timestream n.

The slightest excess of effort might upset the balance at any point of the time stream, sending them backward into the past or forward into the future independently of my will.

You're traveling in time, my lad… You aren’t in space any more. You are in a time stream.

For our lives were cast far apart in the Stream of Time. And not all the power of the gyrane can lift you out of the time-stream, living—for then the whole current must be deflected. But the stream has small grasp upon a few dead pounds of clay.

As any schoolchild learns, the time shuttler who goes into the past introduces an alien variable into the spacio-temporal matrix at the instant when he emerges. The time stream forks, an alternative universe is born in which his visit is given its proper place, and when he returns it will be to a future level in the new world which he has created. His own universe is forever barred to him.

It seems that something happened to one of their Chronoscopes—those little devices they scattered back in the time stream which would radiate visually, everything that happened within their range.

As for me, I am no longer needed in the plan of events, and so intend to remove myself from the time-stream upon finishing this note.

Another early novel of some influence on the development of the theme was Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time (1938), in which the hero discovers the future existence of two possible time-streams (amongst others), that of Jonbar, a good, peaceful world, and another, Gyronchi, of an oppressive nature. Which of these two futures will actually come to pass depends upon a young boy who, in 1921, will find either a magnet or a pebble.

Science fiction has provided us not only with visions of time travel and hence of alternate time streams, but of whole alternate universes. The term ‘alternate universe’ may refer simply to the universe in which history follows an alternate time stream, but more strictly speaking, it refers to a universe somehow complete and yet coexistent with ours.

The timestream is littered with these blank areas.

We are, in fact, the product of a tampered time-stream already.

‘Remaking History’…packs much more thought into a similar wordage: having an alternate time-stream relying on a single change necessarily slants things toward the Great Men theory of history.

The tale tells of a young physics teacher who is ‘twisted into a reversed Time Stream’ by an electrical discharge.

One of the functions of the College that he set up to manage time travel is to infiltrate and manipulate the timestreams instead.

The Time Rangers…travel the time stream righting wrongs and fixing that which can be repaired.

When you finally stretch and kick back from the laptop keyboard, it takes you a minute or two to remember where the hell you are. There’s the usual moment of disorientation, a kind of existential dizziness as you re-enter the everyday time-stream in which most people spend their lives: hours have slid by unnoticed, feeling like minutes (except for the ache in your neck and the gritty heat in your eyes).

It’s established early on that the colony exists in a separate ‘time stream’ from the 21st century that the settlers leave.