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Time travel is a common theme in fiction and has been depicted in a variety of media from prose fiction to television and advertisements.
Time travel themes
Time travel can either be the central theme of the plot or merely a plot device to set the story in motion. Whereas the theme of time travel may be restricted in hard science fiction, which would examine the causes and effects of time travel paradoxes instead, the theme may be allowed in soft science fiction, fantasy and science fantasy, which ignores these aspects and focuses on fantastic wonders and adventures.
Sean Redmond regards the time travel motif as providing a "necessary distancing effect" which can allow fiction to address contemporary issues in metaphorical ways, and valuable for providing a view of history where every person is significant.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895) was the phenomenal book which helps in moving the concept of time travel to the forefront of the public imagination. Non-technological forms of time travel have appeared in a number of earlier stories, and some earlier works have featured elements suggestive of time travel, but remain somewhat ambiguous.
In ancient Hindu mythology, the Mahabharata, written around 700 B.C. mentions the story of the King Revaita, who travels to a different world to meet the creator Brahma. The King is shocked to learn that many ages have passed when he returns to Earth.
Another very old example of this type of story can be found in the Talmud, with the story of Honi HaM'agel, written in 300 A.D., who went to sleep for 70 years and woke up to a world where his grandchildren were grandparents and where all his friends and family were dead.
Urashima Tarō, an early Japanese tale, involves traveling forward in time to a distant future, and was first described in the Nihongi (720). The tale was about a young fisherman, named Urashima Taro, 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 is in ruins, and his family long since dead.
In Walter Map's 12th century De nuts curialium ("Courtiers' Trifles"), Map tells of the Briton King Herla, who is transported with his hunting party over two centuries into the future by the enchantment of a mysterious harlequin.
Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733), by Samuel Madden, is mainly a series of letters from English ambassadors in various countries to the British "Lord High Treasurer", along with a few replies from the British foreign office, all purportedly written in 1997 and 1998 and describing the conditions of that era. However, the framing story is that these letters were actual documents given to the narrator by his guardian angel one night in 1728. For this reason, Paul Alkon suggests in his book Origins of Futuristic Fiction that "the first time-traveler in English literature is a guardian angel who returns with state documents from 1998 to the year 1728", although the book does not explicitly show how the angel obtained the documents. Alkon later qualifies this by writing, "t would be stretching our generosity to praise Madden for being the first to show a traveler arriving from the future", but he also says that Madden "deserves recognition as the first to toy with the rich idea of time-travel in the form of an artifact sent backwards from the future to be discovered in the present."
In the science fiction anthology Far Boundaries (1951), the editor August Derleth identifies the short story Missing One's Coach: An Anachronism, written for the Dublin University Magazine by an anonymous author in 1838, as a very early time travel story. In it, the narrator is waiting under a tree to be picked up by a coach which will take him out of Newcastle when he suddenly finds himself transported back over a thousand years. There he encounters the Venerable Bede in a monastery, and gives him somewhat ironic explanations of the developments of the coming centuries. It is never entirely clear whether these events actually occurred or were merely a dream.
In 1843, the Charles Dickens novella A Christmas Carol depicts Ebenezer Scrooge being transported back and forth in time to points in his own lifetime by a series of Ghosts to visit Christmases Past, Present and Future. However, the things he sees are merely "shadows"; he and the Ghosts do not interact with them.
The book Paris avant les hommes ("Paris before Men"), by the French botanist and geologist Pierre Boitard (published posthumously in 1861), has the main character transported to various prehistoric settings by the magic of a "lame demon", and who is then able to actively interact with prehistoric life.
Tourmalin's Time Cheques (1891), written by Thomas Anstey Guthrie under the pseudonym F. Anstey, was the first story to explore the paradoxes that time travel might cause.
Golf in the Year 2000 (1892), by J. McCullough, tells the story of an Englishman who fell asleep in 1892 and awakened in the year 2000. The focus of the book is how the game of golf would have changed by then, but many social and technological themes are also discussed along the way, including devices similar to television and women's equality.
Nahin, Paul J. (1999). Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction (2. ed., ed.). New York, NY : Springer ISBN9780387985718.
Redmond, Sean (2014). Liquid Metal: the Science Fiction Film Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN0231501846.
