Could original fiction time travel work?

[seitora]

I'm sure we've all read our fair share of time travel stories as a guilty pleasure and what-not, but I think time travel in fanfiction suffers from what a lot of fanfiction tropes suffer from: it can be workable precisely because it's working off a canon base that the reader is assumed to have read or have fair knowledge of, but if the reader hasn't then the fic suffers because there's a lack of context to the story. Take a time-travel Harry Potter story, for instance - the reader is just assumed to know a lot about the magic world, who all these characters popping into the story are, etc. If you didn't know a lick about HP and read a time travel fanfic, you'd be lost.

So I was wondering, how would an original fic time travel story work? I don't mean something along the lines even of Bill & Ted or Dr. Who, as while they use time travel as a major plot element to help move the story along, it isn't THE defining impetus behind the whole story. I'm thinking more along the lines of all the post-apocalyptic stories where an individual or small group travels back in time to save the world from whatever doom is coming. If anybody actually knows of any such stories already in any sort of media (literature, film, etc.) listing them as well would work. I'm sure I know of a couple even, just that aren't coming to mind at all.

A few video games do this already (Tales of Phantasia, To the Moon kinda-sorta), but those I think are boosted by the interactive element, and in ToP's case 40 hours of game yields a lot more story than 2 hours of movie or however many pages of literature.

 

[pacifist]

Have you read mother of learning?

https://www.fictionpress.com/s/2961893/1/Mother-of-Learning

 

[daniel_gudman]

...I'm thinking more along the lines of all the post-apocalyptic stories where an individual or small group travels back in time to save the world from whatever doom is coming.

 

[Glimmervoid]

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett has Sam Vimes accidentally travel backwards in time and relive a period of his younger life alongside his younger self.

 

[seitora]

Good post, Daniel.

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett has Sam Vimes accidentally travel backwards in time and relive a period of his younger life alongside his younger self.

Ah, but it's not self-contained.

 

[Schema]

There is a TV Show called Continuum. It does time travel fun.

And who can forget back to the future?

 

[Glimmervoid]

The 'travel back in time and do my life over again' is a very big plot in the original erotic lit community. I've never been partial to it myself but there are lots of highly rated stories which use the formula on storiesonline.net.

 

[byakuryuu]

The best instance and usage of time travel I've seen is actually from the film Looper. You'd think people would be hard-pressed to combine a mob action film and science fiction involving heavy paradoxes, but it really works there, surprisingly enough. I've always liked commentary on literary tools when they're being used - relationships, happily ever afters, gung-ho heroes, etc. which inspired me to take up full-time writing - I love reading up on them and applying the related science to it. Looper's one of the few films that didn't need to have that commentary and do it well.

For some reason, I found Interstellar's science quite underwhelming - contrary to how it was advertised. I haven't read HG Well's book yet, and - wait... erotic lit community?

 

[Glimmervoid]

wait... erotic lit community?

Sure? You didn't think fan fiction was the only writing on the net? Frankly, there's probably more original erotic lit than original non-erotic lit on the web. Back in the 90s there were lots of big mailing lists with some genuinely good writers - some even went pro. It developed completely independently from the fanfiction movement so some of the conventions are different but writing's writing and plots are plots.

These days its quieted down but there are still several big sites lots of new stuff each day. The romantic in me even wants to say there's something of a revival going on. The big award (The Golden Clitorides Awards) was revived last year. Relevantly, they added a category for 'Do-Over Stories', which are time travel stories where the main character does his life over again.

Anyway, if you have further questions we should probably move this to the Restricted Section.

 

[WizardOne]

The 'travel back in time and do my life over again' is a very big plot in the original erotic lit community. I've never been partial to it myself but there are lots of highly rated stories which use the formula on storiesonline.net.

wait... erotic lit community?

http://www.literotica.com/stories/

http://www.mcstories.com/

http://storiesonline.net/home.php

https://www.sofurry.com/

The list goes on and on and on and on and on and on.

Just in case its not super obvious, don't click on those unless you want to see porn. Shouldn't cause anyone troubles just seeing the links though, none of the URLS are offensive.

 

[Glimmervoid]

Just in case its not super obvious, don't click on those unless you want to see porn. Shouldn't cause anyone troubles just seeing the links though, none of the URLS are offensive.

I'd stick http://www.asstr.org/ on the list too. Its not as active as it once was but it has a huge archive and lots of authors keep sites there.

 

[byakuryuu]

I'm aware of erotic lit. In fact, my cousin has a book. I just didn't know people incorporated science fiction interpretations of actual science into sentences that are pretty much a fancy, sophisticated way of saying "I put on my robe and wizard hat".

 

[daniel_gudman]

The 'travel back in time and do my life over again' is a very big plot in the original erotic lit community. I've never been partial to it myself but there are lots of highly rated stories which use the formula on storiesonline.net.

Conversely, the oldest regular, played-straight, mainstream deployment of this that I've run into is Time and Time Again, by H Beam Piper, published 1947.

...Well, now that I've said that, I've read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, too.

More recently there was Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson. I don't much like KSM, so I never finished it; frankly, I got tired of waiting for the author to stop shitting on Galileo, and get around to having a plot.

Wikipedia has a list (of course it does) of Time Travel Science Fiction; the first entry is from 1733.

 

[goldenarms]

I'm aware of erotic lit. In fact, my cousin has a book. I just didn't know people incorporated science fiction interpretations of actual science into sentences that are pretty much a fancy, sophisticated way of saying "I put on my robe and wizard hat".

...until now, I never really thought about that line or what the hell it was supposed to mean. And then you give me context.

As for original time travel fiction, what about The Butterfly Effect? The first part of the movie gives us the guy's life from childhood to adulthood, hitting on critical points that he was blocking out, to the moment where the girl he liked kills herself after meeting him in present time, and then in comes the time travel to alter things. Sure he doesn't get to ride the wave all the way through, cutting to the results right away, but again, we do get a setup in the beginning so as to keep moviewatchers in on what's going down and why.

 

[seitora]

In thinking about it, I want to write a time travel story where the character comes from a future where super-resistand bacteria have decimated most of tge population, due to antibiotics abuse growing out of hand. It could even double as satire as instead of a big bad, the protagonist has to somshow convince society to stop overusing antibiotics and risk creating superbugs

 

[Glimmervoid]

Thinking back on this topic, I can name three novels where the main character repeats his/her life over and over again.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, Replay by Ken Grimwood and Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.

The first too are fairly scifi. Male main characters who lives there lives over and over again, remembering everything. The third is more a literary novel. The main character girl lives here life again and again during the time around the world wars, but doesn't quite remember everything. She has vague feelings something will happen (and in one case kills Hitler) but never quite awakens. Its more a 'here's a dozen different paths her life could take' story. Still good, though.

 

[seitora]

I had a random idea for a short regarding this subject.

Basically some random guy who's so crazy prepared he's even devised his own code to leave around if at some point in the future he travels back in time and needs to convince his past self of future events.