Time Barrier

Tag Area: Timeline Trait
Novelette

Rescue Party

Only a smidgen of unimportant time phenomena in the first paragraph of this ominous first contact story. —Michael Main
But Alveron and his kind had been lords of the Universe since the dawn of history, since that far distant age when the Time Barrier had been folded round the cosmos by the unknown powers that lay beyond the Beginning.
Pen-and-ink drawing of a military tank with wings.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Novel

The End of Eternity

Andrew Harlan, Technician in the everwhen of Eternity, falls in love and starts a chain of events that could lead to the end of everything. —Michael Main
He had boarded the kettle in the 575th Century, the base of operations assigned to him two years earlier. At the time the 575th had been the farthest upwhen he had ever traveled. Now he was moving upwhen to the 2456th Century.
A black-and-white drawing of an elderly man standing at an electronic control board with a futuristic sphere in the background.
  • Eloi Gold Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • 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
Feature Film

Lem’s Star Diaries

Dziwny gość profesora Tarantogi

  • Professor Tarantoga’s strange guest
  • by Stanisław Lem
  • in Noc księżycowa (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963) [Published as a TV script (“widowisko telewizyjne”) eight years before the 1971 Polish TV broadcast.]
I’d bet my last złotych that Lem is carefully satirizing the rule of the Polish United Workers’s Party in this story of a fourth-millennium man who hails from Mars and has room in his brain for two or three different personalities (Kazimierz Nowak, Hipperkorn, and possibly a dreaded Nanów), the first of which leapt from a touring chronobus in the 20th century where he hoped to find the inventor of time travel, Professor Tarantoga. —Michael Main
W kilku słowach: w naszym społeczeñstwie decyduje o losie człowieka ranga intelektualna. Ludzie wartoœciowi, o zdolnoœciach wybitnych, mają prawo do całego, własnego ciała. Ja właœnie byłem takim, byłem samodzielnym, suwerennym meżczyznę!
translate Briefly, in our society the fate of a person depends on his intellectual level. Valuable people with outstanding abilities have the right to their entire body. I was just that, I was an independent, sovereign man!
A pencil sketch of an odd bird standing on the head of a dog-like robot with a full moon in the sky.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Flash Fiction

On the Bus

A man on a bus gives advice to his younger self. —Michael Main
You’re going to need a lot of dog food.
White text reading "Black is the New Black" on a black background above the text of a story.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Anna Green 1

Time between Us

Somewhat self-absorbed 16-year-old Anna Green manages to fall for the first time traveler she ever meets, not realizing that he’s a time traveler or that he’s hoping his mission to 1995 will be a short-term affair. —Jeff Delgado
It’s too easy for me to say the wrong thing today, and if I do, we may never meet at all
A teenage girl looks into the distance on a beach with her arms clutched around her waist.
  • Romance
  • Audience: Young Adults
  • Definite Time Travel
Novella

I Hate Time Travellers

  • by Lee J Isserow
  • (ABAM.info, March 2016) [audio reading]
Turns out the Luke is one of the few people on Earth who didn’t get involuntarily evolved into a time traveler. —Michael Main
All of them except Luke Denton and around a thousand other souls who’d been left behind whilst the rest of the human race were evolved against their will, by a force conspiracy theorists around the world had put down to anything from governmental to extra terrestrial tinkering.
The words "I Hate Time Travellers" in block letters in front of a pink vortex.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Invictus

After Farway Gaius McCarthy fails his final examination at the Central Time Travelers Academy, he puts together a rogue time travel crew to swipe valuable artifacts from the past at moments when they won’t be missed. And it’s all roses until a mysterious girl sidetracks them on the Titanic and steers them into a multiverse of fading timelines.

As you might guess, we enjoyed Far and his friends, but the thing that sealed an Eloi Bronze Medal was the fact that when a particular timeline actually managed to branch (not an easy feat) and the traveler then jumped to the future, she found her another self—the her that was born on that timeline—waiting for her. Most branching timeline stories ignore this issue entirely. —Michael Main
“There’s nothing to return to.” Eliot’s knuckles bulged at the seams, but she didn’t yell. “When the Fade destroys a moment, it’s lost. Forever.”
An abstract design of thin purple lines and dots over out-of-focus grey objects.
  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Audience: Young Adults
  • Definite Time Travel