time fault n.

a disturbance in time; a place where time travel is possible, or where time progresses in unpredictable ways; cf. time-slip n., time storm n.

Time Travel

  • 1934 ‘˜M. Leinster’™ Sidewise In Time in Astounding Stories June 30/1 page image Murray Leinster bibliography

    We've got to get to the edge of one of these blocks that go swinging through time, the edge of what Professor Minott calls a ‘time fault’, and watch it! When the shifts come, we explore as quickly as we can. We've no great likelihood, perhaps, of getting back exactly to our own period.

  • 1934 ‘˜M. Leinster’™ Sidewise In Time in Astounding Stories June 35/2 page image Murray Leinster bibliography

    I intend to camp along a time fault and cross over whenever a time shift brings a Norse settlement in sight.

  • 1938 J. Williamson Dreadful Sleep in Weird Tales Mar. 300/1 page image Jack Williamson bibliography

    The whole planet was soon informed that it was a Time Fault which had made six months seem like the winking of an eye.

  • 1952 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction June 57 page image

    Look for no trace here of the mad creator of Papa Schimmelhorn and his gnurrs; but discover a new aspect of Bretnor as he reveals an unsuspected symbolism behind the classic science fiction theme of the shifting time-fault.

  • 1959 C. L. Fontenay Bargain Basement in Worlds of If Sept. 61/1 page image Charles L. Fontenay bibliography

    For some reason, that basement door is in a time fault. People from now can go through it into the future and come back.

  • 1967 Worlds of If Aug. 57 page image

    The planet possessed a strange time fault. Through it, a host of Berserkers were attacking!

  • 1980 Famous Monsters Mar. 5

    What happens when an ordinary family builds an ordinary house on an interdimensional time fault? Time twitches & fun begins!

  • 2005 D. Gerrold In the Quake Zone in Year’s Best Science Fiction 23 (2006) 272 page image bibliography

    Got off the plane in San Francisco, caught a Greyhound south, curled up to sleep, and the San Andreas time-fault let loose. It was the first big timequake and I woke up three years later.


Research requirements

antedating 1934

Earliest cite

Murray Leinster, 'Sidewise in Time'

Research History
Fred Galvin submitted a 1952 cite from an editorial blurb in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Rick Hauptmann submitted a cite from a 1985 reprint of Murray Leinster's 1934 "Sidewise in Time"; Mike Christie verified the first appearance in the June 1934 Astounding Stories.
Ben Ostrowsky submitted a 2005 cite from David Gerrold.

Last modified 2021-09-15 15:26:20
In the compilation of some entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries in OED.