A young man and his cousin inherit a clock that takes them back to the siege of Leyden at the start of October 1574, where they affect that time as much as it has affected them. This is travel in a machine (or at least an artifact), but they have no control over the destination.

In which H. G. Wells’s third foray into time travel finalizes the story of our favorite unnamed Traveller and his machine, all in the form that we know and love.

The two earlier forays were The Chronic Argonaut (which was abandoned after three installments in his school magazine) and seven fictionalized National Observer essays (which sketched out the Traveller and his machine, including a glimpse of the future and proto-Morlocks). The story of The Time Machine itself had three 1895 iterations:

[list][*]A five-part serial in the January through May issues of New Review, The serial contains mostly the story as we know it, but with an alternate chunk in the introduction where the Traveller discusses free will, predestination, and a Laplacian determinism of the universe.

In addition, material from Chapter XIII of the serial (just over a thousand words beginning partway through the first paragraph of page 577 and continuing to page 579, line 29) were omitted from later editions. This section was written for the serial after a back-and-forth written struggle between Wells and New Review editor William Henley. The material had a separate mimeographed publication by fan and Futurian Robert W. Lowndes in 1940 as “The Final Men” and has since had multiple publications elsewhere with varying titles such as “The Gray Man.”[/*]

[*]The US edition: The Time Machine: An Invention, by H. G. Wells (erroneously credited as H. S. Wells in the first release), Henry Holt [publisher], May 1895. This edition may have been completed before the serial, as it varies from the serial more so than the UK edition. It does not contain the extra material in the first chapter or “The Final Men” (although it does have a few additional sentences at that point of Chapter XIII).[/*]

[*]The UK edition: The Time Machine: An Invention,by H. G. Wells, William Heinemann [publisher], May 1895. This edition is a close match to the serial, with the exception of chapter breaks, the extra material in the first chapter, and “The Final Men” (omitted from what is now Chapter XIV).[/*]
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Beerbohm (then an undergraduate at Oxford) feels something near to reverence toward the Catholic diabolist Enoch Soames, seeing as how the man from Preston has published one book of stories and has another book of poems forthcoming, but over time, Enoch himself becomes more and more morose and unsatisfied that he shall never see his own work appreciated in future years.

Harry Wright goes to bed on Monday night, skips over Tuesday, and wakes up in a Wednesday that’s not quite been built yet.

More and more strange people are appearing each day in and around Oliver Wilson’s home; the explanation from the euphoric redhead leads him to believe they are time travelers gathering for an important event.

Spinrad’s tells of a man for whom every event in his life happens simultaneously, which is perhaps the ultimate in time travel.

I’m a little surprised at how much I am enjoying Gene Wolfe’s stories. This is a fantasy of a man who builds an exact replica of a Fokker triplane; then, one day on a flight, he sees a beautiful girl in a vintage balloon, an event that seems explicable only via time travel.

The story puts me in the mood of Jack Finney’s wonderful non-time-travel story, “Home Alone.”

A nameless narrator (called Nanette by an overly zealous copy-editor in the If publication) tells of time-traveler Yuri’s return as a dying old man and of the subsequent times when she visited him. I enjoyed that beginning part of the story, but the ending, as the narrator herself ages, spoke to me more deeply.

I met Pamela Sargent in Lawrence, Kansas, at Jim Gunn’s writing workshop. She was insightful and kind to the young writers who came to learn from her and other talented writers.

Tom Perman remembers his home town differently, but in his actual life, the town is run-down and neither his grandmother nor her elegant house exist—a situation Tom can explain only through changes made to the past by Loob, the town idiot; although ironically, it’s only through those changes that Loob himself even exists.

Marcus, an aspirant to the highest rank afforded to members of the Arcanum Temple, undergoes an experiment to determine what awaits us after death, and the answer certainly involves time in a macabre manner.

During an important presidential election between the slick Harman and the less polished Ferris, scientists detect eyes that are watching Harman from the future, perhaps because he is fated to be such an important political figure.

Rather more frequently than I’d like, it’s hard to tell whether a story involves time travel or not. This could just be a ghost fish story, but there are some indications that the old toothless door-to-door salesman might be traveling back to the time of the early fish.

The narrator tells of a time travel paradox where a girl of fifteen meets Day Curtis who has come from a disaster that’s still another sixteen years in the future—and she returns to the scene years later to warn him.

Nick Mikklesen and his wife Janine know that Janine’s ex-husband is out to break up their marriage by altering the past.

After a nuclear war, Americans attempt to prevent the rise of Russia at the outset of the 19th century by traveling back to that time and inhabiting the bodies of key Finnish and Swedish military men during the siege of Sveaborg.

I read the English translation from Châteaureynaud’s collection, A Life on Paper (2010). The story tells of a man who returns to occupied France during World War II on the morning that his mother was killed by an errant bomb. I enjoyed the writing, but was unsatisfied with the ending.

Tasco Magnon, time traveler, decides to take his new bride on his next trip through time—a quest to find the mythical Knot in Time—where the two of them get trapped, and only one can return.

After Smith’s death in 1966, the story was completed by his wife, Genevieve Linebarger, and sold to Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Vision, but that anthology was endlessly delayed. So in 1987, a translated version of the story was published in a French collection of Smith’s stories, and that was the first published version (although we’ve listed it as an English story, since that’s how it was written). The English version was finally published in Smith’s 1993 complete short science fiction collection by NESFA. By then, Ellison’s rights to the story had expired, although that didn’t stop him from suing NESFA.

A physics guy invents a time machine that can go only backward and must always return the traveler to the exact same present from which he left.

Miriam and her fellow time travelers, John and Stan, set up camp in an abandoned watchtower to observe and record the siege of the walled city-state Plataea in the Peloponnesian War.

When a lawyer from the future decides to rent an apartment in 1968 San Francisco, she must first sign your standard temporal noninterference contract—yeah, like that one ever holds up in court!

When Alan’s coworker tells him that an old women’s magazine has a romance story called “The Love That Conquered Time” with Alan himself as the hero, he is dubious, but he reads the thing nonetheless.

At 18, Hideo leaves his family and his planet, O, to become part of a group that invents instantaneous transportation—a device that ends up taking him back to the time that he first left Planet O.

I wouldn’t have used the word palindromic to describe the happenings of this story: Aliens arrive in 1964, and their sense of time is backward from ours. It’s not palindromic because they experience the events in backward order: If I spell out the word time, they will hear e-m-i-t. It would be cool, however, to have a real palindromic story where some sequence of events in reverse is the same as that sequence experienced forward, like the expression emit time.

P.S. I just stumbled across another time travel story that is an actual palindrome! The Palindrome Paradox.

Thirty-year-old Dr. Carol McCullough, a physics post-doc at Berkeley, worships Sara Baxter Clarke, a rare woman physicist who died in 1956 before she could present her paper giving an argument for a practical tempokinetics.

At twenty-one, Justin Kloster has it made: one more year of college and then happily ever after with his sweetheart Megan. Then his forty-year-old self shows up to prevent Justin from making terrible mistakes that will lead to an eventual nasty divorce with Megan.

Turtledove tells the story twice: once from the Justin-21’s point-of-view and once from that of Justin-40. Together, the stories form a short novel-length work that can be read in either order.

More horror than anything else, but amusing nevertheless as an internet stalker in 2001 communicates via a Ouija board with a psychic in 1923.

A pregnant woman calls her future daughter at age sixteen (at a cost of nearly 18,000 euros) to find out whether the daughter was glad she was born—and she’s not the only one calling into different times.

Cheena’s husband comes back to the port around the wormhole—dead, though the death is in the future, and she doesn’t bother to tell him.

In a world where time travel can retrieve past historical figures, Dr. Satyavati Brahmaptura (now a colleague of poet John Keats) receives permission from the History Department to nab Christopher Marlowe in order to prove that he was really a she.

Gene Wolfe has such subtle plots and such perfection of word choice that he lulls you into a story without your ever realizing that you are in a story—even his titles are perfection. In this story, an apparent time traveler finds himself on a journey with Greek gods and mortals, but cannot remember who he is or why he was sent to this far past.

Aseem, a sometimes suicidal man in Delhi, sees and interacts with past and future versions of the city while he searches for the woman who a computer says is his purpose in life.

An artist named Greg, who never wanted to have children, becomes close to Kamla, an adopted daughter of a friend; the situation works out fine, even when Greg does have an unexpected child with his girlfriend, and even when Kamla turns out to be one of the thousands of children with extremely slow-growing bodies and minds from the future.

Bradbury’s time safari story is not improved by 90 minutes of melodramatic nonsense.

An incident at the Institute for Advanced Physics brings a herd of Triceratops to present-day Vermont, which is certainly a worry, but according to Everett McCoughlan of the Institute, that will be the least of our worries by the end of the summer.

Carrie Vaughn lives just down the road from me, and I met her once at a reading. Her voice captured me, and her stories do too, although this tale—of time traveling thieves, Madeline and her nemesis Ned, who gain their ability from dancing—did not grab me as much as her non-time-travel story, “The Librarian’s Daughter.”

In the north of Khurosan—not part of our world—lies the site of a bloody battle between the Warriors and the Scholars, both of whom have come through time to take Islamic boys and turn them into soldiers in their war, but one boy’s uncle gives him to a man who promises to take him to a safe place or possibly a safe time.

A curious story about a curious girl, Augusta Prima, who lives in the most perfect of the eight lands, a land where places and time (and other abstractions, I would say) float in an unmeasurable way.

After its original Swedish publication, this story was translated to English and widely reprinted, including Weird Tales, Lightspeed and The Time Traveler’s Almanac. Artistic stories tend to be hit-or-miss with me (mostly miss). This one hit, but I never seem to be able to say why.

I am a sucker for a soppy, romantic time-travel story. In this case, linguist Kate Tannhauser is one of the members of a team that’s assembled to deal with the arrival of a man who can be nothing but Prince Madoc of Gwynedd—a twelfth-century Welsh seafarer who seems to be skipping through time at 75-year intervals—and Kate intends to be with him on the next skip.

As much as I love Asimov’s The End of Eternity, I’ve also always wondered about the logistics of Eternity’s access to the different centuries. Stross stated that his story, which begins with a clever hazing ritual for Agent Pierce to join the Stasis organization, was a rewrite of Asimov’s story, and I’d hoped that it would address the questions in the back of my mind. Did it? No, although it did take the ideas to a trillion-year span of history hacking and solar system engineering.

Images from the past: not time travel. Precognition of the future: not time travel. But images from the future: yes, time travel. (I know the rules can be difficult to grasp, but it will come to you.) In this case, the whole family, plus the Willards from next door, gather ’round to see the first broadcast of their own future.

Without completely forbidding it, the government allows limited time travel: Each person may send a single letter from himself or herself at age 50 back to age 18 with information about a single event, though not everyone sends the letter and not everyone approves of the procedure. Our narrator did not receive the letter when she was young, and now she approaches 50 as a counselor for others who do not receive a letter.

Because of Hwang’s problem, he ends up in odd, far future times, trying to make connections to his daughters.

Dr. Rosamund Tilly lives in a house that fights her every step of her life, including a day when it keeps resetting time to 8:14.

John, Ellie and Marcus have a spot in late 16th century London where they live nine months of the year to escape the destruction of the Now, but even the future of that space is uncertain as the enemy hunts them.