It is worthwhile at least to attempt fiction writing if only to gain a keener appreciation of what is involved. My two attempts at time travel stories, to be found on the Logic of Time Travel blog, are:
Yossi, the Time Traveller
Time Travel Memoirs Fragments
Other notions:
The (Time) Patrol asks an agent to live through the 1950s and 1960s in the town where he grew up. He sees his family, including his younger self, at church. How would the daily news appear to someone who already knew the outcome of each new crisis/storm in a tea cup?
A historical fiction/futuristic sf/time travel trilogy: the time travel novel reveals that a character in the historical novel is a disguised time traveler from the future period.
A time traveler knows that he will get back together with his estranged girl friend because he has glimpsed them together older and looking happy but does not know when or how.
The masked head of the Secret Intelligence Time Travel Section tells an agent to travel several decades into the past on a unique mission, to found the Section. Taking off his mask, he says, "You will need this."
3 comments:
Paul:
H. Beam Piper's first published story, "Time and Time Again," was about a dying man whose consciousness was flung back thirty years in time into his then-thirteen-year-old body in August 1945. Explaining this to his father, he warned Dad to have plenty of food stocked up, because the stores and restaurants were going to be closed for two days immediately after the news of Japan's surrender. He also began laying plans to try and avert the World War III in which he was killed....
Roger Zelazny's "A Very Good Year" concerns a young man who courts and wins a young woman. Then on New Year's Eve he takes her to a restaurant where all the other diners are older versions of THEM ... except for a few who are younger versions of HIM dining alone. He explains that he'd developed a time travel device, and has been living the same year over and over again, because it was a year in which interesting but never BAD things happened. And during past visits to this restaurant, he saw his older self with her, and noted that they seemed very happy together. So he tracked her down....
One more:
Manly Wade Wellman wrote a VERY short story in which the narrator is warned by an elderly man from forty years in the future that they must work together to prevent World War III. The narrator wonders, given that the time traveler is plainly much more than forty years old, what will happen if he meets his younger self, who must be alive today? The old man smiles: "...why do you reckon I sought you out of all men living today? Who else could I count on?"
Kaor, DAVID!
This brings up interesting questions. We both have read SF time traveling stories, but I don't think we expect to ever meet time travelers, albeit, if they exist, they would likely take pains to remain undiscovered as such. But, if "we" met our future, older selves, shouldn't we sometimes feel a haunting sense of familiarity? Shouldn't we sometimes feel as tho we should know these persons? I know some people change drastically in their looks as they age, but that is not true of all of us. So I wonder if a 15 years old "Sean M. Brooks" should be at least puzzled if he met a 70 years old "Sean M. Brooks."
Sean
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