Time Travel in Science Fiction

When we think of science fiction, names like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke spring to mind. As a result, most people imagine that science fiction originated in the twentieth century, but it did not. Surprisingly, the first science fiction story, The Man in the Moone, was written by Francis Godwin in 1638, followed by Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon in 1659. Of course, these stories were not referred to as science fiction at the time. That term was first coined in 1851 by William Whewell in A Little Earnest Book Upon A Great Old Subject. And it is probably just as well that the term had not come into use in Godwin’s day, as the stories were not very scientific at all. His hero, Domingo Gonsales, is hauled to the moon in a chariot by twenty-five special flying geese called gansas. There is breathable air between the Earth and the moon and the geese are unaffected by the laws of gravity. But the story stretched the imagination beyond the restrictions of space and contemporary technology, marking the beginning of a genre which, over the next three and a half centuries, would bring us robots, inter-sidereal travel and galactic empires, with countless writers striving to bring us their visions of the future.

Time travel took a little longer to arrive on the scene than space travel. It is commonly believed that H. G. Wells’ Time Machine was the first time travel story, but it was actually over a hundred years earlier, in 1771, that Louis Sebastien Mercier, a French author, published Memoirs of the Year 2500 (originally entitled Mémoires de l’An 2440). Again, it may surprise you to know that the first time travel stories all involved trips to the future rather than the past. And there were no gadgets and flying cars like the DeLorean in Back to the Future. In fact, there was no scientific explanation for the temporal shifts at all. The protagonist would fall into a deep sleep and awake in a future Utopian society. Interestingly, most early sci-fi stories, whether space or time travel, involved the idea that outside of our own sinful world of the present, we were bound to come across communities aspiring to perfection, although dystopian societies did occasionally pop up in stories.

In 1838, the first story about a dream trip to the past was published. It was called Missing One’s Coach and the author is unknown. The anonymous narrator drops off into a deep sleep and wakes up in eighth-century Britain. The first story using a mechanical time travel device was Edward Page Mitchell’s The Clock That Went Backwards, which was published in 1881. In this story, two boys find that when they turn a clock back, it transports them to sixteenth-century Holland.

However, the first time travel story that really captured people’s imaginations and gained a wide audience was H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. This book was first published as a schools edition in 1888 under the title The Chronic Argonauts, before being revised and expanded for re-release in 1895. It was an instant success. The time traveller invents a time machine and journeys to the future. Instead of a Utopia, he finds that the fate of the human race has taken a quite different turn. Herbert George Wells, who was born in Bromley near London in 1866 and died in 1946, also wrote The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds.

In the twentieth century, science fiction continued to flourish. Nevertheless, some people cringe even today when they hear the name used. Lots of great sci-fi has been written, but some quite inferior work has been published too. Time travel stories often get bogged down in paradoxes, such as altering history by killing people in the past, a theme that first arose in Nathan Schachner’s Ancestral Voices in 1933. A popular plot is the so-called Grandfather Paradox. What would happen if someone were to go back in time and kill his grandfather before he sired his children? There are basically three answers to this puzzle, none of them particularly satisfactory: a) the hero disappears after killing his grandfather as he cannot exist in the future (although you might ask how, if he does not exist, he can come back and kill his grandfather, and it is also necessary to wipe out all of the grandfather’s other descendants, which causes no end of complications); b) the hero returns to his own time, but no one recognises him (i.e. he is in a parallel universe); c) as he has violated causality, the universe explodes and ends (hard to believe that one small change to Earth’s past could result in the destruction of an entire universe).

Science fiction has also earned itself a bit of a bad name because of the “Pulps”. These are magazines that have been around since the early twentieth century and specialise in short stories. Many budding sci-fi writers got their first break with publications like Amazing Stories and Astounding. But with deadlines to meet, editors often found themselves forced to take some shoddier stories to fill up space, thus soiling the reputation of science fiction. Nevertheless, it is only fair to say that without the pulps, sci-fi would never have become anywhere near as big as it did.

Even so, there are plenty of good stories out there. For space travel and human societies on other planets, you cannot beat Isaac Asimov. His Robot and Foundation novels are the greatest sci-fi classics and in my opinion his End of Eternity is the best time travel story ever written. He skilfully avoids getting up in the clichés and paradox traps that other writers have fallen into so easily. A group of individuals called The Eternals live outside of time and constantly manipulate past, present and future in order to make the world the safest, most welcoming place possible. But their constant refinements of time mean that individuals, groups and whole societies are changed, replaced or simply wiped out. A lesser writer would never have been able to keep track of it all.

However, Asimov is not alone. Other writers have also produced laudable (if more straightforward) time travel stories, sometimes with a little humour. Paul Nahin’s Newton’s Gift (1979) tells of a time traveller, Wallace John Steinhope, who believes that revered mathematician Isaac Newton would have worked much faster had he not been obliged to spend so much time on lengthy calculations, so he goes back to meet his hero and present him with a calculator. The devoutly religious Newton is suspicious of the device with its fiery red numbers and thinks it is a tool of Satan. The hero punches in two numbers to divide at random and the answer comes up 666. Newton believes it is the work of the devil and grows angry, sending Steinhope scurrying back to his own time.

There is also a sub-genre of time travel called Alternate History or Allohistory. In these stories, a time traveller can view alternative pasts or futures or change them by providing people with special knowledge. Common choices for this theme are viewing the world with Hitler as the victor of World War II and an earlier fall of the Roman Empire. It was in Murray Leinster’s Sidewise in Time (1934) that this theme was first explicitly approached. His protagonist can move from one alternative history to another and sees the Romans conquering America and the Confederate armies winning the American civil war. He also wishes to use his scientific knowledge to set himself up as an emperor of a timeline with a less scientifically developed society. But, thankfully, not all time travel stories are centred around tyrants and madmen out to kill their ancestors. Sometimes the time traveller’s intention is merely to observe history. An excellent example of this is the multi-volume Caballo de Troya (1984-2013) by Spanish author Juan José Benitez, which has enjoyed huge success and been translated into a number of languages. An American military officer, code-named Jason, goes back in time to observe the life of Jesus Christ.

Some writers have successfully reverted to the psychological time travel of dreams and hypnotism. Richard Matheson returns to this concept in his book Bid Time Return (1975), which was later made into the cult movie Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. And in Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time, the protagonist believes that she inhabits two time zones simultaneously, flitting between them almost as she pleases. Other good stories are Michael Moorcock’s The Time Dwellers and A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury. Robert Heinlein has interesting takes on the theme in By His Bootstraps and The Door into Summer, and paradoxes are handled with dexterity in Up the Line by Robert Silverberg. There are literally hundreds of stories that involve time travel, not only in books but also in movies and on television, too many to mention here. On film, in addition to the Back to the Future series and Somewhere in Time, there are movies like The Terminator, Time After Time, The Lake House and 12 Monkeys, all of which have a unique take on time travel. On television there is Dr Who, The Time Tunnel, Quantum Leap and Stargate. Some of the most popular episodes of Star Trek involve time travel, including Little Green Men and The City on the Edge of Forever. An interesting BBC Play for Today also deserves to be mentioned: The Flipside of Dominick Hide. In this 1980 production, Dominick Hide travels from the twenty-second century to London in 1980 to meet his great-great-grandfather. He cannot locate his ancestor, but he is befriended by a group of people, one of whom is an attractive young woman called Jane. They have an affair and Jane becomes pregnant and decides to call her son Dominick. Yes, Dominick is not only a man of the 22nd century; he is also his own great-great-grandfather. This play was so popular that the BBC produced a follow-up in 1982 called Another Flip for Dominick.

These are just a few of the books, movies and TV shows on the theme of time travel. There are many more. Many stories of the genre are weak, with gaping holes in the plot and badly handled paradoxes. But a good, well-plotted time travel story is a delight to read and easily compensates for its poorer counterparts. I look forward to enjoying many more time travel stories in the future.