Cannot Return to Where You Already Exist

Tag Area: Time Travel Trope
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

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
Novelette

Bank and Shoal of Time

  • by R. A. Lafferty
  • in A Spadeful of Spacetime, edited by Fred Saberhagen (Ace Books, February 1981)
Peter Luna brings five “time attempter” experts to his estate, hoping that he’ll be able to pass on his secret for getting over the time shoal that prevents them from exploring the past. —Michael Main
This was the message received by a dozen or so experts in the "time attempters" field:

"I have succeeded in establishing a creeping time-satellite or time-shuttle at my estate of Moonwick near Lunel in the Herault Department of the Peoples Republic of France. If you are really experts in your field, you will appreciate the importance of this. From this time-shuttle, which is just beyond the ‘shoal’ of all of you to whom I am sending this message, it will be possible for you to launch genuine time probes. I am sending this to a dozen or so and I hope for acceptance from at least five. I must have a matched set of at least five. Some soon. A very little bit after ‘soon’ will be too late for me to transmit the shuttle to you. Bring ideas only. Everything else for frugal and break-through living is provided. You will receive various transportation chits and enabling papers. Peter Luna.”

The World Courier Service (“No questions asked. Messages carried anywhere or anywhen in the world”) delivered these messages to the dozen or so persons who were experts in the time field. And some of the people gave assent and some didn’t. So, the next day, the Courier Service delivered airline tickets, train tickets, and International Taxi Coupons to five of the experts who had agreed to go to Moonwick.
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite 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

Ransom

Time travel agent Maks Hamilton is told by mysterious kidnappers that if he ever wants to see his own son again, he must travel back three centuries—just before the Troubles—to abduct another boy.

Despite the characters’ belief that they can change history, up in the ITTDB Citadel we all agreed that the characters are an unreliable source and this story actually lives in a carefully crafted single static timeline along with a nice bootstrap paradox. —Michael Main
I want you to bring someone from the past to the present—someone who would otherwise die only a few hours afterward. Surely that’s possible.
A spiral galaxy looms large behind a nighttime desert scene.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Million Eyes 0.04

Paul

A black-and-white banner of the Storgy magazine title above a story by C R Berry.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

The Future of Another Timeline

Tess is a geologist (because, of course, geologists control the time travel of the giant ancient machines) and a member of the Daughters of Harriet (Senator Harriet Tubman, that is, from 19th-century Mississippi). On the surface, the Daughters are time travel scholars, but in reality, Tess and her fellow Daughters are fighting a pitched changewar for women’s rights against the oppressors known as the Comstockers. One more thing: While she’s at it,Tess also hopes to also save the souls of her teenaged self and her underground feminist punk friends in the 1990s, with a particular focus on their vigilante killing spree and young Beth’s abortion. —Michael Main
All five Machines had limitations, but the hardest to surmount was what travelers call the Long Four Years. Wormholes only opened for people who remained within twenty kilometers of a Machine for at least 1,680 days.
A watch dial with Roman numerals inside a dark blue flower on a bright red background.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel