Time Spheres, Eggs, et al.

Tag Area: Time Machine
Flash Fiction

Un brillant sujet


Now that we’re in the enlightened 21st century, every self-respecting reader is intimately familiar with all the early time travel classics. Anno 7603, Paris avant les hommes,[/em] “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Clock That Went Backward,” El Anacronópete, The Time Machine, blah blah blah. But let’s be honest and call a Morlock a Morlock: All those old tales are tales of vacuous travelers through time, none of them giving a thought to contorted paradoxes, none wondering which lover they would get back (or get revenge on) if given the chance, none fretting about what might happen should they kill their younger self, and none having impure thoughts about sleeping with their mothers or the consequences of doing so. Yep, I’d always proudly boasted that it was my generation who discovered such sauciness.

And then I stumbled upon Jacques Rigaut’s century-old gem that managed all that and more in under 1,000 words more than a century ago. —Michael Main
Divers incestes sont consommés. Palentête a quelques raisons de croire qu’il est son propre père.
translate Various incests are consummated. Skullhead has some reason to believe that he is his own father.
A yellowed title page from the 1922 publication of "Un brillant sujet."
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Comedy
  • Experimental
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

Wanderer of Infinity

  • by Harl Vincent
  • in Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1933

When Joan Carmody sends a plea to her ex-boyfriend Bert Redmond, he barrels from Indiana to upstate New York in a trice, only to see Joan and her borderline-mad brother Tom kidnapped by metal monsters from another dimension. Fortunately, a mourning, immortal wanderer through time and space also sees the abduction and fills in Bert with all the salient details and some unsalient ones, too. —Michael Main
“We are here only as onlookers,” the Wanderer explained sadly, “and can have no material existence here. We can not enter this plane, for there is no gateway. Would that there were.”
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Short Story

Ancestral Voices


Time traveler Emmet Pennypacker kills one ancient Hun without realizing who will disappear from the racist world of 1935. —Michael Main
The year of grace 1935! A dull year, a comfortable year! Nothing much happened. The depression was over; people worked steadily at their jobs and forgot that they had every starved; Roosevelt was still President of the United States; Hitler was firmly ensconced in Germany; France talked of security; Japan continued to defend itself against China by swallowing a few more provinces; Russia was about to commence on the third Five Year Plan, to be completed in two years; and, oh, yes—Cuba was still in revolution.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
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
Novella

Sands of Time 1

The Sands of Time


Terry Donovan realizes that it’s possible to travel through time in 60,000,000-year increments, so naturally he travels back to the Cretaceous where he meets dinosaurs and aliens.

This story was under Tremaine’s Astounding editorship, but the sequel, “Coils of Time,” (May 1939) appeared after Campbell became editor. —Michael Main
Incidentally, I have forgotten the most important thing of all. Remember that Donovan’s dominating idea was to prove to me, and to the world, that he had been in the Cretaceous and hobnobbed with its flora and fauna. He was a physicist by inclination, and had the physicist’s flair for ingenious proofs. Before leaving, he loaded a lead cube with three quartz quills of pure radium chloride that he had been using in a previous experiment, and locked the whole thing up in a steel box.
A young man peers out from an egg-shaped time machine at an older man.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

Sands of Time 2

Coils of Time


You’ll need some patience with “Coils of Time," seeing as how it takes the hero, Rutherford Bohr Adams, twenty-some pages before you’ll realize that the story is a sequel to “The Sands of Time,” and it’s going to fall to space pilot Adams to travel through the 60-million-year coils of times into the future and the past, saving Earth from the evil Martians and their zombies, while also saving his own boss’s beautiful daughter from a fate worth than death. —Michael Main
It’s another form of the space-time field that I use in the Egg to bridge the gap between the coils of time.
A worried man in a futuristic jumpsuit climbs up shelves of inanimate bodies.
  • Science Fiction
  • War
  • Definite Time Travel
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
Comic Book

Fantastic Four #19

Prisoners of the Pharoah! [sic]


Hoping to find a cure for Alicia’s blindness, the FF travel back to ancient Egypt where they meet the time traveler Rama-Tut for the first time. —Michael Main
At the conclusion of that adventure, Doom’s castle was abandoned by him, but there is still a chance that the machine he used to send us into the past may still be operational!
Standing beside Rama Tut and dressed in red finery, Sue Storm thinks,
                "Rama Tut
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Book

Fantastic Four Annual #2

The Final Victory of Dr. Doom!


At the end of FF #23, Doc Doom was left floating in space. But of course, he’s too good a villain to not have someone rescue him, and that someone is Rama-Tut, fresh from FF #19 in his time ship. —Michael Main
Pen-and-ink splash page of the Fantastic Four facing motor trouble
                while riding over the city in their world-famous Fantastic-Car.
  • Eloi Gold Medal
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Strip

The Far Side

Gas


Two dinosaurs, a scientist, and a time machine comprise the groundwork for the first ever of Larson’s timeless time travel gags.
—Michael Main
A crew of Far Side characters construct two giant volumes titled The Complete
                Far Side.
  • Comedy
  • Audience: Families
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Strip

The Far Side

Professor Schnabel’s Cleaning Lady


In the world of The Far Side, cleaning ladies just get no respect. —Michael Main
A crew of Far Side characters construct two giant volumes titled The Complete
                Far Side.
  • Comedy
  • Audience: Families
  • Definite Time Travel
Comic Strip

The Far Side

The Cold-Blooded/Warm-Blooded Debate


We may never solve the conundrum of whether the dinosaurs were cold-blooded or warm-blooded.
—Michael Main
A crew of Far Side characters construct two giant volumes titled The Complete
                Far Side.
  • Comedy
  • Audience: Families
  • Definite Time Travel
Picture Book

Mr. Peabody and Sherman

Time-Travel Trouble!

  • by Billy Wrecks
  • (Random House Children’s Books, July 2014)

A short picture book of the 2014 Mr. Peabody and Sherman movie. The images are all from the movie’s CGI (or at least generated by the same process). —Michael Main
Sheman was supposed to keep the time machine secret, but he broke the rules. He took his friend Penny back in time to ancient Egypt.
Animated characters Sherman and Mr. Peabody peek out of a door frame.
  • Comedy
  • Audience: Children
  • Definite Time Travel
TV Season

The Flash, Season 1

  • written and directed by multiple people
  • (The CW, USA, 7 October 2014) to 19 May 2015)

Time travel is implied right from the first episode of the CW’s rendition of The Flash where a newspaper from the future is seen in the closing scene. The rest of the first season builds a fine time-travel arc that includes a nefarious time traveler from the far future, a classic grandfather paradox with a twist (sadly not examined), a do-over day for the Flash (which Harrison Wells calls “temporal reversion”), and a final episode that sees the Flash travel back to his childhood (as well as a hint that Rip Hunter himself will soon appear on the CW scene). —Michael Main
Wells: Yes, it’s possible, but problematic. Assuming you could create the conditions necessary to take that journey, that journey would then be fraught with potential pitfalls: the Novikov Principle of Self-Consistency, for example.

Joe: Wait—the what, now?

Barry: If you travel back in time to change something, then you end up being the causal factor of that event.

Cisco: Like . . . Terminator.

Joe: Ah!

Wells: Or is time plastic? Is it mutable, whereby any changes in the continuum could create an alternate timeline?

Cisco: Back to the Future.

Joe: Ah, saw that one, too.
The Flash, in his red costume, zig-zags through an empty city street, leaving a
                yellow electric bolt behind him.
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

In the Shadow of the Moon


Nine years after a gruesome mass murder, the case is reopened in the face of a copycat. As you might expect, Detective Thomas Lockhart poo-poos the notion that time travel is the only explanation for the set of present-day keys that were in the sealed evidence box of the nine-year-old case. —Michael Main
Last year? How in the hell did she have these keys in 1988?
An image of Boyd Holbrook (as Locke) blends into a nighttime scene of modern
                Cleopatra Coleman (as Rya) walking down an old-time city street.
  • Science Fiction
  • Mystery and Crime
  • Definite Time Travel