THE WHOLE ITTDB   CONTACT   LINKS▼ 🔍 by Keywords▼ | by Media/Years▼ | Advanced
 
The Internet Time Travel Database

Cannot Return to Time Where You Already Exist

Time Travel Tropes

The Search

by A. E. van Vogt

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

“The Search” by A. E. van Vogt, Astounding, January 1943.

Avengers Annual #2

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

by Roy Thomas, Don Heck, and Werner Roth

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!

“. . . And Time, the Rushing River . . .” by Roy Thomas, Don Heck, and Werner Roth, in The Avengers Annual 2 (Marvel Comics, September 1968).

Avengers #56

Death Be Not Proud!

by Roy Thomas and John Buscema

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?

“Death Be Not Proud!” by Roy Thomas and John Buscema, in The Avengers 56 (Marvel Comics, September 1968).

The Hemingway Hoax

by Joe Haldeman

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.

“The Hemingway Hoax” by Joe Haldeman, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1990.

Ransom

by Albert E. Cowdrey

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.

“Ransom” by Albert E. Cowdrey, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 2002.

Million Eyes 0.04

Paul

by C. R. Berry


“Paul” by C. R. Berry, in Storgy Magazine, November 2016.

The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

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.

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz (Tor, September 2019).

as of 4:46 p.m. MDT, 18 May 2024
This page is still under construction.
Please bear with us as we continue to finalize our data over the coming years.