Parallel Universes or Dimensions

Tag Area: Fictional Setting
Novelette

Phantoms of Reality

The blurb for the story sets it in “the fourth dimension,” but alas, this refers to a parallel universe, not time travel for Charlie Wilson and his English friend, Captain Derek Mason. —Michael Main
I have for years been working on the theory that there is another world, existing here in this same space with us. The Fourth Dimension!
Pen-and-ink drawing of a man seen through an arched doorway raising a small blade in one hand and holding a swooning woman in the other.
  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Story Series

2 stories (1931–1931)

Tommy Reames in the Fifth-Dimension

In the first novella (“The Fifth-Dimension Catapult”), physicist Tommy Reames and mechanic Smithers must rebuild the broken machinery that’s catapulted Professor Denham and his beautiful daughter into a parallel dimension of vicious jungle people, strange life forms, and a beautiful golden city. And gadzooks! In the second novella (“The Fifth-Dimension Tube”), the vicious fifth-dimensioners invade Earth! But despite the suggestive titles and citations of both stories in Nahin’s Time Machine, the stories involve only handwaving about time and space dimensions, minor enough that we don’t even count it as a time phenomenon. —based on Frank J. Bleiler
Because the article on dominant coordinates had appeared in the Journal of Physics and had dealt with a state of things in which the normal coordinates of everyday existence were assumed to have changed their functions; when the coordinates of time, the vertical, the horizontal and the lateral changed places and a man went east to go up and west to go “down” and ran his streat-numbers in a fourth dimension.
A man in a lab coat frantically pulls a handle on a room-filling machine of axles, drive belts, guages, valves, and other components.
  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Novelette

Wanderer of Infinity

  • by Harl Vincent
  • in Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1933
When Joan Carmody sends a plea to her ex-boyfriend Bert Redmond, he barrels from Indiana to upstate New York in a trice, only to see Joan and her borderline-mad brother Tom kidnapped by metal monsters from another dimension. Fortunately, a mourning, immortal wanderer through time and space also sees the abduction and fills in Bert with all the salient details and some unsalient ones, too. —Michael Main
“We are here only as onlookers,” the Wanderer explained sadly, “and can have no material existence here. We can not enter this plane, for there is no gateway. Would that there were.”
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Novella

He Never Slept

The famous Dr. Jason Veldor has made a potion that eliminates the need for sleep. The only trouble is, it’s devastatingly addictive, and for better or worse, it takes Veldor’s mind into the lives in other times and other dimensions. —Michael Main
To come to my point, Richard, I have for many years been very disgusted with the fact that all the human race—indeed every living organism—must waste a third of its life in sleep. Think what a race we’d be if we never slept!
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Debatable Time Travel
Short Story

The 32nd of May

Just as the clock is striking midnight, a man steps out of his friends’ living room and into a world of two-dimensional objects for about two hours of adventures, but when he finally escapes back to his 3D world, little or no time has passed. —Michael Main
“The first stroke of the elaborate electric-gong arrangement which Barton had had built into tthe clock, sounded out”
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Novelette

The Search

When salesman Ralph Carson Drake tries to recover his missing memory of the past two weeks, he discovers he had interactions with three people: a woman named Selanie Johns who sold remarkable futuristic devices for one dollar, her father, and an old gray-eyed man who is feared by Selanie and her father.

Van Vogt combined this with two other stories and a little fix-up material for his 1970 publication of Quest for the Future. —Michael Main
The Palace of Immortality was built in an eddy of time, the only known Reverse, or Immortality, Drift in the Earth Time Stream
Pen-and-ink drawing of a man descending a staircase into fog.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Book

Journey into Mystery #40

The Swirling Mist!

Reporter Jeff Coates is working on a series of articles about the old Mississippi river mansions when he spots a riverboat near the old, dilapidated Waverly plantation. —Michael Main
Peculiar things go on ’round that old mansion!
No image currently available.
  • Fantasy
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • No Time Phenomena
Novelette

MUgwump Four

Oh, dear! Albert Miller has dialed a wrong number on the Mugwump-4 exchange, and the mutants who answered have decided that the only solution is to catapult him into the future where he won’t be able to upset their plans for World Domination. —Michael Main
At this stage in our campaign, we can take no risks. You’ll have to go. Prepare the temporal centrifuge, Mordecai.
A cartoonish pen-and-ink drawing of a tall, sad sack kind of man and a short, fat, bald businessman.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Farnham’s Freehold

  • by Robert A. Heinlein
  • (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, October 1964) [We chose October 1964 as the publication date based on a 1 November 1964 review in the Anniston Star and the probability that it appeared after the July to October serialization in If.]
Hugh Farnam makes good preparations for his family to survive a nuclear holocaust, but are the preparations good enough to survive a trip to the future?

In his blog, Fred Pohl wrote about how Heinlein’s agent gave permission for Pohl publish the novel in If and to cut “five or ten thousand words in the beginning that were argumentative, extraneous and kind of boring” (and Pohl agreed to pay full rate for the cut words). But apparently, Heinlein “went ballistic” when he saw the first installment, so much so that when the book appeared as a separate publication, Heinlein made sure people knew who was responsible for the previous cuts by adding a note* that “A short version of this novel, as cut and revised by Frederik Pohl, appeared in Worlds of If Magazine.”

* The version of Heinlein’s note that Pohl recalled was much funnier than Heinlein’s actual note in our timeline, but sadly, we have lost track of where we saw Pohl’s version.
—Michael Main
Because the communists are realists. They never risk a war that would hurt them, even if they could win. So they won’t risk one they can’t win.
Sketch of a clean-cut, older man’s face.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Nonfiction Comic

Gorgo #23

Time Pocket

Although this one-page feature is title “Time Pocket,” it seems to be about travel to another dimension rather than through time. —Michael Main
A person can suddenly disappear before our eyes, by accidentally or purposely stepping into another dimension.
A five-panel single-page feature describing how people step into "other dimensions."
  • Fantasy
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • No Time Phenomena
Comic Book

Avengers Annual #2

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

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!
Five Avengers from 1968, led by Goliath and the Wasp, face off against the five Avengers as they were in early 1964, led by Giant Man and the Wasp.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Book

Avengers #56

Death Be Not Proud!

Using Doc Doom’s time platform, the tag-3743 } Wasp sends Cap and the other three 1968 Avengers back to observe Bycky Barnes’s death at the hands of Baron Zemo. —Michael Main
That’s just what’s begun to torure me! How can I be sure he’s dead? I saw only a single searing blast! If I somehow survived it . . . couldn’t he have, too?
Standing over Bucky Barnes’s body, an anguished Captain America beseeches a higher power.
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

All the Myriad Ways

Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble suspects that the recent spate of suicides and violent crime is somehow connected to the discovery that the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics is real and each of those worlds can be traveled to. —Michael Main
There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? Trimble didn’t understand the theory, though God knows he’d tried. The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision every made could go both ways. Every choice ever made by every man, woman and child on Earth was reversed in the universe next door.
Pen-and-ink drawing of multiple overlapping images of a man with a gun sitting at a desk.
  • 1969 Hugo
  • Science Fiction
  • Mystery and Crime
  • No Time Phenomena
Novel

The Leaves of Time

The small amount of material that we’ve seen so far suggests that the majority of the story takes place in a single parallel Earth with no easily identifyable branching point with our Earth and no time travel. —deferred
Colorful, psychedelic pop-art of a monster exploding out of a woman’s head.
  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Novelette

Many Mansions

  • by Robert Silverberg
  • in Universe 3, edited by Terry Carr (Random House, October 1973)
With eleven years of marriage behind them, Ted and Alice’s fantasies frequently start with a time machine and end with killing one or another of their spouse’s ancestors before they can procreate. So naturally, they each end up at Temponautics, Ltd. Oh, and Ted’s grandpa has some racy fantasies of his own.
In Silverberg’s Something Wild Is Loose (Vol. 3 of his collected stories), he posits that this story is “probably the most complex short story of temporal confusion” since Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (1941) or “—All You Zombues—” (1959), but I would respectfully disagree. In particular, I would describe Heinlein’s two stories as the most complex short stories of temporal consistency in that there is but a single, static timeline and (in hindsight) every scene locks neatly into place within this one timeline. By contrast, Silverberg story involves multiple time travel choices by the characters in what I would call parallel universes. The confusion, such as it is, stems more from what appears to be alternate scenes in disconnected universes rather than temporal confusion per se. —Michael Main
On the fourth page Alice finds a clause warning the prospective renter that the company cannot be held liable for any consequences of actions by the renter which wantonly or wilfully interfere with the already determined course of history. She translates that for herself: If you kill your husband’s grandfather, don’t blame us if you get in trouble.
A yellow silhouette of a kneeling person in the bottom have of an hourglass.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

The Pursuit of the Pankera

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.
A young man and woman stand defiantly in the foreground, with an older man and woman, a spaceship, and multiple planets behind them.
  • Science Fiction
  • Debatable Time Travel
Novel

The Number of the Beast

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.
A man with long, 1970s-style hair stands with a futuristic rifle in a prairie with a walled compound and yellow sky behind him.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Time Bandits

A boy’s bedroom is invaded by six dwarves who have stolen The Supreme Being’s map, which naturally leads both boy and dwarves on adventures through time. —Michael Main
Is it all ready? Right. Come on then. Back to creation. We mustn’t waste any more time. They’ll think I’ve lost control again and put it all down to evolution.
Head shots of the film
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Cherryh’s Alternate Realities #1

Port Eternity

Living an isolated life on the spaceship Maid of Astolat, Lady Dela and her crew of cloned servants designed in the image of Arthurian legends are pulled into a parallel dimension, but despite the title of this first book in Cherryh’s Alternate Realities series, there is no actual time travel. —from publicity material
Then it was as if whatever was holding us had just stopped existing, no jolt, but like sliding on oil, like a horrible falling where there is no falling.
Two images of an Arthurian knight: one in a suit of armor, and the other in a space suit.
  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Novelette

Slow Birds

Every year, Jason Babbidge competes in the skate-sailing race on the two-and-a-half-mile-wide glass surfaces left behind by slowly flying birds when they occassionally explode before disappearing. This year’a race is not a win for Jason, but even worse is what happens when his brother Daniel climbs aboard one of the birds afterwards. —Michael Main
They were called slow birds because the flew through the air—at the stately pace of three feet per minute.
An abstract design of black spirals and red equalateral triangles on a green background with part of a man
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Feature Film

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension

Banzaiers keep writing to the ITTDB Citadel, telling us to add this cult movie to our database (or else we should prepare ourselves for the unexpected, as He would). We finally gave in to keep them from banzaiing us, but alas, oscillation overthruster ≠ flux capacitor, and the rock-musician-neurosurgeon-particle-physicist Banzai merely travels through all the dimensions except time. —Michael Main
May I pass along my congratulations for your great interdimensional breakthrough. I am sure, in the miserable annals of the Earth, you will be duly enshrined.
Peter Weller (as Buckaroo Banzai) stands calmly while behind him, a spaceship navagates a debris field.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Feature Film

Masters of the Universe

With the help of ominous music and a Cosmic Key that opens portals to other places, the evil Skeletor has finally conquered Castle Greyskull, giving Skeletor the power needed to become the Master of the Universe himself. Fortunately, He-Man and his warriors have a copy of the Key and can save the universe! Unless they misplace it and two current-day Earth teens stumble upon it.

I watched the movie through to the end(!), but spotted only one explicit small item to indicate that the Key might transport through time as well as space: When Skeletor’s minionette locates the copy of the Key, she says that they can find it within a “parsec-eon,” which kind of sounds like a space-time measurement. In addition, those who know the He-Man franchise tell me that he is a far-future descendant of Earth humans on the planet of Eternia, which means that the trip back to current-day Earth was through time. So it is a time-travel movie(!) but that fact has no bearing on the movie’s plot. —Michael Main
I call it . . . The Cosmic Key! It is the most unique key in the universe. The tones it generates can open a doorway to anywhere.
Bare-chested Dolph Lundgren (as He-Man) wields a sword in one hand and a futuristic gun in the other.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: Children
  • Debatable Time Travel
Novella

The Hemingway Hoax

Literature professor John Baird and conman Sylvester Castlemaine hatch a plan to get rich forging Hemingway’s lost stories, but before long, Baird is confronted by an apparent guardian of the many timelines in the form of Hemingway himself. —Michael Main
I’m from the future and the past and other temporalities that you can’t comprehend. But all you need to know is that yiou must not write this Hemingway story. If you do, I or someone like me will have to kill you.
A Hemingway-esqu man has various heads and appendages coming out of his head.
  • 1991 Hugo
  • 1991 Nebula
  • Science Fiction
  • Horror
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Novella

Diving Universe 1A

Diving into the Wreck

The first story in the Diving Universe series finds the captain (a.k.a. “Boss”) of Nobody’s Business and her motley crew of five wreck divers grappling with a five-thousand-year-old derelict spaceship that’s farther from Earth than it has any right to be. Their own spaceship has an FTL Drive, which always implies time travel, and there are suggestions that the old ship has areas of differing time rates based on interdimensional, parallel universe hand-waving, but the confirmation of actual time travel doesn’t occur until later in the Diving Universe series. —Michael Main
A few documents, smuggled to the colonies on Earth’s Moon, suggested that stealth tech was based on interdimensional science—that the ships didn’t vanish off radar because of a “cloak” but because they traveled, briefly, into another world—a parallel universe that’s similar to our own.

I recognized the theory—it’s the one on which time travel is based, even though we’ve never discovered time travel, at least not in any useful way, and researchers all over the universe discourage experimentation in it. They prefer the other theory of time travel, the one that says time is not linear, that we only perceive it as linear, and to actually time travel would be to alter the human brain.

But what Squishy is telling me is that it’s possible to time travel, it’s possible to open small windows in other dimensions, and bend them to our will.
A shuttle-like spacecraft accelerates in front of a looming larger craft, both in orbit above a blue planet.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Novella

Diving Universe 1B

The Room of Lost Souls

This time around, “Boss” puts together a crew to dive into the central part of an age-old abandoned space station where many have entered but, apparently, only Boss (long ago, as a young girl) has ever returned. The universe is largely unchanged from the first Diving Universe story, replete with mysterious interdimensional ambiguities and timey-wimey goings-on, but still no actual time travel. —Michael Main
The exterior parts of the station move in a slower time frame. The interior part, nearest the stealth tech itself, is moving at an accelerated pace.
A woman in a off-the-shoulder, flowing white gown with billowing sleeves and a long train stares into the distance in front of a futuristic city.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Feature Film

Dimensions

Imagine you’re a young boy in 1921 Cambridge when your equally young first love dies in a deep well. What would you do? Naturally, you’d vow to become a great scientist in an artsy movie so you could go back in time to alter the tragic event.

Apparently, people in early 20th-century Cambridge espouse many wise thoughts about time, parallel universes that encompass every possible combination of events again and again, and something about every decision every made creating a branch point. In the end, it's difficult to make a cohesive model of time from the plotline of Dimensions, but we tried our best to do so in our plot notes. —Michael Main
Annie: Are you ready to leave?
Stephen: Yes.
Annie: How long will it take?
Stephen: I don’t know: seconds, decades, an eternity.
Annie: An eternity? For a few moments together?
Stephen: Yes.
Intent Henry Lloyd-Hughes (as Stephen) and happy-go-lucky Camilla Rutherford (as Jame with a parousel) are superimposed over a spiral of 1921 dates with version numbers
  • Science Fiction
  • Debatable Time Travel
TV Season

The Flash, Season 1

  • written and directed by multiple people
  • (The CW, USA, 7 October 2014) to 19 May 2015)
Time travel is implied right from the first episode of the CW’s rendition of The Flash where a newspaper from the future is seen in the closing scene. The rest of the first season builds a fine time-travel arc that includes a nefarious time traveler from the far future, a classic grandfather paradox with a twist (sadly not examined), a do-over day for the Flash (which Harrison Wells calls “temporal reversion”), and a final episode that sees the Flash travel back to his childhood (as well as a hint that Rip Hunter himself will soon appear on the CW scene). —Michael Main
Wells: Yes, it’s possible, but problematic. Assuming you could create the conditions necessary to take that journey, that journey would then be fraught with potential pitfalls: the Novikov Principle of Self-Consistency, for example.

Joe: Wait—the what, now?

Barry: If you travel back in time to change something, then you end up being the causal factor of that event.

Cisco: Like . . . Terminator.

Joe: Ah!

Wells: Or is time plastic? Is it mutable, whereby any changes in the continuum could create an alternate timeline?

Cisco: Back to the Future.

Joe: Ah, saw that one, too.
The Flash, in his red costume, zig-zags through an empty city street, leaving a yellow electric bolt behind him.
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Season

The Flash, Season 2

  • by multiple writers and directors
  • (The CW, USA, 6 October 2015) to 24 May 2016)
After Barry aborts his mission to the past in Season 1 in order to prevent his own present from being erased, he finds that his travel has caused even bigger problems! Yep, a rift has been a-opened to a parallel world with an alternate Flash and an evil speedster and—it would seem—more time travelin’ and another attempt to save his mom and dad! —Michael Main
No, that’s not how it works. In our timeline, Barry’s mother’s already dead, and her death is a fixed point. And nothing can change that.
Surounded by yellow lightning, Grant Gustin (as the Flash) races towards us in his red costume with a new white logo on his chest.
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Flash Fiction

Diastanaut

Although the story has no explicit mention of time phenomena, please see our tagging of the story for one interpretation of Imoghen’s multiverse travels. —Michael Main
Ze had traveled the multiverse more times than any other distanaut [. . .]
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Short Film

2nd Door

  • written and directed by Umesh Verma
  • (Youtube: 2nd Door Channel, 8 December 2017)
Two men—a garage shop owner and a mad scientist—loop through 13 days, meeting and shooting each other and themselves, but not so that we could understand much (beyond that there was a time portal made of hubcaps and blue electricity). —Michael Main
This freak made a mess of our garage.
A man in an auto shop, dressed in clean clothes and suspenders, faces a large round portal made of hubcaps and other auto parts.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Re: Bubble 476

A tilted view of a partially lit Saturn with the sun above and a green moon outside of the rings.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Dust of Giant Radioactive Lizards

Forty years after NASA explorer Tessa Raij attempted to step through a dimensional portal and was instead relegated to an inexplicable state of isolation in a radioactivce crater, a dead girl—resembling her grandmother as a teen—shows up at her feet. —Michael Main
Anything entering her horizon no longer experienced the passage of time.
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Flash Fiction

The Hero of Your Own Story

A bad egg creates chaos by leaving time portals open between various times in various parts of the multiverse. —Michael Main
Your time portals are not big enough for any of the really exciting monsters.
Stylized outline of a rocket launching in a green circular seal for Daily Science Fiction.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Art of Navigating an Affair in a Time Rift

Audra Cobb is pulled through time rifts from one parallel universe to another with a bit of time travel thrown in. I think the parallel universes are a literary mechanism to explore daydreaming about what might have been while under the spell of limerence. —Michael Main
The egg yolk path glistens in my periphery and my fingertips tingle. Once the rift closes, we go back. Back to before the rift ruptured. Back to when Joseph first moved in and before we . . .
Illustration of a young woman in a powered bodysuit sitting on a balcony overlooking a futuristic city.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel