7 Stories That Prove Time Travel Is Best When It’s Complicated

Medusa’s Web, by Tim Powers
Powers combines several tropes in this dense, fascinating story about siblings who, in the wake of their aunt’s suicide, return to the decaying Hollywood mansion where they were raised, and find it to be a dark, fascinating place filled with eerie collectibles from the past—and their unfriendly cousins, who resent their presence. When the siblings discover that several strange ink drawings of spider-like abstracts allow them to travel backward and forward in time in unpredictable ways, the secret of the house and their family begins to reveal itself—but the “spiders” are not only unpredictable, they’re addictive, and the cousins aren’t about to sacrifice control over them. This is a tense, dark story that treats time travel as an uncontrollable, irresistible force.

Primer, by Shane Carruth
Carruth’s infamous 2004 film, made on a shoestring budget, offers a version of time travel that is excruciatingly slow and ridiculously complicated. Essentially, the time travel engineers Aaron and Abe discover in their garage allows a person or object to travel back in time to the point that the time machine was turned on, and in the same amount of time. So, if you turned the machine on three days ago, you can travel three days into the past, but it takes three days (of subjective time) to get there. This constraint adds so much tension to the story, it remains a must-watch for any SF fan, despite the fact that only three people in the universe actually understand the plot. Luckily for the rest of us, they’ve chosen to share that knowledge in helpful graphic format. We think it helps.

All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders
Charlie Jane Anders’ genre-bending debut is already one of our favorite books of the year; in one go, Anders has demonstrated she’s one of the smartest, most imaginative writers in the genre today, decorating her narrative with decorative flourishes that some writers would hang an entire novel on. One of our favorite examples is the  “Two-Second Time Machine” young genius Laurence invents in order to prove his mettle to a secretive league of ultra-competent scientists. The book spends only a few pages exploring the power such a brief time travel window would give you, and yet it leaves us contemplating just how complex it would be to put such a gift to good use. “Being able to skip two seconds could be quite useful—if you picked the right two seconds… You need godlike timing to pick the exact instant…” she writes, underscoring the simple fact that constrained time travel might a lot more interesting (and complicated) than flitting about in a for-all-purposes-magical police box. And while it doesn’t strictly deal with time travel, Six Months, Three Days, Anders’ beguiling story about two lovers who can see competing visions of the future, one immutable and one in which everything is in flux, is another mind-altering must.

11/22/63, by Stephen King
It took Stephen King decades to get around to writing a substantive time travel story, but in 11/22/63, he makes several very smart decisions that prove it was worth the wait. In the back room of a diner awaits a time portal that transports you to a very specific moment. While in the year 1958, you can affect the past and stay as long as you like; upon returning to the present, only two minutes will have passed, and the changes you’ve made will be permanent… unless you go back to 1958, at which point the timeline resets. And the past resists any attempts to change it, throwing up obstacles as it can. Put it all together, and King has created a nearly-impossible knot for anyone trying to alter history—but that “nearly”makes it impossible to resist trying. (We’ve also been having trouble resisting a binge-watch of the recent streaming television adaptation starring James Franco.)

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
When seeking for unusual SF concepts, it’s always a good idea to begin with a brisk reread of Kurt Vonnegut. In Slaughterhouse-Five, he introduces a character who has become “unstuck” in time, randomly traveling to different points along his lifespan, from World War II, all the way to that period he spent in an alien zoo (it makes sense in context… more or less). You can choose to interpret this as a form of mental imbalance rather than actual time travel, but it’s a lot more fun to read the book more literally, as random, uncontrollable time travel makes the ability impossible to use in any meaningful way.

The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
Another story about a time traveler powerless to control or alter his trips along his own timeline, Niffenegger’s novel posits a character with a genetic flaw that causes him to jump about in time without desire or consent. She smartly concentrates on the psychological and emotional impact of such an existence, discounting the character’s ability to change the past (he does nothing more on his second September 11, 2001 than appreciate the final moments before the world went mad), and more or less admitting from the get go that such randomness would render time travel a curse, not a superpower.

Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon
Gabaldon’s immensely popular time-travel romance series constrains time travel to particular places, via portals that people only to a particular time. This constraint allows the mechanism to be an incredibly powerful tool—but not a Who-vian reset button that gives people the option to go back a few days and fix something if they’ve made a hash of it. In fact, the fixed location of the portals means Gabaldon’s characters often spend long periods without the ability to travel through time, forcing them to deal with the decisions they’ve already made—and their consequences.
What’s your favorite example of a complex time travel story?