The Big List of Time Travel Adventures

 1987

   “Le gouffre des années”
English title: “The Gulf of the Years” (translated from French)
by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud
First publication: Le héroes blessé au bras, 1987

I read the English translation from Châteaureynaud’s collection, A Life on Paper (2010). The story tells of a man who returns to occupied France during World War II on the morning that his mother was killed by an errant bomb. I enjoyed the writing, but was unsatisfied with the ending.

 You’re Jean-Jacques Manoir, aren’t you? Right? You don’t know me, but I know all about you. 




   Project Pendulum
by Robert Silverberg
First publication: 1987

Ricky and Sean Gabrielson, 23-year-old identical twins, are the first men to travel through time, taking ever larger swings that send one backward and one forward.

This was the first book that I read in the rare books room of the University of Colorado library from the Brian E. Lebowitz Collection of 20th Century Jewish American Literature.

 Hi there. You’re not going to believe this, but I’m you of the year 2016, taking part in the first time-travel experiment ever. 




   Timefall
by James Kahn
First publication: Feb 1987

This is the third book in Kahn’s New World trilogy, but the hero Joshua doesn’t know about the post-apocalyptic fantasy adventures of World Enough, and Time (Book I) and Time’s Dark Laughter (Book II). Could this be a prequel? Well, sort of. Time is cyclic and a previous version of Joshua has left him a message that leads Joshua of our world, wife of our world, and millionaire of our world to a lost city in the Amazon where the people think Joshua is their god arisen. Oh, and there are tunnels to different times and a circuitous but definite, supramundane possibility that the entire cyclical universe is going to end (or maybe never even exist in the first place).

The 2014 release of the book includes new material.

 We hurried him into the den, plugged in the skull, gave him a demonstration on the wall, showed him the composite map we’d constructed: the rivers, the road, the city. 




   Fraggle Rock
created by Jim Henson
First time travel: 23 Feb 1987

The symbolic and colorful world of Jim Henson’s fraggle muppets included at least one moment of time travel when Mokey, Boober and Wembly are mysteriously transported back to a time of fraggles who cannot laugh.

 Wouldn’t it be fun to travel in time? O’ course, you wouldn’t really go anywhere. No, Sprocket, because the past and the future are happening now, here in the present. It’s all a question of perception. I thought dogs knew things like that. 


   “Dinosaur on a Bicycle”
by Tim Sullivan
First publication: Asimov’s Science Fiction, Mar 1987

Harry Quince-Pierpont Fotheringgay, the assistant to the learned Sir Brathewaite pedals a time bicycle from a civilized Victorian era to the distant path where, among others, he meets his own tyranosaur ancestor and two talking simians.

 As far as Harry was concerned, they were getting altogether too near his gigantic ancestor now. 


The story also appeared in this 1990 collection.   “The Silver Box”
by Louise Lawrence
First publication: A Quiver of Ghosts, Mar 1987

While searching for a ghost in the past, Mark and Zak stumble upon young Carole, shut up in her bedroom with glandular fever in 1987.

 What else do we live for but the little mundane things of life? If we sit around waiting for the few, rare wonderful moments that make it all worthwhile we may as well not live at all. 




   Timestalkers
adapted by Brian Clemens (Schultz, director)
First aired: 10 Mar 1987 (made-for-tv)

After the death of his wife and child, Dr. Scott McKenzie stumbles upon a tintype photograph from the old west with three corpses, a shooter and a modern Magnum 357, leading him to develop a theory of time travel that is soon confirmed when a beautiful woman of the future appears to take him back to the old west in order to chase the shooter, save President Cleveland, and pursue other obvious plot developments.

 Georgia: Very impressive, professor. It’s a small wonder you were considered one of the world’s foremost authorities.
The Professor: [incredulously] Were? 




   Amazing Stories
created by Steven Spielberg
First time travel: 20 Mar 1987

Steven Spielberg brought Amazing Stories to tv in two seasons of an anthology format. At least one time-travel story—Jack Finney’s venerable “Such Interesting Neighbors”—appeared in the second season (20 Mar 1987).

Janet and I bought our first color tv for these episodes, a Sony of course.

 Oh, Randy, neighbors are always strange; those are the rules. 


   “Perpetuity Blues”
by Neal Barrett, Jr.
First publication: Asimov’s Science Fiction, May 1987

Orphaned at a young age and sent to live with her abusive aunt and uncle, Maggie befriends the town’s odd duck, Oral, whose magic loop of wire protects the young girl. Oh—and I forgot to mention: Oral believes he’s from outer space and his ship bounces him through time.

 Got the ship clear out of the atmosphere and hit this time warp or something. Nearly got eat by Vikings. Worse than the Mormons. Fixed up the ship and flipped it out again. Ended up in Medival Europe. Medicis and monks, all kinds of shit. Joined someone’s army in Naples. Got caught and picked olives for a duke. Lok at my face. They got diseases you never heard of there. 




   Sphere
by Michael Crichton
First publication: 12 May 1999

Because he wrote a government report on how to handle alien contact, psychologist Norman Johnson is called to the scene when the Navy discovers a 300-year-old crashed space ship on the Pacific floor. But it turns out to be an American space ship, just not from today’s America.

 And yet now we have proof that time travel is possible—and that our own species will do it in the future! 


   “Rider”
aka “Fugue”
by Andrew Weiner
First publication: Asimov’s Science Fiction, Jul 1987

Arnold Lerner is deep into a fugue—a state that allows him to revisit past memories and rewrite them in your own mind. But he’s so deeply in fugue that he won’t ever come out. Then again, some people doubt both those sentences: Ruth Brandon, director of the Hartley Mind Research Center, says that it’s a long shot, but she might be able to go in after Lerner and pull him out; and some say that the rewriting of history is not just in your own mind.

Among other places, the story takes Ruth Brandon to the 1970 total solar eclipse in Miahuatlán; and quite by coincidence, I first read the story when I happened to take the July 1987 issue of Asimov’s with me on our road trip to Scottsbluff to see the Great American Coast-to-Coast eclipse of 2017. The stars (and the Moon) move in mysterious ways.

 Even if you do come back. They say you really do travel in time and that you really can change things if you try hard enough. 




   To Sail Beyond the Sunset
by Robert A. Heinlein
First publication: Jul 1987

In the 19th century, Maureen Johnson grows up near Kansas City, eventually marrying and raising her own brood, including Lazarus Long (the original) and Lazarus Long (from the future).

 I found myself offering my hand and greeting a young man who matched in every way (even to his body odor, which I caught quite clearly—clean male, in fresh rut)—a man who was my father as my earliest memory recalled him. 


   “At the Cross-Time Jaunter’s Ball”
by Alexander Jablokov
First publication: Asimov’s Science Fiction, Aug 1987

Jacob Landstatter is an art critic, and his chosen objects d’art are the alternate realities that the Lords of Time commission from artists who go back in time to make specific changes that result in worlds of one sort or another. So who could want to kill someone with such an occupation as innocuous as Jacob’s?

 Normal intestinal flora. Mutated and hybridized with amyotrophic lateral schlerosis. Infects via the GI tract and destroys the central nervous systems of higher primates. Neat. Grew it in the guts of an Australopithecine on the African veldt, two, three million years ago. Not easy, Jacob, not easy. When I woke up on that pallet at Centrum, I had bedsores, and a headache that lasted a month. Killed them all. Every last one of the buggers. Nothing left on this planet with more brains than an orangutan. 




   Masters of the Universe
by David Odell (Gary Goddard, director)
First release: 7 Aug 1987

With the help of ominous John-Williams-soundalike music and a Cosmic Key that opens portals to other places, the evil Skeletor has finally conquered Castle Greyskull, giving him the power needed to become the Master of the Universe himself. Fortunately, He-Man and his warriors have a copy of the key and can save the universe! Unless they misplace it and two current-day Earth teens stumble upon it.

I watched the movie through to the end(!), but spotted only one explicit small item to indicate that the key might transport through time as well as space: When Skeletor’s minionette locates the copy of the key, she says that they can find it within a “parsec-eon,” which kind of sounds like a space-time measurement. In addition, those who know the He-Man franchise tell me that he is a far-future descendant of Earth humans on the planet of Eternia, which means that the trip back to current-day Earth was through time. So it is a time-travel movie(!) but that fact has no bearing on the movie’s plot.

 I call it . . . The Cosmic Key! It is the most unique key in the universe. The tones it generates can open a doorway to anywhere. 




   Calvin and Hobbes
by Bill Watterson
First time travel: 31 Aug 1987

 Relax! We’ll be back as soon as we go. 


   ““Lui-même en Anachron””
by Cordwainer Smith
First publication: Les puissances de’espace, Sep 1987

Tasco Magnon, time traveler, decides to take his new bride on his next trip through time—a quest to find the mythical Knot in Time, where the two of them get trapped and only one can return.

After Smith’s death in 1966, the story was completed by his wife and sold to Harlan Ellison’s anthology The Last Dangerous Vision. In 1987, a translated version of the story was published in a French collection of Smith’s stories, so that the first published version was in French (although I have listed the English title above, since that’s how it was written). The English version was finally publisheded in Smith’s 1993 complete short science fiction collection by NESFA. By then, Ellison’s rights to the story had expired, although that didn’t stop him from suing NESFA.

 ‘Honeymoon in time,’ indeed. Why? Is it that your woman is jealous of your time trips? 


   Replay
by Ken Grimwood
First publication: Sep 1987

After 43-year-old radio newsman Jeff Winston dies, he finds himself back in his 18-year-old body in 1963—an occurrence that keeps happening each time he dies again in 1988; eventually, in one of his lives, he finds Pamela, another replayer, and they work at figuring out the meaning of it all (without success).

 So he hadn’t died. Somehow, the realization didn’t thrill him, just as his earlier assumption of death had failed to strike him with dread. 




   The Jukebox Stories
by Dean Wesley Smith
First story: Night Cry, Fall 1987

A jukebox in the Garden Lounge does more than make you remember the time of the song. It actually takes you to that time.

I’ve yet to find a good guide to these stories and where they can be obtained. The first story, “The Jukebox Man’ appeared in 1987 in a sister magazine to The Twilight Zone Magazine. Here’s a list of the other stories that I know of, although the only one I’ve read so far is “Jukebox Gifts’:
  1. The Jukebox Man (Fall 1987) Night Cry
  2. A Bubble for a Minute (Jan 1994) By Any Other Fame
  3. Jukebox Gifts (Jan 1994) F&SF
  4. Black Betsy (Oct 1994) Alternate Outlaws
  5. The Ghost of the Garden Lounge (Nov 2005) Time After Time
  6. He Could Have Coped with Dragons (Nov 2009) chapbook
  7. A Golden Dream (Jul 2010) chapbook
  8. The Songs of Memory (Jul 2012) chapbook
  9. Our Slaying Song Tonight (Oct 2012) chapbook
  10. The Wages of the Moment (Jan 2013) chapbook
  11. She Arrived without a Song (May 2013) chapbook

 I had carefully typed onto labels the names of over sixty Christmas songs, then taped them next to the red buttons. Somewhere in this jukebox, I hoped there would be a special song for each man. A song that would trigger a memory and a ride into the past. My Christmas present to each of them. 

—“Jukebox Gifts”


  The Time Guardian by John Baxter and Brian Hannant (Hannant, director), 3 Dec 1987
When terminatoresque cyborgs attack a future Australian city (headed by Quantum Leap’s favorite scoundrel, Dean Stockwell, and defended by everyone’s favorite princess, Carrie Fisher), the scientists taken them all back in time—a fine plan until the evil cyborgs follow.


No Time Travel. Move along.
  The Year Before Yesterday by Brian Aldiss, 1987 [despite title, no time travel ]

  “Enter a Soldier, Later: Enter Another” by Robert Silverberg, Asimov’s, Jun 1989 [simulacrum ]

  “Left or Right?” by Martin Gardner, Mathenauts, Jun 1987 [4D spacial topology ]

  “Traplanda” by Charles Sheffield, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Jun 1987 [despite appearances, no time travel ]

  Dragonriders of Pern #8.1.A1: Dragonharper by Jody Lynn Nye, Jul 1987 [no time travel ]
  aka A Crossroads Adventure in the World of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern: Dragonharper

 

24 items are in the time-travel list for these search settings.
Thanks for visiting my time-travel page, and thanks to the many sources that provided stories and more (see the Links and Credits in the menu at the top). —Michael (main@colorado.edu)