My Wife Hates Time Travel

by Adam-Troy Castro

Release: September 2012
Format: Short Story
Genre: Comedy
Audience: Adults
Content: Definite Time Travel
Original Language: English

When a not-so-brilliant man and his similarly equipped wife find out that one of them is destined to invent time travel, they end up continuously fighting, not the least cause of which is their future selves popping in all the time, intent on informing them that they should do this and not that.

— Michael Main

Being the future inventors of time travel wasn’t all bad, of course. It was great to know that we’d never lose anything, never go to a movie that turned out to be a stinker, never buy a book we wouldn’t want to finish, never go out to a restaurant where the service was lousy, and never get stuck in a traffic jam, because we’d always be warned away, beforehand. It was terrific to have some future version of myself pop in just as I was about to irritate my wife with some inconsiderate comment and tell me, “It would be a really bad idea to say that.”

DEBUT

“My Wife Hates Time Travel,” in Lightspeed, September 2012.

VARIANTS

1 English variant

TAGS(SPOILERS!)

Time Periods

Circa AD 2000 to 2099: presumed

Timeline Models

Multiple Naive Timelines
Narrative Time: When the narrator and his wife make a decision to not invent time travel, their future selves fade away.

Time Travel Methods

Unexplained Time Travel Methods

Themes

Fix Your Own Past!: on steroids
Selves-Visitation

Real-World Tags

Neanderthals and Other Cavemen

Fictional Tags

TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY: We haven’t yet mapped out the time travel itinerary.