Post-Apocalyptic and Post-Holocaust Worlds

Tag Area: Fictional Setting
Novelette

A Race Through Time 2

Farewell to Earth


Perhaps you recall that in Wandrei’s first story, “A Race through Time,” good and compassionate Webster was trapped in the year AD 1,001950, exactly 1,950 years after the time when his true love, Ellen, was taken by that cad Daniel. So what is left for him on this barren Earth?
I am the daughter of Ellayn, who was the daughter of Ellayn, until far back there was the first Ellayn. She and Worin were the first two.
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Short Story

The Time Impostor


Newspaper reporter Derek Williams leaps into a time machine that’s come from the 9th millennium to rescue the condemned murderer Mike Spinnot because he’s worshiped as a hero in that future time. —Michael Main
You know as well as I that in 1932 the Earth was groaning under a tyranny more brutal, morehorrible, thanany in all recorded history.
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Long Night


Garry Coyne devises a way to move into the future via suspended animation, which (as we all know) is not time travel, but once he arrives in the future to fight throwback hominids and take shelter with a small band of normal men, he does have a moment where he slides back to the present for a brief communication with his trusted friend and a realization about the nature of time. —Michael Main
Past, present, future—all one. And we, moving along the dimension called time, intersect them. I can’t grasp it. But I can’t deny it. If only there were proof—
|pending alt-text|
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Tales of Tomorrow (s01e37)

All the Time in the World


The skilled robber is now Henry Judson and his target is now the New York Metropolitan Museum, but the plot essentials remain largely the same as in Clarke’s earlier story: Use the time traveler’s foolproof plan to rob the museum. —Michael Main
Within this five-foot circle, time is speeded up to an almost unbelievable pace. But the world outside the circle remains unchanged.
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

All the Time in the World


Robert Ashton is offered a huge amount of money to carry out a foolproof plan of robbing the British Museum of its most valuable holdings. —Michael Main
Your time scale has been altered. A minute in the outer world would be a year in this room.
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

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)

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.
The title Time to Come--along with other text--appears in a white letters on a
                red blob in front of a mottled black-and-white background.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Beyond the Time Barrier


Major Bill Allison flies the experimental X-80 into the year 2024 where a plague has turned most humans into subhuman mutants and the rest are mostly deaf, dumb, and sterile. Once there, the leaders of an underground citadel (not to be confused with the ITTDB Citadel) have plans for him to marry the beautiful telepathic (and possibly non-sterile) Princess Trirene, and thereby re-populate the world. But together with Trirene and a small group of scientists, he devises a plan to return to his own time and prevent the plague from ever occurring.

The flight to the future is explained by scientific gibberish that contains a high concentration of mumbo jumbo, but the gist of it is that the speed of Allison’s plane (around 10,000 mph) added to the rotational speed of the Earth plus the speed of the Earth’s orbit around the sun plus the speed of the Solar System around the center of the galaxy plus maybe another speed or two, managed to bring his total speed close to that of light, which brought him to the future. Apparently, reversing his plane’s path is all that’s needed to return him to the past (ideally with Trirene beside him).

A self-defeating act paradox is set up nicely (if Alison stops the plague, then the citadel in the, future won’t be there to send him back to stop the plague), but the issue is never explicitly discussed and the ending of the film is inconclusive on the matter. Nevertheless, I commend the film for being the first to raise the issue of time travel paradoxes, albeit in the background. —Michael Main
I may be able to prevent it: Is that what you mean?
A montage of Robert Clarke and Darlene Tompkins as Adam and Eve of the Year
                2024! Only they could re-populate the world!
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Film

La jetée

  • The pier
  • La Jetée
  • written and directed by Chris Marker
  • (at movie theaters, France, 16 February 1962) [Accessed at Youtube on 28 February 2022.]

In a world made uninhabitable by the Third World War, a prisoner is chosen as being the only person with vivid enough memories of the past to travel through time and return with salvation.

This 28-minute photo montage with about 1,200 words of narration has a nice seed of an idea, but I find it insulting to other talented filmmakers that Time magazine ranked this sketch of a film as #1 in their 2010 list of best time travel movies. —Michael Main
Tel était le but des expériences : projeter dans le Temps des émissaires, appeler le passé et l’avenit au secours du présent.
translate Such was the purpose of the experiments: to project emissaries into Time, to summon the Past and the Future to the aid of the Present.
A grid of 16 photos from Chris Marker
  • Science Fiction
  • Experimental
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Lem’s Star Diaries

Wyprawa profesora Tarantogi

  • Professor Tarantoga’s voyage
  • by Stanisław Lem
  • in Noc księżycowa (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963) [Published as a TV script (“widowisko telewizyjne”) 19 years before the 1964 Polish TV broadcast.]

Oh, tensor! Oh, turbulent perturbation! Some time before Professor Tarantoga invented a time machine and met a schizophrenic man from the fourth millennium, he apparently invented a transporter that took him and his new assistant Chybek to a series of progressively more advanced civilizations, the last of which included a barefaced cook who had an embarrasing accident in the cosmic kitchen, resulting in mankind (and indirectly resulting in time travel for the professor and Chybek). —Michael Main
I znów mi się przypaliło—jedno spiralne ramie, od spodu, na trzysta parseków—i znowu wybiegła mi słonecznica, i ścięło się, i będzie zgęstek, i powstanie białko, przeklęte białko! I znowu będzie ewolucja, i ludzkość, i cywilizacja, i będę się musiał tłumaczyć, usprawiedliwiać, składać we dwoje, przepraszać, że to niechcący, że przez przypadek . . . Ale to wy, nie ja!
translate And I got burned again—one spiral arm, underneath, three hundred parsecs—and again a sunflower came out of me and it was choked and there will be a bundle of white, cursed protein! And there will be evolution again, and humanity and civilization, and I will have to justify, justify, put together, apologize that it’s accidentally, that by accident . . .
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
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
Novel

October the First Is Too Late


Dick, a composer, and his boyhood friend John, now an eminent scientist, find themselves in a patchwork world of different times from classical Greece to a far future that humanity barely survives.

My favorable impression is no doubt reflective of the time when I read it (the summer of 1970, nearly 13, while moving from Washington State to Alabama). Perhaps the fiction doesn’t hold up as well decades later up, but the issues of time that it brings up still interest me and it was my first exposure to the idea of a geographic timeslip. And, similar to Asimov, Hoyle served to cultivate my interest in the natural sciences. —Michael Main
To the Reader: The “science” in this book is mostly scaffolding for the story, story-telling in the traditional sense. However, the discussions of the significance of time and the meaning of consciousness are intended to be quite serious, as also are the contents of chapter fourteen. —from Hoyle’s preface
An abstract design, a battleship, and a headshot of a military man.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Science Fiction
  • Music and Musicals
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Journey to the Center of Time

  • written and directed by David L. Hewitt
  • (at movie theaters, USA, a forgettable day in 1967)

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.
Alien death rays, a T-rex, and multiple copies of Scott Brady and Gigi Perreau
                () hugging.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Man Who Walked Home


After an accident at a temporal research facility in Idaho, a manlike monster known as John Delgano shows up for half a seoncd once a year at the same time and place.

As early as the 1930s, stories have addressed the issue of the Earth moving to a different position when a time traveler moves through time. This story addresses the issue by saying that the time traveler appears only once per year, but that doesn't really solve the problem for so many reasons, starting with the fact that a given position on the surface of the Earth will not be at “the same” position in the subsequent year. —Michael Main
Then that winter they came down for Christmas and John said they had something new. He was really excited. A temporal displacement, he called it; some kind of time effect.
Magazine cover: A stylized pop-art woman
  • Science Fiction
  • 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

The Time Machine


For me, the update to the 1970s took this made-for-TV movie too far away from the original novel. For example, the Traveller (now a rocket scientist called Neil Perry) explains the workings of the machine with gibberish, whereas the original Traveller expressed himself with up-to-date mathematical terminology. The travel to the Salem witch trials and the California gold rush were also off the mark, as was the dreamy Weena who immediately speaks English. —Michael Main
Well, in principle, it utilizes a electromagnetic force field to molecularly reconstruct the space-time continuum.
John Beck (as the traveler) and Priscilla Barnes (as Weena) appear behind a
                triangular, metal time machine.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Millennium


Cheryl Ladd plays Louise Baltimore opposite Kris Kristopherson’s Bill Smith in this movie adaptation of Varley’s novel (1983), although on-screen credit is given only to his earlier short story “Air Raid” (1977). —Michael Main
For one thing, paradoxes can occur. Say you build a time machine, go backwards in time and murder your father when he was ten years old. That means you were never born. And if you were never born, how did you build the time machine? Paradox! It's the possibility of wiping out your own existence that makes most people rule out time-travel. Still, why not? If you were careful, you could do it.
A passenger jet flies into a starburst of light.
  • 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

A Time Odyssey 1

Time’s Eye


And she was continually amazed at how easily everyone else accepted their situation, the blunt, apparently undeniable reality of the time slips, across a hundred and fifty years in her case, perhaps a million years or more for the wretched pithecine and her infant in their net cage.
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • 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
TV Season

12 Monkeys, Season 1


Same pandemic backstory as the movie, similar names for the characters, no Bruce Willis, and a mishmash of time-travel tropes along with tuneless minor-key chords in place of actual tension and slowly spoken clichéd dialogue in place of actual plot. Random discussions of fate brush shoulders with an admixture of possible time travel models from narrative time (when a wound sprouts on old JC’s shoulder while watching young JC get shot), to skeleton timelines (JC thinks that his timeline will vanish if he succeeds), to a fascination with a single static timeline (you’ll see it in Chechnya) and time itself has an agenda. Primarily, we’d say that the story follows narrative time from Cole’s point of view.

By the end of the first season, one principal character has seemingly been trapped in the 2043, and Cole is stuck in 2015, having just gone against fate in a major way, but with a third principal character poised to spread the virus via a jet plane.

P.S. Whatever you do, whether in narrative time or elsewhen, don’t bring up this adaptation as dinnertime conversation with Terry Gilliam (but do watch it if you can set aside angst over a lack of a consistent model and just go with Cole’s flow). —Michael Main
About four years from now, most of the human race will be wiped out by a plague, a virus. We know it’s because of a man named Leland Frost. I have to find him.

—from “Splinter” [s01e01]
A man
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

ARQ

  • written and directed by Tony Elliott
  • (Toronto International Film Festival, 9 September 2016)

Ren (and eventually Hannah) are stuck in a time loop, fighting the Bloc—a group of violent men who at first don’t seem interested in the time-looping machine (aka the ARQ). —Michael Main
I already tried that.
Robbie Arnell (as Ren) wearing a full-face gas mask in a lab packed with
                computer cables.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Film

Aether

  • written and directed by Jerry Brown, Jr.
  • (Youtube: SuperEpic Channel, 2 April 2018)

At the moment when the speedometer on the Aether spaceship clicked over from .999999c to 1.00000c, a collective cheer erupted up in the ITTDB Citadel. Was it a jaw-dropping dramatic moment? Seems unlikely, but we were looking for something to cheer for in this cryptic story of three men who headed to the future via relativistic time travel, only to find themselves trapped in post-apocalyptic outer space and quantum technobabble. —Michael Main
It nullifies Gödel’s theorem.
Drawing of three astronauts with an abstract background of clouds, outspace,
                and the word "Aether" in a red, star-filled circle.
  • Science Fiction
  • Debatable Time Travel
TV Season

The Umbrella Academy, Season 1

  • by multiple writers and directors
  • 10 episodes (Netflix, USA, 15 February 2019)

Of the 43 children born 1 October 1989 with no gestation period, the eccentric and sometimes cruel billionaire Reginald Hargreeves brought up seven of them and turned them into the super-powered group called the Umbrella Academy when they developed powers. Nearly thirty years later, after Hargreeves dies, the five surviving members of the group gather at their family home. Oh, and: Number Six died some time ago and only Number Four can see him; Number Five disappeared about seventeen years ago, but he’s back (and in his 13-year-old body) after living 45 years in a post-apocalyptic future that’s scheduled to start in eight days. —Michael Main
As far as I could tell, I was the last person left alive. I never figured out what killed the human race. I did find something else: the date it happens. . . . The world ends in eight days, and I have no idea how to stop it.
The six living siblings of the Umbrella Academy gather in colorful garb under a
                black umbrella held by Luthor.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • 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
Short Story

Eye of the Storm


A nameless narrator tells of unimaginable results and understandable regret that arose from testing what seemed like sound theories. —Michael Main
What has to happen to make you change?
Stylized outline of a rocket launching in a green circular seal for
                Daily Science Fiction.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Season

The Peripheral, Season 1


When Flynne Fisher’s ne’er-do-well brother lands a lucrative gig testing new VR tech, he drafts Flynne to do the heavy lifting, and she’s bowled over by the future world the VR has created—until she realizes it’s more than a sim. —Michael Main
If it were time travel, as you say, you’d be here physically. This is merely a matter of data transfer: quantum tunneling is the technical term for it. I understand your confusion.
Close-up of Chloë Grace Moretz (as Flynne Fisher) with her eyes obscured by a
                scene of rural North Carolina underneath an upside-down futuristic London.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel