Nude Travel

Tag Area: Time Travel Trope
Feature Film

Lem’s Star Diaries

Dziwny gość profesora Tarantogi

  • Professor Tarantoga’s strange guest
  • by Stanisław Lem
  • in Noc księżycowa (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963) [Published as a TV script (“widowisko telewizyjne”) eight years before the 1971 Polish TV broadcast.]
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!
translate 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!
A pencil sketch of an odd bird standing on the head of a dog-like robot with a full moon in the sky.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Idaho Transfer

A group of secretive scientists develop time travel near Idaho’s Craters of the Moon, discovering a near-future apocalypse. Since anyone much over age 20 can’t survive traveling, they’re in the process of sending a group of young people, including Isa and her withdrawn sister Karen, beyond the apocalypse to rebuild civilization. Things go wrong (not the least of which are the plot, the dialogue, the acting, the sound track, and the requirement that the young Jane Fonda lookalikes must strip to travel through time), but even so, the film has a certain unprepossessing appeal. —Michael Main
You see, Dad and Lewis are trying to get it together, to secretly transfer a lot of young people into the future, bypassing the eco-crisis or whatever it is. Start a new civilization.
A partly-clothed man and a nude woman sit in front of a time machine and then disappear.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Terminator 1

The Terminator

Artificially intelligent machines from 2029 send a killer cyborg back to 1984 to kill Sara Connor because, in 2029, her son John will lead the resistance against the machines’ rule.

The story has a classic self-defeating act: The Terminator goes back in time to kill Sara Connor, causing Kyle Reese to follow and become romantic with Sara Connor, causing John Connor to be born and eventually lead the revolution, causing the Terminator to go back in time to kill Sara Connor, . . . —Michael Main
Kyle: [to Sarah at the Tech-Noir Club] Come with me if you want to live.
Gun-toting Arnold Schwarzenegger in his trademarked Terminator sunglasses and fingerless gloves.
  • Eloi Gold Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Terminator 2

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Once more, the machines from 2029 send back a killer cyborg, this time a T-1000 to kill young John Connor in 1995, but Resistance-leader Connor of the future counters by sending a reprogrammed original T-800 to save himself. —Michael Main
The T-800: [to Sarah at the Pescadero State Hospital] Come with me if you want to live.
Shotgun-toting Arnold Schwarzenegger in his trademarked Terminator sunglasses sits stoically on his stolen motorcycle.
  • Eloi Gold Medal
  • 1992 Hugo
  • 1991 Nebula
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

12 Monkeys

In the year 2035, with the world devastated by an artificially engineered plague, convict James Cole is sent back in time to gather information about the plague’s origin so the scientists can figure out how to fight it. —Michael Main
If you can’t change anything because it’s already happened, you may as well smell the flowers.
The faces of Bruce Willis (as old James with one red eye), Brat Pitt (as young James), and Madeline Stowe (as Kathryn) stare out of the shadows.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Artemis Fowl, Book #6

Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox

  • by Eoin Colfer
  • (Hyperion Books for Children, July 2008)
When fourteen-year-old genius Artemis Fowl realizes that the only cure for his mother’s case of Spelltropy lies in a species of lemur that Artemis made extinct eight years ago, there is only one solution: Grab your 80-year-old, elfin-police-captain-friend Holly Short and trick her into traveling back in time to stop your formerly evil, ten-year-old self from killing off the last of the all-cure lemurs.

Author Eoin Colfer does a masterful job presenting a single nonbranching, static timeline, complete with three consistent causal loops (further described in our tag notes for this story). But really, Eoin, you missed the shuttle on “the kiss”! With the help of N°1, Artemis can time travel, so if you're intent on his first romantic kiss coming from Holly Short, couldn’t N°1 have brought Holly’s actual fourteen-year-old self into the story? Might have even presented an opportunity for a fourth causal loop: Fourteen-year-old Holly kissees fourteen-year-old Artemis, but only because fifteen-year-old Artemis had already told thirteen-year-old Holly that they would enjoy it. —Michael Main
Oh, bless my bum-flap. You’re time travelers.
A boy clutching a lemur and followed by a smaller version of himself is blown out of the page by a yellow explosion.
  • Science Fiction
  • Fantasy
  • Audience: Young Adults
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

When You Reach Me

Miranda has an odd friend named Marcus who knows a lot about time machines, another friend named Sal who has stopped hanging out with her, and a man—not really a friend—who sleeps under the mailbox out front. And then there are those mysterious notes from someone who seems to know quite a lot, but also needs her to write about everything that’s happening in her twelve-year-old life. —Michael Main
So if they had gotten home five minutes before they left, like those ladies promised they would, then they would have seen themselves get back. Before they left.
An abstract map of square city blocks with a few buildings, a shoe, a bread bag, a jacket with two pockets, a book, and other oddities in front of a city skyline.
  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: Children
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

The Here and Now

  • by Ann Brashares
  • (Delacorte Press, April 2014) [print · e-book]
Teenager Prenna James and her mother are two of the survivors of a future plague who return to the early 21st century to live out a quiet life under strict non-interference rules. —Michael Main
“And then I’ll be a proper early-twenty-first-century girl?” I ask. I feel like crying. I don’t want to be set.”
A mozaic of triangular photos and colors forms half of the face of a young woman.
  • Science Fiction
  • Romance
  • Audience: Young Adults
  • Definite Time Travel
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

7 Splinters of Time

While on medical leave for his mental health, police detective Darius Lafaux is called back in to investigate a case that turns into multiple murders of men who look exactly like himself. —Michael Main
Alise: You died ten years ago.
Darius: I was born ten years ago.
Two versions of Edoardo Ballerini (as Darius and Daniel) are merged into a single photo beside four other movie scenes.
  • Science Fiction
  • Mystery and Crime
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

The Ottoman Secret

Secret police agent Kamal teams with his sister-in-law Nisreen, fleeing through time from pursuing gunmen who killed Nisreen’s family because toprotect the secret that their world was created by a violent temporal disruptor who altered history in favor of an autocratic Islam theocracy. —Michael Main
Nisreen: I want to know how it is different and why he wanted to change it. Don’t you see? That’s how the world was supposed to be.

Ramazan: Assuming no one else had gone back and changed things before he did.
A man and a woman flee under a red Turkish flag that hangs from the Eiffel tower.
  • Science Fiction
  • Fantasy
  • War
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Terminator 6

Terminator: Dark Fate

After the excitement of T2, you’d have thought that Sarah Connor and her son John could have settled down for a well-deserved, peaceful life. But, no: First a leftover T-800 Model 101 Terminator kills young John, and then 20 years later, Sarah meets two new characters—young Dani Ramos and an enhanced woman from the future—who are running from a new kind of terminator built by a new kind of Skynet. Certainly a fun T-romp, cast in the mold of T2, but really?!, if those johnny-come-lately millennial writers wanna live, they can’t be messing with the come-with-me line. —Michael Main
Grace: [to Dani and Diego at the car assembly plant] Come with me or you’re dead in the next 30 seconds.
Linda Hamilton (as Sarah Connor), Arnold Schwarzenegger (as the Terminator), and two new characters stand defiantly as a Rev-9 terminator walks single-mindedly toward us all.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Flash Fiction

Remainder

The setting is necessarily vague, but it seems that in the future, doctors may recommend limited time travel to seek closure for a lost personal relationship. —Michael Main
She wants to go back more, as far as possible. Maybe before he was sick, even. But two years is the limit the doctor from the company gives her, his voice serious, concerned.
Stylized outline of a rocket launching in a green circular seal for Daily Science Fiction.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel