Five Stories Exploring the Pitfalls of Time Travel

It’s 1976 and Dana is celebrating her 26^th birthday with her husband in their new home in California when she’s suddenly ripped through time and space to find herself on a Southern plantation in the early 1800s. Before she’s even had the time to process what just happened, she hears a child drowning in a nearby river and springs into action. Almost immediately after saving the boy, she just as abruptly finds herself back in her house in L.A.  

Over the course of the story, Dana is pulled back in time to this plantation for longer and longer chunks of time. This is a particular problem due to the fact that she’s Black and is therefore treated as a slave. While the mistreatment of enslaved people is a large—and important—part of the story and is absolutely brutal to read about, Butler’s narrative is also a brilliant exploration of different types of agency and modes of resistance.

Despite the challenging subject matter, I sped my way through Kindred—eager to see Dana’s attempts to control both her increasingly difficult life in the past and learn more about the mysterious mechanics of the time travel itself.

Kin Stewart is from 2142 and works (or, rather, worked) as a secret agent who travels through time. But things went wrong on a mission in 1996, leaving Kin stranded. With no other option—and suffering from memory loss—he set about creating a normal life by getting a job in IT, getting married, and having a kid. The story kicks off with rescue finally arriving—18 years too late (although, in fairness, it’s only been a few weeks in their timeline). Kin now finds himself torn between two families split across different time periods.

Kin’s very valid life crisis would be enough to deal with on its own, but he then starts messing around with the rules of time travel for the sake of his daughter—a decision that has some pretty dire consequences. Here and Now and Then has this compelling father-daughter relationship at its emotional core, but I also loved getting into the details of how the time travel agency, the Temporal Corruption Bureau, actually works.

Recursion starts with NYPD detective Barry Sutton attempting to stop a woman from ending her life. She has a new disease—False Memory Syndrome (FMS)—which has recently started spreading, and the disease is generating memories of a son who doesn’t exist in the current reality. Barry starts to investigate FMS after this distressing encounter and it eventually leads him to Dr. Helena Smith, a neuroscientist whose research into Alzheimer’s disease may have accidentally resulted in the creation of time travel.

From pretty much start to finish, Recursion is a propulsive, twisty, and chaotic thrill ride. Barry and Helena know that it’s incredibly messy to interfere with the past, but if they want the present to go back to normal, then they don’t have any other choice.

The idea of a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a tornado on the other side of the world was first put forward in 1972 by Edward Norton Lorenz (although both he and other scientists had been developing the idea before that). But in the realm of fiction, at least, Lorenz and his “butterfly effect” had been beaten to the punch by Ray Bradbury, who 20 years earlier had written a story which illustrated the idea that great changes can spring from seemingly insignificant origins with the untimely demise of just one winged insect.

In “A Sound of Thunder,” Time Safari Inc. is a company that will take anyone willing to pay an incredibly high price tag back to the prehistoric period to hunt and shoot a dinosaur. The company is aware that small changes in the past could snowball into huge changes in the present, so specific dinosaurs—ones that already have one foot in the grave for whatever reason—are pre-selected for clients to kill and they’re led through the experience under very tight parameters.

But it turns out that those parameters weren’t tight enough, because it takes just one member of a hunting party freaking out when he sees a T-Rex—causing him to disastrously step off of the pre-planned path—to set history on the wrong course.

There’s been plenty of debate over how long Phil is trapped in his time loop in Groundhog Day (1993); most estimates fall somewhere within the 10 to 40 year range. This is enough time for Phil to be driven to desperate measures, attempting to end it all via various painful methods out of despair. But imagine being just 14 years old when you became trapped in a time loop… and then imagine it going on and on forever.

That’s the situation that Ama finds herself in, but she isn’t alone in the loop, with the rest of the residents in her neighborhood also being subjected to the same strange timey-wimey phenomenon. At the end of each day a nuclear explosion—known as the Flash—wipes everyone out and the day resets. You might think that having other people to share in the hellish experience would ease the mental burden, but the characters in “Through the Flash” are there to prove you wrong. And yet, for all of the external violence and internal strife in the short story, it ends on a relatively hopeful note.