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The Internet Time Travel Database

Time Ships

Time Machines

El Anacronópete

English release: The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey Literal: He who flies backwards in time

by Enrique Gaspar

Mad scientist Don Sindulfo and his best friend Benjamin take off in Sindulfo’s flying time machine along with Sindulfo’s niece, her maid, a troop of Spanish soldiers, and a bordelloful of French strumpets for madcap adventures at the 1860 Battle of Téouan, Queen Isabella’s Spain, nondescript locales in the eleventh and seventh centuries, 3rd-century China, the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, and a biblical time shortly after the flood.

After taking a year of Spanish at the University of Colorado, I undertook a three-year project of translating Gaspar’s novel to English, which is available in a pdf file for your reading pleasure. Even with the unpleasant twist at the end, it was still a fine, farcical romp through history.

— Michael Main
—Poco á poco—argumentaba un sensato.—Si el Anacronópete conduce á deshacer lo hecho, á mi me pasrece que debemos felicitarnos porque eso no permite reparar nuestras faltas.

—Tiene usted razón—clamaba empotrado en un testero del coche un marido cansado de su mujer.—En cuanto se abra la línea al público, tomo yo un billete para la vispera de mi boda.

“One step at a time,” argued a sensible voice. “If el Anacronópete aims to undo history, it seems to me that we must be congratulated as it allows us to amend our failures.”

“Quite right,” called a married man jammed into the front of the bus, thinking of his tiresome wife. “As soon as the ticket office opens to the public, I’m booking passage to the eve of my wedding.”

English

[ex=bare]El Anacronópete | He who flies backwards in time[/ex] by Enrique Gaspar, in Novelas [Stories] (Daniel Cortezo, 1887).

The Atom-Smasher

by Victor Rousseau

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.

“The Atom-Smasher” by Victor Rousseau, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May 1930.

Race through Time 1

A Race through Time

by Donald Wandrei

Evil Daniel kidnaps Ellen and takes her to the year 1,000,000 A.D. via metabolic speed-up! Not to worry. Good and compassionate Webster follows via relativistic time dilation!
— Michael Main
What I’ve done is to build a time-space traveler, working by atomic energy. Even as long ago as 1913, you know, Rutherford succeeded in partly breaking down the hydrogen atom. By 1933, others succeeded in partially breaking down atoms with high voltages of electricity. But they used up far more energy than they got back, or released. I’ve simply perfected the method to a point where, with an initial bombardment of fifty volts, I can break down one atom and get back thousands of times the energy I put in. There’s nothing strange or wonderful or miraculous about it. I don’t create energy of power from nothing. I simply liberate energy that already exists. Part of the power I use to break down another atom, and so on, while the rest is diverted to propel the torpedo by discharging through tubes—like a rocket. I’ve made one short experimental trip.

“A Race through Time” by Donald Wandrei, Astounding Stories, October 1933.

Factor, Unknown

by Sam Merwin, Jr.

In order to save the world, wealthy young Houghton travels back fifty years to set straight his great-uncle’s world-threatening mistakes, but it’s Alison—Houghton’s fiery tempered cousin-once-removed—who has a more genuine interest in saving the future than her father does.
— Michael Main
“This is most extraordinary,” he said in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice, regarding Houghton benignly from the tall white fortress of his collar. “You say that you have come back through time to instruct me how to arrange my affairs so that they will not be instrumental in destroying the world some fifty years hence.”

“Factor, Unknown” by Sam Merwin, Jr., Other Worlds Science Stories, June 1952.

Space Adventures #1

Time Skipper Visits the City of Brass

[writer unknown] and Art Cappello (art)

Charlton’s first issue of Space Adventures introduced Hap Holliday, the Time Skipper, who travels with Professor Eon Tempus to the far future to rescue Ula, queen of Futuropolis, from reptile people. The end of this installment assures us that we’ll learn more of Ula in the next issue, but alas, the second and final adventure of the Time Skipper was delayed until Space Adventures #3.
— Michael Main
Just skip along with Hap Holliday, the time skipper, in his “Year an Instant” yacht and learn what the world can be like in somebody else’s lifetime!!!

“Time Skipper Visits the City of Brass” [writer unknown] and Art Cappello (art), in Space Adventures 1, July 1952.

Space Adventures #3

The Time Skipper Travels to Ancient Rome

[writer unknown] and artist

At the end of the Time Skipper’s first adventure, Hap Holliday and the professor were hoping to convince Queen Ula to accompany them back to the past, and it seems they succeeded, since Ula is with them on the splash page. But in their return trip (via the ever-staunch Timejumper), they overshoot their mark and end up in ancient Rome where the trio meets Cleopatra and tries to save Caesar.
— Michael Main
Write Caesar a letter in your own hand, inviting him here tomorrow and we’ll have Ula deliver it. That will keep him from going to the Senate chamber!

“The Time Skipper Travels to Ancient Rome” [writer unknown] and artist, in Space Adventures 3, November 1952.

Jon’s World

by Philip K. Dick

First the Soviets and the Westerners fought. Then the Westerners brought Schonerman’s killer robots into the mix. Then the robots fought both human sides. You know all that from Dick’s earlier story, “Second Variety.” But now it’s long after the desolation, long enough that Caleb Ryan and his financial backer Kastner are willing to bring back the secret of Schonerman’s robots from the past to make their world a better place for surviving mankind, including Ryan’s visionary son Jon.
— Michael Main
And then the terminator’s claws began to manufacture their own varieties and attack Soviets and Westerners alike. The only humans that survived were those at the UN base on Luna.

“Jon’s World” by Philip K. Dick, in Time to Come: Science-Fiction Stories of Tomorrow, edited by August Derleth; Farrar (Strass and Young, April 1954).

Unusual Tales #3

The Lodestone

by Joe Gill [?] and Ernie Bach

Businessman Burt Carpe and his scientist sidekick Jeff struggle with coming up with a plan to make money from their time machine. In the end, they take a large lump of carbon back to an unspecified ice age a few million years in the past. Can you guess why?
— Michael Main
There she is, my cyclo-metronome, a real live time-machine!

“The Lodestone” by Joe Gill [?] and Ernie Bach, Unusual Tales #3 (Charlton Comics, April 1956).

Unusual Tales #30

A Small Matter of Time

by Joe Gill [?] and Rocco “Rocke” Mastroserio

The title suggests that Professor Amos Shute’s intrepid travelers are going back in time to four planets that are identical in every way to our own, but then again, perhaps those four planets were merely at earlier times to begin with. We won’t say one way or another, but we are glad that the Spanish Flu pandemic, World War I, World War II, and World War III were all averted on some Earth.
— Michael Main
In what time period will you find yourselves when you land at your particular destinatoin!

“A Small Matter of Time” by Joe Gill [?] and Rocco “Rocke” Mastroserio, Unusual Tales #30 (Charlton Comics, October 1961).

Lem’s Star Diaries

Dziwny gość profesora Tarantogi

Literal: Professor Tarantoga’s strange guest

by Stanisław Lem

I’d bet my last złotych that Lem is carefully satirizing the rule of the Polish United Workers’s Party in this story of a fourth-millennium man who hails from Mars and has room in his brain for two or three different personalities (Kazimierz Nowak, Hipperkorn, and possibly a dreaded Nanów), the first of which leapt from a touring chronobus in the 20th century where he hoped to find the inventor of time travel, Professor Tarantoga.
— Michael Main
W kilku słowach: w naszym społeczeñstwie decyduje o losie człowieka ranga intelektualna. Ludzie wartoœciowi, o zdolnoœciach wybitnych, mają prawo do całego, własnego ciała. Ja właœnie byłem takim, byłem samodzielnym, suwerennym meżczyznę!
Briefly, in our society the fate of a person depends on his intellectual level. Valuable people with outstanding abilities have the right to their entire body. I was just that, I was an independent, sovereign man!
English

[ex=bare]Dziwny gość profesora Tarantogi: Widowisko telewizyjne | Professor Tarantoga’s strange guest: Television show[/ex] by Stanisław Lem, in Noc księżycowa (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963).

Journey to the Center of Time

written and directed by David L. Hewitt

The writer, David L. Hewitt, took chunks of plot and script from The Time Travelers (1964), swapped the blonde for a brunette, swapped the accidental time gate for an accidental time rift that drags the whole lab through time as if it were a time ship, added a anachronistic dinosaur, and ended up with an unwatchable movie.

Like the 1964 version, this version has a brief mention that it’s impossible to change events that have already happened, but unlike the original, the montage at the end of the film is mere chaos that no longer reinforces the idea of a single deterministic, nonbranching timeline. Despite that, I enjoyed the consequences of the villainous character running into himself, but at the same time, I dismayed at the discussion of how meeting yourself could instantly cause a disastrous explosion or implosion or maybe something-or-other (the audio was unintelligible at 1:12) would cease to exist. (I pray that the space-time continuum wasn’t in peril).

— Michael Main
Well, isn’t it obvious, Manning? The war did happen. We didn’t get back with our warning.

Journey to the Center of Time written and directed by David L. Hewitt (at movie theaters, USA, a forgettable day in 1967).

Avengers Annual #2

. . . and Time, the Rushing River . . .

by Roy Thomas, Don Heck, and Werner Roth

After the Scarlet Centurion waylays the Avengers on their way back from the 1940s, they find themselves in an alternative 1968 where the five original Avengers stayed together under the thumb of the Scarlet Centurion.

The story includes flashbacks and previously unknown explanations of the team’s previous trip to the ’40s in Avengers #56, and at the end of the story, Goliath uses Dr. Doom’s Time Platform to banish the Scarlet Centurion back to his time—and we think this is the only time travel that actually appears in the story (apart from the flashbacks). We don’t know what happens to the alternative 1968 (now known as Earth-689, but the traveling Avengers return to the universe that we all knew and loved in the 1960s (a.k.a. Earth-616), with their memory of the whole affair wiped by the Watcher.

— Michael Main
Time is like a river! Dam it up at any one point . . . and it has no choice but to flow elsewhere . . . along other, easier routes!

. . . And Time, the Rushing River . . .” by Roy Thomas, Don Heck, and Werner Roth, in The Avengers Annual 2 (Marvel Comics, September 1968).

Topolino #911

Zio Paperone e la scorribanda nei secoli

English release: Money is the Root of Upheaval Literal: Uncle Scrooge and the scavenger gang through the centuries

by Jerry Siegel, Romano Scarpa, and Sandro Del Conte

After waking an Egyptian pharaoh from a millennia-long sleep, Uncle Scrooge summons Donald and Gearloose, eventually realizing that they can restore the pharoah to his rightful throne via a trip to ancient Egypt in Gearloose’s not-quite-finished time machine. That doesn’t go quite as planned, and on the way home, they manage to turn the future into a money-mint-land or somnethin’?.
— based on Duck Comics Revue
Il veicolo aveva bisogno di una messa a punto! Comunque, siamo sulla “strada” giusta! Tenetevi forte!
Keep your seat belts buckled at all times! In the unlikely event of a water landing, your seat cushion doubles as a flotation device.
English

[ex=bare]“Zio Paperone e la scorribanda nei secoli” | Uncle Scrooge and the scavenger gang through the centuries[/ex] by Jerry Siegel, Romano Scarpa, and Sandro Del Conte, Topolino [Mickey Mouse] #911 (Mondadori, 13 May 1973).

The Pursuit of the Pankera

by Robert A. Heinlein

The 2020 posthumous publication of this 1977 manscript shows us Heinlein’s first forey into the multiperson solipsism of semi-mad scientist Jake Burroughs, his beautiful daughter Deety, her strong love interest Zeb Carter, Hilda Corners and their time/dimension-traveling ship Gay Deceiver. In all, the earlier manuscript has three adventures that were significantly changed in his eventual 1980 publication of the work, retitled as The Number of the Beast:
  1. In Pankera, the Mars Ten actually is Barsoom where the gang meets the Princess of Mars and others, while in Beast, Mars Ten is a relatively boring futuristic British Mars.
  2. Pankera has a long adventure in the Lensman universe, while Beast has only a few pages.
  3. Pankera’s ending is a 30-page, rushed description of how they plan to launch a major war against the Panki, while Beast’s 130-page ending takes the gang to the universe of Dora and Lazurus Long where they rescue Maureen from the past and are joined by a passel of Heinlein’s characters.
In both books, Gay Deceiver can clearly travel through any one of three time axes at will, although that ability is largely ignored apart from Maureen’s rescue in Beast. Because of this, we had a fierce debate up in the ITTDB Citadel about whether to even include Pankera in the database. In the end, we decided yes, marking it as the parent work of Beast, but on account of no easily recognizable time travel, we also marked it as having only debatable time travel.
— Michael Main
Sharpie, you have just invented multiperson solipsism. I didn’t think that was mathematically possible.

Six-Six-Six by Robert A. Heinlein, unpublished, 1977.

The Number of the Beast

by Robert A. Heinlein

Semi-mad scientist Jake Burroughs, his beautiful daughter Deety, her strong love interest Zeb Carter, Hilda Corners (“Aunt Hilda” if you prefer) and their time/dimension-traveling ship Gay Deceiver yak and smooch their way though many time periods in many universes (including that of Lazurus Long), soon realizing the true nature of the world as pantheistic multiperson solipsism.

In Heinlein’s first version of this novel, written in 1977, the middle third of the story takes place on Barsoom, but in the 1980 published version, Barsoom was replaced by a futuristic British Mars

— Michael Main
Sharpie, you have just invented multiperson solipsism. I didn’t think that was mathematically possible.

The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein (Fawcett Columbine, 1980).

Professor Noah’s Spaceship

by Brian Wildsmith

Professor Noah rescues all the animals from a dying planet, and during their journey of 40 days and 40 nights they plan to travel through a time-zone to take them hundreds of years into the future. At one point, the elephant must take a spacewalk to fix the time-zone guideance fin, which suggests that the time-zone is some sort of a wormhole or other time portal in space rather than mere reletavistic time dilation—and indeed there is actual time travel!
— Michael Main
He put on a special space-suit, went out through the air-lock, and pulled the fin into shape.

Professor Noah’s Spaceship by Brian Wildsmith (Oxford University Press, December 1980).

Himself in Anachron

by Cordwainer Smith and Genevieve Linebarger

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.

— Michael Main
‘Honeymoon in time,’ indeed. Why? Is it that your woman is jealous of your time trips? Don’t be an idiot, Tasco. You know that ship’s not built for two.

“Lui-même en Anachron” by Cordwainer Smith and Genevieve Linebarger, in Les puissances de’espace [The powers of space[/em] (Presses Pocket, September 1987).

Horrid Henry [s01e16]

Horrid Henry’s Time Machine

by Francesca Simon

In the cartoon version of the short story, Henry imagines that his time machine is an elaborate time ship, at least until his perfect little brother brings him out of his daydream and back to the real world of cardboard.
— Michael Main
Peter: “I'm going to the future. I want to see it for myself!”

Horrid Henry’s Time Machine by Francesca Simon, from Horrid Henry [s01e16] by Malcolm Williamson, directed by Dave Unwin (ITV, UK, 18 December 2006).

Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

After Farway Gaius McCarthy fails his final examination at the Central Time Travelers Academy, he puts together a rogue time travel crew to swipe valuable artifacts from the past at moments when they won’t be missed. And it’s all roses until a mysterious girl sidetracks them on the Titanic and steers them into a multiverse of fading timelines.

As you might guess, we enjoyed Far and his friends, but the thing that sealed an Eloi Bronze Medal was the fact that when a particular timeline actually managed to branch (not an easy feat) and the traveler then jumped to the future, she found her another self—the her that was born on that timeline—waiting for her. Most branching timeline stories ignore this issue entirely.

— Michael Main
“There’s nothing to return to.” Eliot’s knuckles bulged at the seams, but she didn’t yell. “When the Fade destroys a moment, it’s lost. Forever.”

Invictus by Ryan Graudin (Little, Brown, September 2017).

Lost between the Plates

by Benjamin Abbott

A woman seems to be chasing someone via random jumps through time.
— Michael Main
I’ve been chasing him for years and forever. Spinning through time and space without a sail.

“Lost between the Plates” by Benjamin Abbott, Daily Science Fiction, 21 May 2021 [webzine].

Captain Nova

English release: Captain Nova

by Lotte Tabbers and Maurice Trouwborst, directed by Maurice Trouwborst

Captain Nova Kester travels back from a devastated future to warn an energy mogel about the impending climate cataclysm, but only young Nas takes her seriously. That happens when time travel causes you to revert to 12 years old.
— Michael Main
Luister, jongedame: De mensen denken al eeuwen dat ze leven in het einde der tijden. Het zou handig ziln als je jezelf ietsje minderbelangrijk maakt.
Listen, young lady: People have thought for centuries that the end of time is drawing near. It would help everyone if you showed just a little less . . . self-importance.
English

Captain Nova by Lotte Tabbers and Maurice Trouwborst, directed by Maurice Trouwborst (Cinekid Film Festival, 13 October 2021).

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