Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Forum administrators, Interface administrators, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
116,480
edits
(Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 0 as dead. #IABot (v2.0beta9)) |
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (→Comics: -> "Comic Books") |
||
(6 intermediate revisions by 4 users not shown) | |||
Line 4:
{{quote|''Time travel is theoretically impossible, but I wouldn't want to give it up as a plot gimmick.''|'''[[Isaac Asimov]]'''}}
{{quote|''(For related tropes, see [[Time Travel Tropes]])''|TV Tropes}}
A time travel story can simply use time travel as a vehicle to get the hero to the [[Adventure Towns]], or the [[Phlebotinum]] involved can be a key plot driver. No matter what story type the hero is going to need a [[Time Machine]] or [[Time Master]] to get around. Time Travel stories seem to fall into several categories:
Line 36:
See also [[Temporal Mutability]] for the very tricky problem of how (or even if) you can change the future or the past.
See also [[Meanwhile in the Future]], [[What Year Is This?]], the other [[Time Travel Tropes]], and this [[wikipedia:Time travel|Wikipedia entry]].
----
Line 45:
=== [[
* In ''[[Universal War One]]'', scientists build a space station that accidentally opens a wormhole, allowing limited time travel. {{spoiler|Then Kalish solves the equations that allow anybody to travel through time and space without limitation.}}
=== Film ===
Line 62 ⟶ 61:
=== [[Literature]] ===
* In ''[[
=== [[Live Action Television]] ===
Line 109 ⟶ 108:
* ''[[Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle]]'' later turns out to have used this, having hidden it among a bushel of jaunts to alternate universes, or "countries". One "country" turned out to be the main characters' homeland in the past. {{spoiler|And our world, or one much like it, in the future}}.
* ''[[Pokémon 4Ever|Pokémon 4 Ever]]'' features a Celebi that inadvertently brings {{spoiler|the young Professor Oak}} with it to the present day when escaping from a hunter.
* The ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!
* In ''[[Mirai Nikki]]'', its use is so incredibly spoileriffic details can't be given. Let's just say it's important. {{spoiler|[[Yandere|Yuno Gassai]] abuses THIS.}}
* In ''[[Puella Magi Madoka Magica]]'', this turns out to be the main power of {{spoiler|Homura. The entire series is the nth iteration of a time loop that started when Kyubey granted Homura's wish for the chance to save an already-dead Madoka.}}
=== [[
* ''[[PS238]]'', especially the later issues. Includes several confusing [[Stable Time Loop|stable time loops]]
* ''[[Booster Gold]]'' is the current Time Travel comic at DC, exploring the difficulties of [[You Can't Fight Fate|solidified time]] and the effects of the various crises on the time line, making it like [[Screw Destiny|"Wet Cement".]]
Line 120 ⟶ 119:
* Prior to [[Post-Crisis|1985]] [[Superman]] could time travel under his own power but would arrive in the past completely invisible and intangible, unable to interact with the past in any way, avoiding the problems with this trope. After 1985, he was no longer powerful enough to time travel at all.
** Not quite. He would be invisible and intangible only if he travelled to a period where he already existed, since he couldn't be in two places at the same, er, time. If he travelled to a time prior to his own birth, he was solid. However he still couldn't change the past.
=== [[Film]] ===
Line 135 ⟶ 133:
** In the 8th-century Japanese tale of [[wikipedia:Urashima Taro|Urashima Taro]]. Urashima Taro is a young fisherman who visits an undersea palace and stays there for three days. After returning home to his village, he finds himself three hundred years in the future, where he is long forgotten, his house in ruins, and his family long dead.
* The concept of travelling backward in time is relatively more recent. The idea was hinted at in Samuel Madden's ''Memoirs of the Twentieth Century'' (1733), and told more explicitly in Alexander Veltman's ''Predki Kalimerosa: Aleksandr Filippovich Makedonskii'' (1836).
* ''[[A Christmas Carol]]''{{'}}s ([[Charles Dickens]], 1843) ghosts of Christmas past, Christmas present and Christmas yet to come allude to the concept of travel both backward and forward in time, but only as a passive observer.
* ''[[The Time Machine]]'' ([[H. G. Wells]], 1895) inspired 99% of the modern uses of the concept. The book used it to provide a present day [[Framing Device|frame story]] for a tour of the future.
* Zits in ''[[Flight (novel)|Flight]]'' time travels continuously by going into different bodies.
* ''[[Time and Again]]'', and its sequel ''Time After Time'' by Jack Finney.
* ''[[Dragonriders of Pern]]'': The earlier books used the newly-(re)discovered time-traveling ability of the dragons for several plot points. After the Big One (Lessa bringing the lost Weyrs back
** Which had more to do with the detrimental effects of dragon-based time-slipping: first, simply making the jump required traveling through the sensory-deprivation hell that is "between" for extended periods far beyond the quick three-breaths referenced in early stories, and second being in two places at once had ever-increasing mental effects on the travelers in question...effects that were decidedly unhinging to the travelers and intensified drastically the closer they were spatially to an earlier incarnation. Lessa's jump some four hundred years into the past very nearly killed her from apoxia, and the one recorded time that an earlier version actually caught sight of a later time-traveling one (for a split second, and even that only as a shadow moving in darkness) left the earlier incarnation almost completely physically and mentally incapacitated for a good fifteen minutes.
* ''[[A Tale of Time City]]'' by [[Diana Wynne Jones]]. Time City is "[[Place Beyond Time|outside]]" normal time, using recycled time (hence very important/emotional moments get burned in and are seen as time ghosts both before and after the event). Time is divided into unstable eras to be visited with great caution (ours obviously) and stable eras that they trade information with. However, they only sell information about the (relative) past, no stock market sneak previews.
Line 148 ⟶ 147:
* The ''[[Time Scout]]'' series is built around an Accident that caused [[Portal to the Past|time portals]] to open up between random times and places. The stories cluster around people who happen to go places for various reasons.
* [[Doomsday Book]], among other books by [[Connie Willis]], features time-travelling historians who visit the past via a "net".
=== [[Live Action Television]] ===
Line 302 ⟶ 300:
Mentioned in the end, since this series uses (and spoofs) ''every single trope'' listed above:
* [[Larry Niven]]'s ''Hanville Svetz'' series of time travel short stories, collected in ''[[The Flight of
{{reflist}}
▲[[Category:Narrative Devices]]
[[Category:Applied Phlebotinum]]
[[Category:Narrative Devices]]
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:
|