time traveller n.

‘But,’ said the medical man, ‘even if man in the future no longer need [sic] strength to fight against other men or beasts, he will still need a sufficient physique to resist disease.’ ‘That is the queer thing,’ said the Time Traveller; ‘there was no disease. Somewhen between now and then your sanitary science must have won the battle it is beginning now. Bacteria, or at least all disease causing bacteria, must have been exterminated. I can explain it in no other way.[’]

‘There,’ said the Time Traveller, ‘I am unable to give you an explanation. All I know is that the climate was very much warmer than it is now.’

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.

You must realize that a time traveler runs certain hazards. At any place on the road, he may materialize inside of a solid of some sort. In that case, he is almost certain to be blown up or otherwise destroyed.

It is now up to the professional time travellers to defend their devices for exploring the past and the future.

The Supreme Council has ruled that all Time Travellers must be sent back immediately and their particular method of passage through Time closed from this end.

Into this world goes the Time Traveler, a man of our era—a barbaric alien in comparison with the possessors of a science vastly superior to ours.

‘You’re a spaceman,’ Smith decided. ‘I only came a few hundred miles, shrugged the stranger modestly. ‘Mostly, I’m a time traveller.’

What in your mind is the greatest terror facing a time traveler? That there will be an implosion due to coincidence on reentry?

It wasn’t only the embarrassing experience of being shown off around the hall by her—as it were, a real live time-traveller, exclamation point, in the same tone of voice as one would say, ‘A real live tiger’.

‘The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door….’ A traditional SF writer would conclude this story by opening that door to reveal 1) the last woman on Earth, or 2) a time traveler from the past, or [etc.].

As any self-respecting time traveller will confirm, going backwards in time to change history is a dodgy business, fraught with the possibility of temporal anomalies, rips in the space/time continuum, etc.

My father liked some Bradbury. He’d read ‘A Sound of Thunder’ to me and we’d spend a few hours discussing the consequences of a time traveler stepping on a butterfly, but he didn’t care for stories about ordinary life or fiction that held a surreal edge.