Time travel in fiction

Time travel is a common theme in science fiction and is depicted in a variety of media. It simply means either going forward in time or backward, to experience the future, or the past.

Literature

Time travel can form the central theme of a book, or it can be simply a plot device. Time travel in fiction can ignore the possible effects of the time traveler's actions, as in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, or it can use one resolution or another of the Grandfather paradox.

Early stories featuring time travel

Although The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was instrumental in causing the idea of time travel to enter the public imagination, non-technological forms of time travel had appeared in a number of earlier stories, and some even earlier stories featured elements suggestive of time travel, but remain somewhat ambiguous.

• In ancient Hindu mythology, the Mahabharatha mentions the story of the King Revaita, who travels to a different world to meet the creator Brahma and is shocked to learn that many ages have passed when he returns to Earth.
• Urashima Tarō, an early Japanese tale, involves traveling forwards in time to a distant future, and was first described in the Nihongi (720). It was about a young fisherman named Urashima Taro who visits an undersea palace and stays there for three days. After returning home to his village, he finds himself three hundred years in the future, where he is long forgotten, his house in ruins, and his family long dead.
• Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) by Samuel Madden is mainly a series of letters from English ambassadors in various countries to the British "Lord High Treasurer", along with a few replies from the British foreign office, all purportedly written in 1997 and 1998 and describing the conditions of that era. However, the framing story is that these letters were actual documents given to the narrator by his guardian angel one night in 1728; for this reason, Paul Alkon suggests in his book Origins of Futuristic Fiction that "the first time-traveler in English literature is a guardian angel who returns with state documents from 1998 to the year 1728", although the book does not explicitly show how the angel obtained these documents. Alkon later qualifies this by writing "It would be stretching our generosity to praise Madden for being the first to show a traveler arriving from the future", but also says that Madden "deserves recognition as the first to toy with the rich idea of time-travel in the form of an artifact sent backwards from the future to be discovered in the present."
• in Walter Map's 12th century De nugis curialium (Courtiers' Trifles), Map tells of the Briton King Herla, who is transported with his hunting party over two centuries into the future by the enchantment of a mysterious harlequin.
• In the play Anno 7603, written by the Dano-Norwegian poet Johan Herman Wessel in 1781, the two main characters are moved to the future (AD 7603) by a good fairy.
• Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving's 1819 story, is about a man named Rip Van Winkle who takes a nap at a mountain and wakes up twenty years in the future, where he has been forgotten, his wife deceased, and his daughter grown up.
• In 1843, the Charles Dickens novella A Christmas Carol depicts Ebeneezer Scrooge being transported back and forth in time to points in his own lifetime by a series of ghosts to visit Christmases Past, Present and Future.
• In the science fiction anthology Far Boundaries (1951), the editor August Derleth identifies the short story Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism, written for the Dublin University Magazine by an anonymous author in 1838, as a very early time travel story. In this story, the narrator is waiting under a tree to be picked up by a coach which will take him out of Newcastle, when he suddenly finds himself transported back over a thousand years, where he encounters the Venerable Bede in a monastery, and gives him somewhat ironic explanations of the developments of the coming centuries. It is never entirely clear whether these events actually occurred or were merely a dream.
• The book Paris avant les hommes (Paris before Men) by the French botanist and geologist Pierre Boiterd, published posthumously in 1861, in which the main character is transported to various prehistoric settings by the magic of a "lame demon", and is able to actively interact with prehistoric life.
• The short story The Clock That Went Backward, written by editor Edward Page Mitchell appeared in the New York Sun in 1881, another early example of time travel in fiction.
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark Twain.
• Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy and News from Nowhere (1890) by William Morris, which features' a protagonist who wakes up in a socialist utopian future.
• Tourmalin's Time Cheques (1891) by Thomas Anstey Guthrie (written under the pseudonym F. Anstey) was the first story to play with the paradoxes that time travel could cause.
• Golf in the Year 2000 (1892) by J. McCullough tells the story of an Englishman who fell asleep in 1892 and awakens in the year 2000. The focus of the book is how the game of golf would have changed by then, but many social and technological themes are also discussed along the way, including a device similar to television and women's equality.

Time travel themes and ideological function

A number of themes tend to recur in time travel stories, often with enough variations to make them interesting.

• Changing the past: in this genre, a visitor to the past changes history using knowledge and/or technology from their own time, either for good or evil, or sometimes accidentally, creating an alternate history as a result. Examples of this genre include Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp.
• The Guardians of Time: in this genre, a group of people are charged with ensuring that time turns out 'properly' (or protecting it from changes by other travelers). This includes The Big Time and the other Change War stories by Fritz Leiber, Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time, Simon Hawke's TimeWars series, Simon Lee's Timekeepers, A Tempus Viator Novel and The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. Another example of this concept is the Doctor Who sci-fi series, whose main character is a "Time Lord" called the "the Doctor" who personally intervenes to fight the evil he encounters if he is called on to do so and whose people are essentially scholars and historians who usually only observe histories.
• Preventing a bad future: in this genre, the main characters learn, either by going to the future and returning or by the arrival of a time traveler from the future, that the future has not turned out well, having either turned into a dystopia or resulting in the end of the world. The characters then try to change something in the present which prevents said future from coming to pass. The Terminator franchise includes several stories of time travelers from the future, waging disputes to influence a post-apocalyptic future.
• Unintentional change or fulfillment: in this genre, a time traveler intends to observe past events, or is taken to the past against his will and tries to return to his proper time. However, the time traveler discovers that his actions have unintentionally altered the future because of the Butterfly effect. A Sound of Thunder and Ripples of Suicide (a scientist goes back in time to kill himself) are examples of this genre.

The time travel motif also has an ideological function because it literally provides the necessary distancing effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that concern people in the present. If the modern world is one where the individuals feel alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out.

— Sean Redmond, Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)

Time travel as a defining characteristic of science fiction

Science fiction is, in essence, a time travel genre. Events either open in the altered past, the transformed present, or the possible future, transporting the reader or viewer to another age, place, dimension or world.

— Sean Redmond, Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)

When science fiction time travels one truly knows that one is in science fiction because time travel provides […] the futuristic narrative dynamic needed for the genre.

— Sean Redmond, Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)

Time travel in science fiction versus fantasy

Stories that involve time travel devices and technologies that take people backwards and forwards in time and space are considered part of the science fiction genre, whereas stories that involve time travel through supernatural, magical, or unexplained means are considered part of the fantasy genre.

The genre of science fiction is often characterized by incorporating technology either as “a driving force of the story, or merely the setting for drama.” Therefore, it is this key component—technology—that can be used to distinguish between time travel of the science fiction and fantasy realms.

Isaac Asimov, when asked to explain the difference between science fiction and fantasy, once explained that science fiction, given its grounding in science, is possible; fantasy, which has no grounding in reality, is not.

Any story involving time travel may be considered to include an element of science fiction. However, novels and short stories from the science fiction genre usually feature time travel via technology (a 'time machine') rather than time travel by supernatural means, and often play with the possibility of time paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox.

The concept of time as erratic appears frequently in fantastic folklore, British and Irish particularly. However, "time travel" as such is not particularly implied. Ordinarily a mortal human who spends time in the realm of the fairies or other "little people" returns to find that either a very long time has passed in the world relative to what he experienced, or a very brief time. The Oriental tales cited above may be actually more in this line than "time travel" itself. A common example is the man who dances all night with the fairies, and when day dawns, he finds it is not the next day, but that a year, or a century, has passed. The converse example appears in modern times in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, of C. S. Lewis' book series "The Chronicles of Narnia." During the course of the novel, four World War Two-era children are magically transported to the fantastic land of Narnia, are instrumental in liberating the land from an evil tyrant, and become themselves the long-prophesied king and queen of Narnia. At the conclusion of the story, the four, who have lived perhaps half a lifetime in Narnia and seem to have forgotten their life on Earth, return home at virtually the moment after their departure, and with their original memories intact.

See also

• List of time travel science fiction
  • List of time travel science fiction literature
  • List of time travel science fiction films
  • List of time travel science fiction television
• List of television series that include time travel
• List of games containing time travel

• Ontological paradox
• Grandfather paradox
• Predestination paradox
• Time viewer

External links

• timelinks - the big list of time travel video, time travel movies, & time travel TV - over 700 movies and television programs featuring time travel
• SciFan: Time Travel - Time Control - Time Warp - list of over 2400 books featuring time travel
• Aparta Krystian. Conventional Models of Time and Their Extensions in Science Fiction A master's thesis exploring conceptual blending in time travel.
• Andy's Anachronisms - Exploring the themes of Time Travel and Alternate Universes in Literature and Entertainment
• Ultimate Time Travel - Reviewing books, movies and computer games that deal with concept of Time Travel
• Time Travel Movies - Reviews and clips of the some more influential movies involving time travel.