tragedy, they’re actually doing something that’s a little dark and twisted and selfish and greedy and a little criminal. I don’t call it “evil” but I definitely don’t call it “heroic or good.”

  3. The mission they’re on is not only morally ambiguous, but also bizarre, random, eyeroll-inducing, laughable, ridiculous, WTF-spit-take-inducing, unimportant (in the big cosmic scheme of things), and absurd.

Get this: in the year 2040, the powerful and shady heads of a major corporation (let’s call it Corporation B) have gotten their hands on time travel. They send this group of 12 assembled agents back in time to WWII-era Europe on a mission- and that mission is to wipe out the existence of Corporation A, their main competitor that they have always been Second-Place/“In the shadow” of.

Pretty dark and morally ambiguous, right? But get this:

It’s basically IHOP sending agents back in time to erase Denny’s.

That’s right, “Corporation B” as I called it above is actually some kind of American/Global pancake restaurant chain Megacorporation that’s sending these agents back in time to wipe out the existence of the only chain that has always eclipsed them in dominance.

Imagine Burger King erases McDonald’s from history.

What are your best ideas?

2

All I’ve got is the equivlanet of a footnote in category 4. Brilliant inventor successfully develops a time travel device. Then spends the rest of his life trying to find a way to compensate for the fact that the planet isn’t where it would have been at any not-immediately-recent time in the past. Even the damn galaxy itself is moving.

3

Along those lines, you could also point out that “time” is probably an illusion/delusion programmed by evolution into animal brains like ours so that everything wouldn’t seem to happen all at once, which it probably does. The beginning of the universe/everything, and the end/infinite life of the universe/everything- and all events in-between- may have all occurred at the same infinitely short and non-existing “moment” or “instant.”

Also, here’s a thought I just had a few hours ago after posting my OP- if time travel is possible, there’s probably more than one way or method- or even countless ways or methods- to invent/achieve time travel. As far as I know, we’ve never had a story in which, say, one guy invents time travel by creating a flux capacitor or some made up thing, and another guy around the same time has invented time travel by creating an artificial wormhole in a laboratory, and a third guy (not guy- let’s say an attractive woman, just to make things interesting :grinning:) has discovered a chemical mixture that when mixed allows particles/people to move backwards in time for just a few hours, let’s say, and… You get the idea.

4

A friend of mine came up with the idea of a jackpot lottery being used by a government agency to capture time-travelers (obviously because they win).

It seems like a cool idea…

5

That is pretty cool!

6

If you can make any money from it, throw a little my way.

7

I’m going back and kicking all of the Founding Fathers in the balls for putting the electoral college into the Constitution. The End.

8

I posted this previously in another thread, but my idea was to upgrade the Sid & Marty Kroft Saturday morning show Land of the Lost from a kiddie show to serious science fiction (and the played-for-laughs Will Ferrell abomination shall henceforth not be mentioned). As I previously put it:

An artificial universe, built by a now-extinct race of intelligent dinosaurs. The struggle of the Marshall family in the short term to survive and in the long term learn enough about an almost Clarke-level technology to seek a way home. Hints that somehow the LotL is important both to humanity’s primeval origins and it’s deep future. An alien being (the Zarn) with an agenda most unfavorable to the human species.

9

I searched and found the thread you’re referring to, and was disappointed it wasn’t specifically about time travel stories. If there are any other threads from the past about sharing ideas for our own time travel stories, let me know- I found none while searching.

You know, there was an early 90s version that lasted a little over a year- it was the Kroft duo again, and it was also aired on Saturday mornings, so you could have been referring to either one.

Are you aware of Spielberg’s Terra Nova, which aired for all of three months? Terra Nova (TV series) - Wikipedia

10

My half-baked idea — which seems so obvious that I’m guessing someone else has already written it — is that an eccentric tinkerer slaps together a time machine in his garage (a) that lets someone travel back in time, (b) but without fully understanding just how he’s pulled it off; he hasn’t figured out that the only power source capable of that feat would require destroying the entire universe in the process of draining it to serve as fuel. Because, well, from his perspective, he, uh, just left, y’know?

So the oblivion that would be here now if he fired it up today is what he doesn’t see as he makes his way to yesterday; it’s what then doesn’t ensue, as he lives through today and next week and so on, until he fires it up again a month from tomorrow, which is when that universe dies when he feels like going back a year or two for shits and giggles.

The punchline, of course, is what happens if he eventually decides to set the machine’s controls for a quick trip to the future…

11

I think I mentioned this idea here before to see if anyone had seen this idea anywhere and nobody could recall it having been done.
Starts very typical ‘seen this before’ where a character wakes up as their younger self from 20 years ago and they slowly come to realize it’s 2004 again. However, they soon come to discover this has happened to everybody on earth at the same time. And everyone still has their memories intact from 2004 to 2024.
The possibilities for all the different ramifications of such an event are endless.
Anyone born after 2004 would cease to exist. Anyone who died after 2004 would be alive again. Everyone would be back in their jobs from 2004 but probably would have forgotten how to perform them. Toddlers and even infants now have the knowledge and memories of their adult self.
Fortune 500 start-up companies would cease to exist and the “big ideas” they were founded upon are now up for grabs. Bush is president again and any future elections are open game.
If you were married after 2004 you are single again.
People who were prosecuted or canceled for their mis-deeds that happened pre 2004 but were revealed post 2004 (think P-Diddy, Weinstein, Cosby) are free again but everyone knows what they did.
This could almost become a tv series that explores a different ramification story each week.

12

This is mentioned at the beginning of Elan Mastai’s really clever time travel novel All Our Wrong Todays.

Even where I come from, time travel was considered more or less impossible. Not because of time, actually, but because of space.

Here’s why every time-travel movie you’ve ever seen is total bullshit: because the Earth moves.

You know this. Plus I mentioned it last chapter. The Earth spins all the way around once a day, revolves around the Sun once a year, while the Sun is on its own cosmic route through the solar system, which is itself hurtling through a galaxy that’s wandering an epic path through the universe.

The ground under you is moving, really fast. Along the equator, the Earth rotates at over 1,000 miles per hour, twenty-four hours a day, while orbiting the Sun at a little over 67,000 miles per hour. That’s 1,600,000 miles per day. Meanwhile our solar system is in motion relative to the Milky Way galaxy at more than 1,300,000 miles per hour, covering just shy of 32,000,000 miles per day. And so on.

If you were to travel back in time to yesterday, the Earth would be in a different place in space. Even if you travel back in time one second, the Earth below your feet can move nearly half a kilometer. In one second.

The reason every movie about time travel is nonsense is that the Earth moves, constantly, always. You travel back one day, you don’t end up in the same location—you end up in the gaping vacuum of outer space.

Marty McFly didn’t appear thirty years earlier in his hometown of Hill Valley, California. His tricked-out DeLorean materialized in the endless empty blackness of the cosmos with the Earth approximately 350,000,000,000 miles away. Assuming he didn’t immediately lose consciousness from the lack of oxygen, the absence of air pressure would cause all the fluids in his body to bubble, partially evaporate, and freeze. He would be dead in less than a minute.

The Terminator would probably survive in space because it’s an unstoppable robot killing machine, but traveling from 2029 to 1984 would’ve given Sarah Connor a 525,000,000,000-mile head start.

13

I had an idea that was supposed to fall into category two, and I envisioned it as an Outer Limits or Twilight episode format. I’m sure someone out there has done something grossly similar, although I haven’t seen it come up.

So if one of you talented persons takes it and runs with it successfully feel free to share the credit and the $$$. :wink:

Unintentional Timetravel:

Earth in the not-too distant future has become (more of!) a dystopian hellhole. A small group of elites is chosen to pilot an experimental FTL ship to a new planet to make sure the FTL is viable as is the target.

The FTL takes a process of weeks to approach .9c under semi-conventional acceleration, after which they’re supposed to “flip the switch” which kicks them over into FTL (technobabble).

During this period, the situation on Earth is growing worse at an unexpectedly fast rate, the center can not hold, and it’s doubtful that even the first colony ship being built concurrently will even be completed. Much of the crew begins to believe that humanity should be allowed to destroy itself, rather than destroy another planet.

Finally, as information from Earth is cut off (still bad) by their ever increasing speed and distance, the majority of the crew mutiny. Most are killed, with only two bridge crew, one male, one female (not going where you think it’s going, but playing to that expectation) who finally reach the target .9c and flip the switch.

The ship speeds up and hits FTL according to the sensors, but the actual effects are the ship “bounces” off of spacetime and begins heading backwards in both time and space, on a reciprocal course to Earth.

As they approach, the remaining two crew realize what is happening but quickly realize that they are now a displaced “bubble” outside the universe, more-or-less unable to effect it in anyway (very cool visual of the ship phasing through it’s past self shortly before the drive was engaged) and eventually end up back at Earth, with enough fuel to enable a viable orbit for years or decades (remember they had enough fuel originally to go to the other planet, check it, and come back along with supplies for such for the entire crew).

Time continues to wind back in the bubble, and they get to see the Earth slowly “recover” or get better, seeing all the steps they could make to avoid the future they come from (many desperate attempts are made to communicate, each of which could contribute to an ongoing storyline if this was in mini-series format).

Still, eventually, they realize there is not chance to change things, and hope that the future is never fixed, and that things will happen differently the next time. Supplies running low, and critical systems are no longer able to be maintained. Cut to black above an Earth at some dramatic point in Industrial history (Atom bomb test, Sputnik, etc).

14

The closest two examples I can think of:

  1. The original Jumanji movie, in which both Robin Williams and Bonnie Hunt are sent back into the 1960s and into their 12 or 13 year old bodies.

  2. In a 2004 episode of Charmed, a character at her high school reunion accidentally casts a spell that turns them all mentally but not physically back into their teenaged selves (thus they have no memory of the next 10 or 20 years, but they’re all their younger selves in their now-adult bodies in the present age). Hyde School Reunion

15

The whole idea of the Earth moving out from under you if you time travel presumes that there’s such a thing as absolute locations in space; as it were, “gridlines” marking out “you are here”. We know from Special Relativity that that’s not true.

16

My attempt to build a Hieronymous machine.

17

There’s a book, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, in which the main characters live in time loops. they’re born, live a life, and when they die, they return to their original birthdate with their memories largely intact. Harry August is born in 1919, and it occurred to me: that’s just about the right time for someone to be the right age to fight in WWII.

So I’d like a story about that guy. His first life, he gets drafted for WWII, fights and dies, most likely. Then he does it again. He eventually decides he wants to experience the entirety of the war. Every branch of service, every theatre of combat, as many different jobs as he can get. He’s an infantryman, and airborne ranger, a marine, a pilot, a naval aviator, a ship’s crewman, enlisted man, officer, OSS operative, codebreaker, physicist on the Manhattan Project, you name it. Some lives, he gets cut short by being in the wrong place at the wrong time (heck, it’s war out there!), some lives, he survives the whole show and has to deal with what kind of post-war life he might have.

Eventually, he’s basically the biggest bad ass on the planet, but he’s also dealing with the trauma of nearly endless war. A few lives, he says fuck it, and finds some out of the way place to sit this cycle out.

18

On another forum I came up with the idea of a time travel based power plant. It presumes the Many Worlds Interpetation of quantum mechanics is true, and works by sending energy back in time. Since there are more futures than pasts, more energy arrives from the future than is sent to the past so there’s a net gain of energy.

Not time travel but close, since FTL overlaps with time travel. I recall a short story where an FTL drive is invented, but it turns out that using it consumes the entire universe as fuel since it requires an infinite amount of energy to accelerate past lightspeed. "Any universe can build a ship that can travel faster than the speed of light; once."

19

In quantum mechanics, there is the same number of “futures” as “pasts”. Just saying :slight_smile:

20

A time traveler wants to throw the party of all parties on the night when global nuclear war broke out, and he wants to book pretty much the entire house at a specific luxury hotel to host this party. In order to ensure that he can get the reservation without arousing anyone’s suspicions, he incrementally changes the past first to the point of making himself insanely wealthy, then contributing to the hotel’s development and expansion and survival over the course of nearly a century, then ultimately setting into motion the chain of events that cause the nuclear war to break out in the first place, so he can have the time of his life before the party itself gets nuked.

The ultimate ouroborous of suicidal decadence. The bare bones of it came to me in a dream several years ago and it’s been percolating in my brain ever since.