Write Back to the Future: Difference between revisions
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** Also in the eighth book ''The Pilgrims of Rayne'' where Aja Killian leaves a message hoping the future will find it.
* In [[Isaac Asimov]]'s ''The End of Eternity'', Cooper sends a hidden message through an ad in a magazine, to inform Harlan of where (or to be exact, when) he is.
* Jack Finney wrote a story in which the main character sent people into the past who wanted to "emigrate" there. They would get themselves in
* Inverted in [[The Riftwar Cycle]] book ''Into a Dark Realm''. Pug has a magical box which he uses to send his past self messages.
** Actually, it is revealed later that {{spoiler|the god of Trickery on Pug's world was forging Pug's hand-writing and using the magic box as a way of putting Pug where he needed to be, when he needed to be there. He did this partly because he knew Pug wouldn't fully trust any magical message from anyone but himself and partly because it was more fun that way.}}
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** This trope is mocked in ''Life, the Universe, and Everything'' when Arthur and Ford end up on Earth shortly before it's blown up. Arthur gets the idea to warn himself, but Ford points out that it wouldn't work by doing an impression of the hypothetical phone call "'Hello, me? It's me. Please don't hang up.' ''*shrug*'' He hung up. [[Genre Savvy|This is NOT my first temporal anomaly, you know.]]"
* Done without the time travel - sort of - in [[Joe Haldeman]]'s ''[[The Forever War]]'', in which Marygay leaves a note for William at the front of his army record, knowing that this will be kept safe to give to him if he survives the war, even though near-lightspeed travel has caused their personal timelines to diverge and therefore he's hundreds of years in her future.
* The protagonist of ''[[The Anubis Gates]]'' by [[Tim Powers]] sends a message from the past to ''himself'', jotting a note on a book in Pig Latin. This isn't so much an attempt to convey
* Likewise, at the end of ''[[Artemis Fowl]]: The Time Paradox'', Artemis {{spoiler|sends back a note to the past Mulch Diggums after he defeats Opal Koboi to break Artemis and Holly out after they were captured by the past Butler.}}
* The part of the Plot of [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''The Doorway to Summer''
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* ''[[Doctor Who]]'':
** In "Battlefield", the Doctor finds a note in his own handwriting with the body of [[King Arthur]], a message from his future self.
** "Blink" revolves almost entirely around such messages. First, Sally finds a message addressed to her written behind the wallpaper of a derelict house. When she returns with her friend Kathy, Sally answers the door to someone with a letter for her while Kathy goes upstairs. The letter is from Kathy saying she had a long and happy life, delivered by her grandson; meanwhile Kathy is sent back in time. Another character is asked to keep a message and take it to Sally by [[The Slow Path]], and DVD [[Easter Egg
*** His conversation with Sally is even more impressive, since the two actually have a dialog using the DVD easter eggs. It turns out that Sally's companion is a conspiracy theorist who has been fascinated by the easter eggs for years. When he hears Sally's responses, he writes her side of the conversation down in shorthand so he can post it to his conspiracy newsgroup. The Doctor later gets a copy of her responses and uses this to record ''his'' side of the conversation. Thus the entire conversation is an [[Fridge Brilliance|ontological paradox]].
** River Song uses this tactic all the damn time to get the Doctor's attention, leaving messages in places that are sure to get his attention sooner or later. (It doesn't matter ''when'' exactly he finds them, because he can land the TARDIS precisely at the time she asks, even if that was millenia prior.)
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*** Not so unlikely if {{spoiler|Adam, who'd lived through the intervening centuries,}} had kept it all along, and Linderman only got ahold of it when {{spoiler|the Company locked him up}}.
* Reversal: In ''[[Early Edition]]'', the main character mysteriously receives newspapers a day ahead of time. He then spends the rest of the episode trying to avert the tragedies the newspaper describes before they happen.
* Used pretty well in the sci-fi action series ''[[Time Trax]]''
* In the sixth season of ''[[Charmed]]'', when Chris gets dragged back into the future by {{spoiler|his fiancee, Bianca,}} the sisters write a spell to give him back his powers and stick it under a [[Chekhov's Gun|loose floorboard mentioned previously in the episode]]. Twenty years in the future, Chris pries up the old loose floorboard, finds the note, and returns to the past with his newly-recovered powers. The sequence is also an example of [[San Dimas Time]], as the sisters 'race' to write and place the spell 'before' Chris opens the floorboard, and were surprised when he re-emerged just a few moments after they planted the note.
** Though this is justified when you consider that the girls don't really understand time travel, despite attempted explanations by Leo.
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