Discussion Main / TimeTravel

Is there a trope for when an ongoing serialized work does a Time Travel back to the Pilot. I have noticed this trend recently am not sure how old it is.

I looked over the Time Travel index, if we have one already it wasn't apparent to me from the name.

Family Guy did one, and so did Yuru Yuri.

It usually has other Time Travel tropes involved also.

GURPS Infinite Worlds breaks time travel into three main categories:

• Fixed Time: the past cannot be changed.
  • Time loop: you being in the past is part of history and despite you thinking you are changing history your efforts will fail somehow or will cause what you are trying to prevent.
  • Time phantom: traveling to the past turns you into a noncorporeal phantom unable to physically interact with it such as in some Pre-Crisis Superman stories and Michael Garrett's "Brief Encounter" in Twilight Zone Magazine May 1981

• Plastic Time: the classic you can change the past but there are issues with doing so. The traveler, the world, or both can be impacted.
  • Chaotic time: small changes multiple down the timeline ala Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder".
  • Plastic Time with resistance: changes to the past are possible but the big picture remains the same.

• Alternate timelines/parallels universes: time travel to your own past is impossible. Either your very arrival creates a new timeline (nearly all of Marvel comics time travel) or you arrive in a reality similar or identical to your past up to that point (such as the Echo Earths in GURPS Infinite Worlds and James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation)

Isaac Asimov's quote is partially false, for it is well-known nowadays that time travel IS theoretically possible. I don't think such a quote belongs there, anyway. Anyone have an objection to removing this quote?

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