Books Time Travel Five Stories About Time Travel on a Limited Scale No rules, no bureaucracy, just some randos messing around with the past, present, and future. By James Davis Nicoll | Published on June 9, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share The larger the organization, the more likely it needs something like a bureaucracy… which both adds efficiency and harms efficiency. Bureaucracies, alas, are known for their office politics and endless red tape. This leads many to believe that bold innovations are best created and deployed by individuals (or at least small groups). This kind of effort also makes for good science fiction plots. Consider these five works about time travel as practiced on a small scale. The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold (1973) Daniel Eakins expected to inherit his uncle Jim’s vast estate. Instead, Daniel was presented with $6000.00 and a fancy belt. The sting of disappointment faded as soon as Daniel discovered that the fancy belt was a fully functional time machine1. The belt provides Daniel the means to pursue hedonism on an epic scale. Daniel can and does shape history to his taste, eliminating developments that might inconvenience him2, while indulging his very particular sexual inclinations. It would be a perfect life, at least for Daniel… if only he didn’t age. Daniel’s preferred bed partner is another version of Daniel; some of these analogs are women, but most of them are men. Daniel wonders if this means he is gay. Many readers might conclude Daniel is just tremendously self-absorbed. The Wizard Children of Finn by Mary Tannen (1981) To protect Deimne from the Sons of Morna, witch Bovmall transported Deimne to a place and time far from his would-be killers. Specifically, to the estate of eleven-year-old Fiona and eight-year-old Bran McCool’s Uncle Rupert. The trio become chums, which is why when Bovmall returns Deimne to his native Ireland, the siblings accompany him. Deimne has a hero’s path ahead of him. The boy, well versed in heroic narratives, is quite familiar with what destiny demands of him. Fiona and Bran, in contrast, find themselves in the heroic adventurer’s equivalent of the Actor’s Nightmare. An actor who flubs a line might get jeered by the audience. Adventurers who fumble their line could well end up dead. One gets the impression that the heroic adventurers + faithful bard combination is extremely successful… except of course there’s a significant survivorship bias there. None of the bards who died horribly along with their companion ever got to celebrate those histories. Making History by Stephen Fry (1996) Leo Zuckerman is working on a time machine. Leo also has a dreadful secret he struggles to come to terms with. Leo is not a Jew, as he believed. Leo is the son of a Nazi war criminal. Leo and his mother appropriated the names of a dead Jewish mother and her child at the end of World War II. Enter feckless historian Michael Young, led to Leo by misaddressed mail. Michael proposes that Leo use the time machine to come to terms with his past by utterly altering that past. All Michael need do is eliminate Hitler. After all, it’s not as if Hitler had been the beneficiary of existing social forces or that in Hitler’s absence, an even greater monster might take his place. Right? One might expect that Michael would be alarmed to find himself in a new world, one where the Nazis decisively won, Britain was crushed, the Soviet Union was nuked, and the Jews completely exterminated, not to mention horrified by his own role in the matter. Michael is impressively self-centered, so the only thing that motivates him to try to fix what he helped break is his discovery that among the many liberalizations that did not happen in this history was the legalization of homosexuality. This inconveniences bisexual Michael personally; thus, he acts. Broadway Revival by Laura Frankos (2021) Recently bereaved David Greenbaum could not save his husband. Nor is David much interested in therapy. Instead, David opts to assuage his grief by an entirely novel approach: steal a time machine, travel back to 1934, and save George Gershwin. Gershwin is merely the first name on a long laundry list of people David intends to save. Armed with detailed knowledge of the era, not to mention drugs as yet undeveloped in 1934, David establishes himself as an empresario of note, then guides performers from Gershwin to Lorenz Hart away from their historical dooms. The catch? The more successful David is, the less he can depend on his knowledge of the era to guide him. Readers should be aware that David is extremely focused on Broadway and that he views other famous events of 1930s solely in terms of how they affected Broadway3. However, because his focus is extremely specific, he manages to accomplish more of his goals than many other time travelers have been able to do. Macy Murdoch, created by JP Larocque & Jessica Meya (2023) The great-great-great-granddaughter of famed Toronto detective William Murdoch, 21st century teen Macy Murdoch takes pride in her famed ancestor. Thus, should the means to clear Murdock of the crime for which he was framed back in 1910 present itself, Macy would not hesitate to take advantage of it. Enter the mysterious, seemingly abandoned time machine. Macy and her friends commandeer the device and travel back to 1910. Once there, however, it becomes evident that clearing William Murdoch’s name will be considerably more difficult than anticipated. Fans of this series who plan to visit Toronto should be aware that not every building conceals a functioning time machine. After all, we need space to store all the illicit tunnel boring machines, death rays, and rudimentary suborbital rockets Toronto’s thriving communities of visionary geniuses have created over the decades. These are just a few stories about what one person (or a small group) can accomplish, given only determination and a time machine. Perhaps I omitted your favourites. If so, feel free to extol their virtues in comments below.[end-mark] Complete with documentation, so he need not worry about e.g. traveling back to 20,000 BP to find himself solidly embedded in a continental ice sheet. ︎There’s no evidence in Daniel’s preferred histories of Women’s Lib or the Civil Rights Movement, so far as I can see. ︎At least Daniel has done his homework. Harry Harrison’s A Rebel in Time has as its antagonist a man who relies overmuch on a single text, Ordeal by Fire by Fletcher Pratt, a short history that omits any mention of John Brown or why the bad guy might want to avoid Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859. ︎The post Five Stories About Time Travel on a Limited Scale appeared first on Reactor.