Time Travel Science Fiction Stories

Time travel has mystified people for generations. Mark Twain wrote about it, science fiction stories abound. Real physicists are either dismissive, ambivalent, or supportive of the possibility. Time travel stories account for some great science fiction movies including Time Cop, The Time Machine, Primer, and A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur's court.A time travel story has several key elements. Let's begin with the most crucial, the Time Machine. Wells understood the centrality of the machine by naming his book after it. What is a time travel story without a time machine? It's probably boring. Think about Terminator. Yes I know it's about robots from the future. But there isn't actually any time travel in any of the 3 movies after the first few scenes. We never know if they really changed the future, we think so, we anticipate it. But the never-ending sequels continue to imply not.Compare this with Time Cop where characters are flitting back and forth creating paradoxes and
preventing them and the story has a real ending. Star Trek has some good time travel stories, but their time machine falls flat. It's the exact same spaceship they use everyday. Primer is an outstanding movie where the protagonists actually build the time machine, use it, and put one time machine inside another. Now that's quality scifi.The next key element is some type of paradox. The time traveler is trying to cause or prevent a paradox which threatens disaster, or prevents one. In the sound of thunder the hero travels back in time to try to stop the death of a butterfly. In Time Cop thugs are getting rich off of stock investments. In Back to the Future Marty's entire life unravels, and re-ravels.Finally, time travel stories have to have some tension. Something surprising must be learned, history is not what we thought, a time traveler stayed in the past to become Leonardo da Vinci. There must be a resolution.

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