Time Catapults

Tag Area: Time Machine
Novelette

Monsters of Moyen


When the U.S. is attacked with monsterous submarine/aeroplanes by the demagogue Moyen, it's up to Professor Mariel to find a way to save the country, possibly even through the manipulation of time itself! —Michael Main
In this, I have even been compelled to manipulate in the matter of time! I must not only defeat and annihilate the minions of Moyen, but must work from a mathematical absurdity, so that at the moment of impact that moment itself must become part of the past, sufficiently remote to remove the monsters at such distance from the earth that not even the mighty genius of Moyen can return them!
Black-and-white drawing of serious old men in suits and ties watching a video
                screen in horror.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator


Pete Davidson has inherited all the properties of an uncle who had been an authority on the fourth dimension, including the Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator that can pull copies of matches, coins, dollar bills, fiancées, and kangaroos out of the past. —Michael Main
“These,” said Pete calmly, “are my fiancée.”
Three identical women, dresses in the same high fashion, stand on a contrivance
                connected to copper tubes and other high-tech machinery.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Murder in the Time World


Karl Tarig plans to murder his kindly cousin, Dr. Claude Morrison, who took Karl in when nobody else would. Then he'll toss cousin Claude’s body into the time machine that Claude built. Lastly, he’ll sell all of Claude’s valuables and run away in time with the indomitable Ellen Warren. The perfect crime! —Michael Main
To hell with the law! For he had thought out the perfect crime. There could be no dangerous consequences. You can’t hang a man for murder with a body—a corpus delicti. For the first time in the history of crime, a murderer had at his disposal the sure means of ridding himself of his corpse.
Pen-and-ink drawing of a crazed man dragging an unconscious man into a vault
                beside a futuristic chair and control panel.
  • Science Fiction
  • Mystery and Crime
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Book

Adventure into Mystery #2

Among Those Missing!


Earth’s finest scientific minds are being taken to the future to save a crumbling society. —Michael Main
Here is a chart of the fifty outstanding brians in our country! You will notice that thirty-two have disappeared to date!
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Book

Journey into Mystery #48

Don’t Turn Around!


Just when two burglars approach his house, reclusie scientist Frank Mulford finishes his time machine to retrieve people from the past. —Michael Main
What a mad idea . . . thinking I could bring people from the past with this machine!
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
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
Comic Book

Journey into Mystery #66

The Black Ray


While in prison, Hiram Drudd builds a machine that casts a black ray to send his mind back into a historical figure. —Michael Main
The fool . . . Little does he realize I’m building the instrument for my escape!
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Episode

The Twilight Zone (v1s01e26)

Execution


Back in the 1880s, just after a man without conscience is dropped from a lone tree with a rope around his neck, a scientist pulls him into 20th-century New York City.

Serling wrote this script based on a George Clayton Johnson’s bare bones, present-tense treatment for a TV script, complete with an indication of where the commercial break should go. For this episode, Serling filled in the flesh and cut the fat from a bare bones, present-tense treatment by George Clayton Johnson. The treatment appeared in Johnson’s 1977 retrospective collection of scripts and stories, and in Volume 9 of Serling’s collected Twilight Zone scripts, Johnson commented that “Rod took my idea and went off to the races with it. He had a remarkable knowledge of what would and wouldn’t work on television, and he took everything that wouldn’t work out of ‘Execution’. He worked like a surgeon; a little snip here, a complete amputation over there, move this bone into place, graft over that one. When he was done, my little story had grown into a television script that lived and breathed on its own.” Serling also added a nice twist at the end that, for us, warranted the TV episode an Eloi Honorable Mention.
Rod Serling wrote this script based on a 1960 Twilight Zone episode of the same name, but I’m uncertain whether the story was published before Johnson’s 1977 retrospective collection. —Michael Main
Caswell: I wanna see if there are things out there like you described to me. Carriages without horses and the buildings that rise to—

Professor Manion: They’re out there, Caswell. . . . Things you can’t imagine.
Dressed in a tie and black jacket, and holding his trademarked cigarette, Rod
                Serling stands in front of a time machine.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Fantasy
  • Weird Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Book

Journey into Mystery #75

The Man Who Lost the World!


Just when does the professor’s time machine send things to? Nobody knows, so when the prof’s flunky feels poorly treated, he decides to find out on his own. —Michael Main
But if I could find outwhether the machine sends people intothe past or the future, then I would know something even he doesn’t know!
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Weird Fiction
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Book

Fantastic Four #5

Prisoners of Doctor Doom!


The Marvel Comics Brand began in 1939 with the first edition of Marvel Comics. Throughout the ’40s and ’50s, some of the Timely and Atlas comics had the slogan “A Marvel Magazine,” ”Marvel Comic,” or a small “MC” on the cover. As for me personally, I was hooked when Marvel started publishing the Fantastic Four in 1961. During the sixties, I devoured as many Marvels as I could as they arrived at the local Rexall Drug Store or swapping comcs with my pals, and this is the first of those Marvel issues in the ’60s involved superhero time travel.

Nowadays, we all know that Doc Doom is far too smart to think the most profitable way to use his time platform is by sending three of the FF into the past with orders to bring back Blackbeard’s treasure (while keeping the fourth member of their team captive). And yet, the story has a charm that stems from the causal loop of Ben Grimm’s presence in the past actually causing the legend of Blackbeard, which in turn caused Doom to send the loveable lunk back.
And now I shall send you back. . . hundreds of years into the past! You will have forty-eight hours to bring me Blackbeard’s treasure chest! Do not fail!
Through a large, round portal in an air-tight chamber, Doctor Doom threatens to
                destroy the F F, who helpless struggle as they run out of air.
  • Eloi Gold Medal
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Book

Journey into Mystery #85

Filbert’s Frightful Future


Mad scientist Filbert Phelps wants to use his time machine to become the richest man in the world, —Michael Main
Yes, I am a genius . . . and that’s why I’m about to become fabuously rich! Just as soon as I finish my greatest invention . . .
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Weird Fiction
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Debatable Time Travel
Comic Book

Avengers #11, December 1964

The Mighty Avengers Meet Spider-Man


This story is as close as Spidey ever got to time traveling in the Silver Age. He didn’t travel himself, but he did meet and battle Kang’s time traveling Spider-Man robot. On top of that, Don Heck gave us his interpretations of Ditko art taken from the pages of the Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1. Can you tell which is which?
Spider-Man! Well, much obliged to you, fella! I never knew you were so . . . cooperative!
Spider-Man perches on one side of a large web that has trapped the five
                Avengers.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Superhero
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Book

Gorgo 23

The Land of Long Ago


Charlton’s Gorgo comic was inspired by the the 1961 movie of the same name Unlike the movie, however, the comic book Gorgo had one adventure in time when Dr. Hobart Howarth rescues Gorgo from YaPa* by sending the giant reptile back to the late Jurassic. Sadly, as a child, I bought only one Gorgo comic, which was not the time-travel issue, although that one issue I had was drawn by Steve Ditko, hooray!
* Yet another Pentagon attack —Michael Main
I will send Gorgo back into is own era in the stream of time. Here he is an anachronism . . . In his own time, he would be in harmony withhis surroundings!
A giant green reptile bats at a dark pterodactyl while a man cowers to one
                side.
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • 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
Flash Fiction

Historicity


In the moments before a jump, a traveler muses over the realities of time travel. —Michael Main
That's a much nicer narrative device than having to find the right kind of black hole orbiting the right kind of star and then build a machine around both of them.
A star emerging from behind a blue planet.
  • Science Fiction
  • 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
Feature Film

2067

  • written and directed by Seth Larney
  • (at limited theaters (USA, 2 October 2020)

The cinematic vision of writer/director Seth Larney was beyond his grasp in this story of a Philip K. Dick-esque future where all plant life has been killed off, an evil corporation has cornered the market in artificial oxygen, and a lowly utility worker with a dying wife is called four centuries into the future by a successfully executed causal loop accompanied by the usual kind of unexplained skeleton timeline. —Michael Main
You want to shoot me into oblivion with no way to get home.
Kodi Smit-McPhee (as Ethan Whyte) and Ryan Kwanten (as Jude) stare at us
                through oxygen helmuts, while below them, a man in an environmental suit stares into
                an overgrown city.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Miniseries

16 episodes

시지프스: The Myth

  • Sisyphus: The Myth
  • Sisyphus: The myth
  • Sisyphus: The Myth
  • by 전찬호 and 이제인, directed by 진혁
  • 16 untitled episodes (JTBC-TV, Korea, 17 February to 8 April 2021)

Young genius Han Tae-sul is the focus of dangerous people and a mysterious woman—Gang Seo-hae—from a war-torn near future.

Sadly, the story comes close to being a slick static timeline, but alas, the writers could not follow through. —Michael Main
The Downloader is a real piece of work. There’s only a ten percent chance of success, eh? And even if they make it, half of them get caught by the Control Bureau.
A static-y head shot of Park Shin-Hye (as Gang Seo Hae) with long black hair
                and a worried look.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel