Free Will, Fate, and Determinism

Tag Area: Time Travel Trope
Novel

Not in Our Stars


After a meteor strike and some scientific mumbo-jumbo, Felix Menzies wakes up in a jail cell on the day before his execution for murdering the man he wrongly thought was his wife’s lover—an act he doesn’t remember—, and then he starts waking up on each previous morning, whereupon he begins to think he can cheat Destiny by not murdering the guy in the first place. —Michael Main
If he did meet Savile, he was prepared to shake hands with him in the old way, and to realize what a neurotic fool he had been: also that Destiny had made an idiot of itself with the careless blundering born of the knowledge that nobody would ever know, nobody, that is, except himself; and, of course, Destiny safely relied on the assumption that nobody would believe him.
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  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Weird Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novella

The Atom-Smasher


We've got the evil Professor Tode (who modifies an atom-smasher into a time machine that travels to the Palaeolithic and to Atlantis), a fatherly older professor, his beautiful young daughter (menaced by evil Tode), casually written racist pronouncements (by Rousseau), and our hero scientist, the dashing Jim Dent. But my favorite sentence was the brief description of quantum mechanics, which I didn’t expect in a 1930 science fiction tale. —Michael Main
The Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of a body cannot vary continuously, but only by a certain finite amount, or exact multiples of this amount, had been the key that unlocked the door.
Black and white drawing of a young man, a young woman, and an old man staring
                into a brightly lit crevice.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Hindsight


Years ago, engineer Bill Webster abandoned Earth for the employ of the piratical Astrarch far beyond the orbit of Mars; now the Astrarch is aiming the final blow at a defeated Earth, and Bill wonders whether the gun sights he invented can spot—and change!—events in the past. —Michael Main
The tracer fields are following all the world lines that intersected at the battle, back across the months and years. The analyzers will isolate the smallest—hence most easily altered—essential factor.
Pen-and-ink drawing of a man standing at a futuristic control panel, looking at
                a wall-sized hatched screen displaying a flying ship.
  • Science Fiction
  • War
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

It Happened Tomorrow


One day at the end of the 19th century, newspaperman Larry Stevens is given the gift of tomorrow’s newspaper by the ghost of the archive man, Pops Benson. That leads him to improve his position at the newspaper by scooping a story, but it also leads to trouble, more of tomorrow’s papers, and a romance with the alluring clairvoyant Sylvia.

So why do I count this as time travel when, for example, The Gap in the Curtain is not? The future newspapers in Gap never actually appeared, and it felt as if they were mere visions of a possible future, whereas we had no doubt that Larry holds an actual copy of tomorrow’s paper in his hands. And besides, It Happened Tomorrow had a great take on how events may be fated and yet, when accompanied by charming misunderstandings, lead to the unexpected.

Early Edition, one of my favorite TV shows, uses the same idea of tomorrow’s paper, but its creators said that the show was not based on this movie. —Michael Main
But I’m afraid I’m going to end up at the St. George Hotel at 6:25 no matter where I go.
Dressed in fancy suits, Dick Powell (as Larry Stevens) and Linda Darnell (as
                Sylvia) hold up a banner announcing the cast of It Happened Tomorrow.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

Passage to Gomorrah


In a future of FTL spaceships, time storms between the stars, and male-only space explorers, young Berenice had run away to the stars as a sex worker. But when she inexplicably becomes pregnant, the powers-that-be book passage for her on Captain Cross’s ship to the exhile planet called Gomorrah. —Michael Main
“But wouldn’t our objective reality be affected?”

He nodded. “It could be,” he said, “since, in the absence of any real passage of time, it would be in temporal ratio to our involvement in our pasts, which might force it into a different time plane altogether.”
Pen-and-ink drawing of a man in a whirlwind falling toward a nude woman with
                outstretched arms.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Book

Journey into Mystery #102

Death Comes to Thor!


Eighteen-year-old Thor seeks out the three prophetic Fates for the answer to whether he shall ever be awarded Odin’s enchanted hammer. —Michael Main
You can win Odin’s enchanted hammer—but you will have to meet death first!
Young Thor, without his hammer, climbs a grassy hill toward a rock outcrop
                where three cloaked figures stir a caldron.
  • Superhero
  • Folklore and Mythology
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Time Phenomena
Feature Film

The Time Travelers

  • written and directed by Ib Melchior
  • (at movie theaters, USA, 29 October 1964)

Using their time viewer, three scientists see a desolate landscape 107 years in the future, at which point the electrician realizes that the viewer has unexpectedly become a portal. All four jump through, only to have the portal collapse behind them, whereupon they are chased on the surface by Morlockish creatures who are afraid of thrown rocks, and they meet an advanced, post-apocalyptic, underground society that employs androids and is planning a generation-long trip to Alpha Centauri.

The film draws in at least four important additional time travel tropes: suspended animation, a single nonbranching, static timeline (with the corresponding inability to go back and change it), experiencing the passage of time at different rates, and a trip to the far future. And according to the SF Encyclopedia, the film was originally conceived as a sequel to the 1960 film of The Time Machine. —Michael Main
Isn’t it obvious? The war did happen. You never did go back with your warning.
A monster chases people across a rocket field--along with three other scenes
                from the future before it happens!
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Escape from the Planet of the Apes

  • by Paul Dehn, directed by Don Taylor
  • (premiered at an unknown movie theater, Los Angeles, 26 May 1971)

Among the original Apes movies, only this one had true time travel; the others involved only relativistic time dilation, which (as even Dr. Milo knows) is technically not time travel. But in this one, Milo, Cornelius, and Zira are blown back to the time of the original astronauts (given the violence of the explosion, we’re going to call it a time rift) and are persecuted in a 70s made-for-TV manner. —Michael Main
Given the power to alter the future, have we the right to use it?
Roddy McDowall (as Cornelius), Kim Hunter (as Zira), and Milo stand defiantly
                in front of a lineup of militia.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

“Willie’s Blues”


A music historian travels back to the 1930s to uncover the real story of how Willie Turnhill rose from an extra in the Curry Band to tenor sax virtuoso ever. —Michael Main
He thinks of me now as the one person who’ll be able to say who’s the original and who’s the plagiarist when “the other guy” does eventually turn up!
A radio-telescope in front of a futuristic skyline and a bulbous rocket
                launching vertically into an orange sky.
  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Music and Musicals
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Hot Tub Time Machine


Three middle-aged losers (along with a nephew) head back to their teenaged bodies at a ski resort twentysome years earlier. —Michael Main
Yes, exactly. You step on a bug and the fucking Internet is never invented.
An equation! Old mug shots of the four cast members plus alcohol plus squirrel
                equals young mug shots and a hot tub.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Flash Fiction

No Time


A battlefield plunderer meets his own dead self.
You get attacked, you have no backup, so you become your own.
A star emerging from behind a blue planet.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Time Lapse


Three friends stumble across a camera that produces pictures from 24 hours in the future. That no-good Jasper thinks to use it to make a fortune with his bookie, while painter Finn is happy to see a painting that he’s going to paint, resulting in a nice example of the artist paradox. And Callie has her own agenda going on. From there, the plot turns into a gory thriller where whatever the photos show, the three friends must make happen or they will die as Mr. B. did, all while the bookie’s henchmen threaten them all. —Michael Main
Mr. B. invented a camera that takes pictures of the future.
Danielle Panabaker (as Callie) stares straight-ahead from out of a clockface
                above a large, mechanical and electronic contraption.
  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

The Boy in His Winter


After Huck Finn and Jim fall asleep on an appropriated raft in Hannibal, Mo., they find themselves floating down the Mississippi for decades without ever aging a day themselves. —Michael Main
We came by the raft dishonestly. We’d only meant to do a little fishing. It was cool and nice under the big willow with its whips trailing over the water. Christ, it was a scorcher of a day. The whole town must have fallen asleep, along with Jim and me. When we finally did wake, if we ever did, the raft was too far along in space and time to return it. We could no longer reverse ourselves, our motions in all five dimensions, than fly to the moon.
A empty raft with not much space for two people floats on a wide river toward
                distant skyscrapers.
  • Mainstream
  • Time Phenomena
Feature Film

Hot Tub Time Machine 2


John Cusack exhibited his most excellent judgment by not reprising his role as Adam from the first tubfest. Nevertheless, we did spend several enjoyable hours up in the ITTDB Citadel trying to devise a timeline model that fits this second adventure of Adam’s three cohorts—one of whom (Jake) also attempts an explanation of how a mortally wounded Lou manages to jump into his future, healthy body. In his explanation, the trio of travelers go to 2025 in a timeline that branched off from their own timeline—in particular, a timeline where Lou was never shot. Perhaps they are even in the very timeline that was created after the trio returns to 2015 and Lou is not shot. That means that they’re living in the 2025 timeline at a point in their personal lives that’s before their actions created that timeline. —Michael Main
So, Lou was killed in our present, which means that here in the future, he should still be dead. Well, clearly he’s not fucking dead, because he’s sitting here, still bothering me. So what that tells me is we’re in a completely different future on a completely different timeline. [. . .] Anyway, the repairman said that the past is actually the future of the present that we’re in right now. So I think what that means is the killer is from the future. So clearly, someone from 2025 will go back in time and shoot Lou.
The move’s four main yahoos, dressed as astronauts, pose in front of a full
                moon.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

A Promise of Time Travel

  • written and directed by Craig Jessen, produced by April Grace Lowe
  • (North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Durham, North Carolina, 16 August 2016)

After fifteen years of estrangement, bookish Zelda Jones reunites with her best friend from high school, Cassie . At the start of their new relationship, it’s not apparent that their interactions are going anywhere, but as the other main characters weave their way into the plot, Zelda learns about time travel on a single, static timeline, and the pieces lock nicely into place.

Oh, and Dave’s grandfather had a plot to go back and kill Hitler, but that’s not really relevant to Zelda (and Cassie and Walter and John and Charlie). —Michael Main
If you do travel back in time, even though it’s in your subjective future, it’s in the objective past. So if you could travel back in time and if you were determined to change the past, when it came down to it, you’d either decide not to, or you’d fail.
Head shots of April Grace Lowe (as Zelda) and Angela Rysk (as Cassie) beside a
                smoking alarm clock.
  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Marley and Marley


Somewhat jaded 28-year-old Marley comes back through time to take care of 12-year-old orphaned Marley. —Michael Main
He told me all the horrible things that would happen if I broke any Time Laws. Worlds would collapse. I would turn inside out. Important people would die and important things wouldn’t happen.
Two spirits emerge on a stone wall behind a young woman.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

Creeped Out (s01e05)

A Boy Called Red


After his parents break up, Vincent visits his Dad’s childhood home where Auntie Jeanne encourages him to explore—without even putting that cursed well off limits, the very well where Dad lost his best friend back in the summer of ’85! —Inmate Jan
When your dad was younger, he had a best friend, a boy called Red. Red disappeared down that well.
Young Malen Clarkson (as Vincent) reaches out in amazement at a glowing white
                globe larger than his head.
  • Horror
  • Audience: Families
  • Definite Time Travel
Nonfiction Book

Paradoxes of Time Travel


Ryan Wasserman’s philosophical book is one of two books* that need to live on your nonfiction shelf. One by one and with complete reference to the past literature, he presents all the major paradoxes of time travel along with different models of time travel and arguments against time travel even being possible. Just get it and read it cover-to-cover. As a bonus, Professor Wasserman, who is on the Philosophy faculty at Western Washington State University, will cheerfully have discussions about time travel issues via e-mail with those of us up in the nearby ITTDB Citadel.

* The other, of course, is Paul J. Nahin’s Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction, Second Edition. —Michael Main
Each of the foregoing cases involves a self-defeating act—an act such that, if it were performed, it wold not be. Self-defeating acts are obviously impossible, since the performance of such an act would imply a contradiction. Yet time travel seems to make such acts possible. This suggests the following line of argument against backward time travel:

(P1) If backward time travel were possible, it would be possible to perform a self-defeating act.

(P2) It is impossible to perform a self-defeating act.

(C) Backward time travel is impossible.
A descending spiral of Roman numerals in the style of a clockface.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Nonfiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Here and Now and Then


When time travel agent Kin Stewart finds himself rapidly losing his memory and stranded in 1996, he writes a journal of his life in the future and proceeds to break every rule in the book by creating a new life and family in his new present . . . until a retriever shows up in 2014. —Michael Main
Science fiction. She thought the journal was filled with tales, like her Doctor Who or Heather’s Star Trek shows.
Two paper dolls--a man and a woman--run on opposite sides of a looped,
                non-Moebius, strip of paper with the San Francisco skyline along its edge.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Oona Out of Order


On Oona Lockhart’s 19th birthday, her mind leaps into her 51-year-old body where she learns that she’s fated to leap into a random year on every coming birthday, living each year once in a normal manner except for her discontinous consciousness. —Michael Main
Do I ever find any kind of stability? Or do I live life year after year like some kind of existential hobo?
Drawing of the face of a startled young woman with red lipstick, straight brown
                hair, and bangs.
  • Mainstream
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel Series

Providence Falls Trilogy


After more than a century in limbo, Irish ruffian Liam O’Connor is dropped into an adult life in 21st-century Providence Falls where, in order to save his soul, he must convince his reincarnated true love, Cora, to marry someone other than himself. It appears that Liam had a long sleep, and Cora was reincarnated, but neither had real time travel. —Michael Main
“Cora is on earth again in this twenty-first century,” Samuel said. “You must make sure she fulfills her true destiny in this life.”
A man and a woman walk away from each other in long grass with their images,
                wearing old fashioned clothes, reflected in water below.
  • Romance
  • Mystery and Crime
  • Time Phenomena
Essay

Mindscape #124

How Time Travel Could and Should Work

  • by Sean Carroll
  • from Mindscape 124 [podcast], 23 November 2020

Alas, Sean Carroll doesn’t pull any punches in his realistic assessment of the kinds of time travel that are or may be possible under the laws of physics as we know them in our universe. Or, as Professor Carroll himself puts it: “. . . podcasting isn’t for the squeamish.” In my layman’s understand of his most excellent explication, time travel aficionados have two physical phenomena on which to hang their Hat Things:
  1. Time Dilation: Under the laws of Einstein’s special relativity, a fast traveler who leaves the Earth, zooming around for a while at near light speed before returning, will experience less passage of time than those who stay in the more-or-less fixed reference frame of Earth. How cool is that? Yes, you can travel as far into the future as you like, so long as you have a means of zooming up to a high enough speed and returning. (And according to general relativity, time dilation also occurs inside a high gravitational field, although I didn’t notice a discussion of this sort of time dilation in the podcast.)
  2. Closed Timelike Curves: The second hope for time travelers are certain distributions of matter that (according to Einstein’s equations of general relativity) result in directed paths through spacetime in which a traveler along the path is always moving forward through time—and yet completing a full circuit of the path returns the traveler to the starting point in both space and time. That’s the good news. The bad news is that such paths, called closed timelike curves, might only be possible in the presense of infinitely long rotating cylinders or other physical conditions that may be impossible to engineer.
Up in the ITTDB Citadel, many of us found ourselves in a disquieted state at this point in Professor Carroll’s podcast (roughly the two-hour mark). Some went to bed early in a kind of daze; others decided it was time for a long walk through the lonely ice paths that surround the Citdel. But for those with the fortitude to keep their ears glued to the pod, there was a great reward. Carroll had already waded through the swift, waist-high currents of causality, predeterminism, free will, the A Theory of Time, the B Theory of time, and more. But now he was ready to dive into deep, uncharted waters. Yes, now he was ready to leave known physics behind, to talk about branching time that went beyond the Everettian Many Worlds of Schrödinger’s equation, and to consider what kind of a world would be needed to allow stories such as Back to the Future and Looper to consistently hold together. With this in mind, he devices a four-pronged theory that concludes with what he calls Narrative Time. For me, narrative time shares some features with the time model of Asimov’s The End of Eternity (a model that we call Hypertime in our story-tagging system), but it goes far beyond that.

Suffice it to say that when all the Librarians up in the Citadel woke from their sleeps and returned from their treks, we had a celebration that was strident enough to raise Lazurus Long himself from the dead (if he is dead, that is). —Michael Main
I think that if we really try hard, we can make sense of this. But there’s a rule in physics or whatever that the more surprising and weird the phenomenon is, the more you’re gonna have to work to introduce some weird elements into your theory to explain it. That’s not surprising, right? So we’re gonna need some leaps of faith here, but I think I can come up with the scheme that involves four ingredients on the basis of which we can actually make sense of Back to the Future, Looper, and other similar movies.
A brain below a lit incandescant light bulb.
  • Eloi Gold Medal
  • Nonfiction
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

Loki, Season 1


Hang on to your Tesseracts! Apparently, in Endgame, when the Avengers traveled back in time to swipe various things from the 2012 Avengers, they inadvertantly started a branch in time where Loki ended up with the Tesseract. Of course, once that occurred, the Time Variance Authority spotted him as a Variant and quickly recruited him to help in their fight against even more variant Variants. —Michael Main
Appears to be a standard sequence violation. Branches growing at a stable rate and slope. Variant identified.
Tom Hiddleston (as Loki) stands with his arms crossed and an annoyed look on
                his face, in front of a large analog clock with multiple hands.
  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

The Adam Project


In 2050, time jet pilot Adam Reed steals a jet and heads back to 2018 to save his stranded wife, but he gets waylaid in 2022 where his 12-year-old self is the only hope to save the mission. —Michael Main
Young Adam: I mean if this is happening to me, that means that it already happened to you—right?—unless it works more like a multiverse where each ripple creates an alternate timeline—
Middle-Age Adam: It isn’t a multiverse! My god, we watch too many movies.
Ryan Reynolds and Walker Scobell (as the two Adams) pose in superimposed
                pictures along with three other cast members of The Adam Project and a timejet.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Ghosts of Christmas Always


This time around, the usual three ghosts are only one of the many three-ghost teams who are given a yearly assignment to scrooge one of the many Scrooges who seem to be more numerous than ever before. Together with their 2022 assignment—Peter Baron, an unsatisfied son of a food baron—they provide a nice tear-jerker for the entire family. —Michael Main
He’s like the anti-Scrooge.
No image currently available.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Fantasy
  • Romance
  • Audience: Families
  • Debatable Time Travel
Miniseries

8 episodes

Bodies


Slowly, the investigations of four different appearances of the same body come together in four different years from 1890 to 2053. —Michael Main
My thesis dared to posit that cause and effect is malleable, right? Which therefore makes time, as we know it, totally changable and fluid.
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Mystery and Crime
  • Definite Time Travel