time travel v.

to travel through time n.

SF Encyclopedia


Time Travel

  • 1933 W. S. Sykora Letter in Astounding Stories Dec. 143/1 page image

    Time traveling is impossible because it is contrary to the laws of conservation of mass and energy!… So—it is impossible to time travel.

  • 1941 ‘R. Rocklynne’ Time Wants A Skeleton in Astounding Science-Fiction June 38/1 page image Ross Rocklynne bibliography

    How convenient this was. One time-traveled. One witness to the origin of the asteroids. Similarly, one might time-travel and understand at last the unimaginable, utterly baffling process by which the solar system came into being.

  • 1965 F. Leiber Books in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Dec. 36/2 page image Fritz Leiber

    Whereupon the narrator, who thought he'd been time-traveling, awakes in Moscow, 1928. It was all a delirious dream.

  • 1986 B. W. Aldiss Trillion Year Spree 257 Brian W. Aldiss

    Ward Moore’s name lives on because of two novels, the satirical Greener Than You Think (1947), a great success in its time, and a classic alternative world story, Bring the Jubilee (1953), in which the hero lives in an America where the South won the Battle of Gettysburg; his interference in the battle to which he time-travels, causes the North to win. So matters turn out as we know them today. The wit and ingenuity of this story influenced more recent excursions into alternative history such as Harry Harrison’s A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!

  • 2003 Cult Times May 59/4

    A sorcerer Time-travels to the home of a waitress and casts a spell that makes her age 20 years a day.

Research requirements

antedating 1933
Earliest cite

Letter to Astounding Stories
Research History
Fred Galvin submitted a 1965 cite from a book review column by Fritz Leiber (Magazine of Fantasy & SF, December 1965).
Fred Galvin submitted a cite from a 1983 reprint of Ross Rocklynne's "Time Wants a Skeleton", which Mike Christie verified in its first publication (Astounding Science Fiction, June, 1941.)

Earliest cite in the OED database: 1969. OED3 entered a 1937 cite from a non-SF source.

Last modified 2020-12-16 04:08:47
In the compilation of some entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries in OED.