List of Science Fiction Short Stories - Time Travel

Time Travel

"The Chronic Argonauts" (1895) by H.G. Wells

Probably the very first significant time travel story ever.

"Vintage Season" (1946) by C. L. Moore

Time-travelling tourists from the future seen from a perspective contemporary to the writer's era.

"A Sound of Thunder" (1952) by Ray Bradbury

This story revolves around a business called Time Safari, Inc. Time Safari promises to take people back in time so they can hunt prehistoric animals, such as Tyrannosaurus rex. In order to avoid a time paradox, they are very careful to leave history undisturbed on the principle that even the slightest change can cause major changes in the future.

"You Were Right, Joe" (1957) by J. T. McIntosh

The disembodied mind of a man is cast into the far off future where it is re-incorporated in the body of a Herculean body builder, maintaining all the while a line of communication with the scientist who stayed behind.

"" — All You Zombies — "" (1959) by Robert A. Heinlein

A story featuring a neatly tangled set of time travel paradoxes.

"Hawksbill Station" (1968) by Robert Silverberg

The Station in the title is a prison colony created in the pre-Cambrian era by means of a time machine invented by an eponymous Dr. Hawksbill.

"A Little Something For Us Tempunauts" (1975) by Philip K. Dick

US time travellers, tempunauts, find that instead of travelling 100 years into the future, they have gone merely a few days.

"Fire Watch" (1982) by Connie Willis

The story of a time-travelling "historian" who goes back to The Blitz in London. He's annoyed by this as he had spent years preparing to travel with St. Paul and gets sent to St. Paul's Cathedral, in London, instead. Winner of the 1983 Hugo Award and a Nebula Award.

"Ripples in the Dirac Sea" (1988) by Geoffrey A. Landis

The affecting story of a scientist seesawing inescapably through time, this brilliant work effectively deconstructs most time-travel stories that came before. Winner of the 1989 Nebula Award for best short story.

"A Night on the Barbary Coast" (2003) by Kage Baker

Time travel facilitator and a botanist return to the wild and woolly San Francisco of the 1850s. Winner of the first of the Norton awards for San Francisco based speculative fiction in 2003.