Science Fiction Time Travel

In the not-too-distant future, a 21-member crew launches from Earth. Their mission: to establish a temporary colony on Mars. Little do they know that colony will become permanent–and the last stand of the human race. Because, without warning, every single person left on Earth simply...vanishes. Now, a thousand years later, the resources needed to sustain life are running out, and the very existence of the Mars colony is threatened. Humankind has only one option–to return to its home planet.

The science fiction genre has become increasingly influential in mainstream popular culture, evolving into one of the most engaging storytelling tools we use to think about technology and consider the shape of the future. Along the way, it has also become one of the major lenses we use to explore important philosophical questions. The origins of science fiction are most often thought to trace to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, a story born from a night of spooky tale-telling by the fireside that explores scientific, moral, and ethical questions that were of great concern in the 19th century - and that continue to resonate today.

A modern classic, Einstein's Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, and people are fated to repeat their triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children.

The wall just didn’t look right. Alex has been trying to cope. Life after his deployment had been rough. His ex-wife thought he needed to stop disappointing their daughter. She was right. He would try harder. With six hours before his little girl’s fourth birthday party, he saw the anomaly. One wall was too short. Plenty of time to tear out a panel and look behind it. He found a brick wall. His house wasn’t made of brick. Behind that was another just like the first. He still had time. When the second wall came down, Alex stood and stared at the shining doorway.

Quinn Black is having the worst day ever...over and over again. The same car blocking his driveway, the same horrific accident he witnesses, the same cop that keeps preventing him from saving his boss from dying in it, and the same memory of a girl from his past that gets sharper each time. Then he realizes he has the power to travel through time and change the future. Could he prevent terrorist attacks? Natural disasters? The deaths of friends? Before long, Quinn is thrust into the greatest race in human history.

The best science fiction scrutinizes our culture and politics, examines the limits of the human condition, and zooms across galaxies at faster-than-light speeds, moving from the very near future to the far-flung worlds of tomorrow in the space of a single sentence. Neil Clarke has selected the short science fiction (and only science fiction) best representing the previous year's writing, showcasing the talent, variety, and awesome "sensawunda" that the genre has to offer.

If the past is prologue - what if the prologue never happened? When a team of scientists attempts to rewrite history, the story of the present turns out to have an ending they didn’t see coming. Over and over.

Joe Colsco boarded a flight from San Francisco to Chicago to attend a national chemistry meeting. He would never set foot on Earth again. On planet Anyar, Joe is found unconscious on a beach of a large island inhabited by humans where the level of technology is similar to Earth circa 1700. He awakes amid strangers speaking an unintelligible language and struggles to accept losing his previous life and finding a place in a society with different customs, needing a way to support himself and not knowing a single soul.

Join contemporary characters who find themselves back in Bible times, living out epic adventures.

Annie has always had high hopes for her future. But the reality of her life just isn’t measuring up. She loves her fiancé, Greg–doesn’t she? She’s going to get her degree and open her own business–won’t she? Then, a strange old woman shows up outside her house, and she seems to know a lot about Annie. An awful lot. Annie could tell the old woman to get lost. Yet there’s something about her Annie just can’t shake. And what she learns could change her life forever–but is it the life she envisioned?

When something knocks Quinn Black and his team through an anomaly, he finds himself on a crash course with what appears to be an uninhabited planet. With an object of mysterious origin orbiting the system and his crew under attack from an unknown source, one thing is clear: they are not supposed to be there. Unfortunately, that’s just the beginning of their problems. Thrust into time loops and a seemingly parallel world where dinosaurs roam, someone is deliberately sabotaging them.

A man builds a time machine and tells his dinner guests that he can travel through time. He leaves from dinner in his machine for three hours and has adventures that include going back in time hundreds of years and forward in time millions of years, where he finds strange and dangerous places from which he is lucky to escape from. He returns and tells them of his adventures and shows proof of his travels by providing strange items from his pocket.

Quinn Black thought his work was finished. After all, in the years since he discovered he could time travel, he saved the human race from disaster and restored hope to the world. At least in the current timeline of the universe. Out in the multiverse, the Earth—and everyone he loves—is in trouble again. Someone sent Quinn's team a video begging for help. If Dr. Green's assessment of reality is correct, how will he find his way home if he gets lost in the vast expanse of the cosmos? However, the alternative might be worse.

A time traveler gains a vista of the world’s unknown history—at the peril of his life!

In 1967, four female scientists worked together to build the world’s first time machine. But just as they are about to debut their creation, one of them suffers a breakdown, putting the whole project - and future of time travel - in jeopardy. To protect their invention, one member is exiled from the team - erasing her contributions from history. Fifty years later, time travel is a big business. Twenty-something Ruby Rebello knows her beloved grandmother Granny Bee was one of the pioneers, though no one will tell her more.

In 2028, former homicide detective Rachel Hunt is hired by Katherine Richardson, a wealthy descendant of Grace Carrington, to use Sinclair Whitlock's time machine once again. Her task: travel back to Southampton, England, and uncover the fate of Grace, a fifteen-year-old girl, and her governess, Edith Winslow. They disappeared just a day before boarding the Titanic—and the mystery has haunted Katherine's family for over a century.

Max and Liz have escaped the mysterious time phenomenon by traveling to the Mars colony, which promises a whole new, exciting, and secure life. But they've left behind someone important to them. Should they embark on a journey from which no one has ever returned? And why does everyone seem to put obstacles in their way even as they try? The physicist and the mathematician must contend with forces that cannot be swayed by logical arguments while time, at an accelerating pace, is running out for their friend on Earth.

'Action-packed, brilliantly unique' – Andy Weir, author of The Martian A compulsive, mind-bending exploration of memory and what it means to be human, Recursion is a breathtaking thriller from the author of Dark Matter, Blake Crouch. At first, it looks like a disease. An epidemic that spreads...

Mars is supposed to be dead. Bizarre quakes are rumbling over the long-dormant tectonic plates of the planet, disrupting its trillion-dollar mining operations and driving scientists past the edges of theory and reason. However, when rocks shake off their ancient dust and begin to roll seemingly of their own volition carving canals as they converge to form a towering structure amid the ruddy terrain, Lt. Jain and her JSC team realize that their routine geological survey of a Martian cave system is anything but. The only clues they have stem from the emissions of a mysterious blue radiation, and a 300-year-old journal that is writing itself.

It is 2056. Mathematics professor Elisabeth Gabai is fascinated by multi-dimensional forms that have no equivalent in reality. Then, her boss sends her to the site of an artifact that might have come straight from her theories—or from the technology of an advanced civilization. Twenty-eight years earlier, physicist Max Webber is hell-bent on improving Einstein’s theories of relativity. His latest concept seems flawless, except it predicts the end of humanity. The extinction of Earth can only be prevented if Max can locate a multi-dimensional object.