What if we could travel through time?
A premise in which the ability to move through time, forward, back, or sideways, reshapes what is possible and what is at stake.
What if we could travel through time? in fiction: 11 works
The Time Traveller's machine carries him into the deep future, the book's central conceit.
A time-traveling agent's loops make him his own mother and father, the story's whole premise.
Billy experiences his life out of sequence, reliving moments across past and future.
A modern Black woman is repeatedly pulled back to an antebellum plantation, the novel's engine.
Both hunter and protector are sent from a war-torn future into the present.
A modified car sends Marty into the past, where he must ensure his own future exists.
A prisoner is sent back to trace a plague's origin, the film's central conceit.
A tangent universe and a countdown to its collapse frame the film's time-loop logic.
Two engineers build a time-travel device in a garage, the film's premise.
Hitmen kill targets sent back from the future, including their own future selves.
'Inverted' entropy lets objects and people move backward through time, the film's premise.
More premises
- What if machines could think?
- What if we met an alien intelligence?
- What if we could create life?
- What if reality were a simulation?
- What if we could live forever?
- What if civilization collapsed?
- What if we could edit the mind?
- What if the state controlled everything?
- What if we could engineer humanity?
- What if we settled other worlds?
- What if history had gone differently?