Time travel fiction involves exploring the past or future with a time travel device, popularized by HG Wells’ The Time Machine. Tropes include changing events for noble reasons and focusing on the effect on characters. Examples include A Sound of Thunder, Doctor Who, and Slaughterhouse-Five.
Time travel fiction involves the characters exploring the past or the future. This usually involves some kind of time travel device, which makes these stories part of the genre of science fiction, although this is not always the case. The genre was introduced by British writer HG Wells’ 1895 novel, The Time Machine. The perpetual one-way nature of time makes the subject endlessly fascinating to many people. Time travel fiction includes many popular novels, films, and comics.
The unshakable nature of time and its effect on human life has given rise to much speculation over the centuries, some of which is inevitably recorded in histories. Legends of ordinary people traveling far into the future occur in Chinese, Japanese and Irish myths. Early works of time-travel fiction included Washington Irving’s story Rip Van Winkle and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, both featuring characters visiting the future. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in which a modern man visits the past after a blow to the head, appeared in 1889.
The Time Machine by HG Wells was first published in England in 1895. This popular science fiction novel introduced the world to many of the concepts and contradictions of time travel fiction. It was made into blockbuster films in 1960 and again in 2002, as well as numerous adaptations in other media. Later films, such as the 1980s comedy-adventure series Back to the Future, had some elements in common with Wells’ story, including a device that allowed time travel to a specific destination. These works have focused on the effects and consequences of changing the past or visiting the future in human terms, neglecting the scientific details of the actual process of time travel.
Much time travel fiction has involved commonly used science fiction themes, called tropes. A classic example was Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder, in which the death of a butterfly changes a time traveler’s future; this story provided the origin of the phrase the butterfly effect. The television series Quantum Leap and Doctor Who, among others, have involved heroes who travel through time to change sequences of events for noble reasons. The classic Star Trek episode “The City at the Edge of Eternity” is an example of another time travel trope: that time must unfold as it will, sometimes tragically, despite the best intentions of the time travelers.
Another form of time travel fiction ignores the actual method, preferring to focus on its effect on the characters. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, his hero Billy Pilgrim famously drifts off in time, living his sad life out of sequence. The TV series Lost and Iain Sinclair’s novel Slow Chocolate Autopsy also dealt with the experiences of unstranded characters. The films The Lake House and The Time Traveler’s Wife explored the effects of time travel on romantic relationships. The 2004 independent film Primer applied cutting-edge physics to its story and used a documentary shooting style to portray the consequences of time travel on its characters.
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