I've got huge problems with time travel stories. Most often, I can't stand them at all, because they make no sense. However, there are a few exceptions. The biggest one for me is "The Last Day of Creation" by Wolfgang Jeschke. It's about an attempt of the USA to send troops back in time to steal oil from the Arabians. The RTS Original War is loosely based on this story. Unlike the book, however, the game isn't that well known, and severely underrated. Which is a pity, because it is a quite unique RTS. So, I decided to give away five copies of it.

What do you have to do to win? Simply tell me what you think is a good time traveling story (book, movie, game, whatever), and why you think so.

Entries with the most funniest and/or logical answers will make it into the final round. The five victors will then by determined via random.org.

The giveaway is over.

The winners are:

XYCat
klaattu
Stooner
tinyE
and Rwarehall

I have this game on my wishlist...

as for good time travel story, Back to the Future of course, as McFly plays Johnny B. Goode and teaches rock 'n roll before it's time..


Thank you!

I'll go in on this, always wanted this game.

I'm going to suggest the classic time travelling story, "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells. It's not the best, not by a long shot, but it is more or less the holy grail of TT stories. I dig it because it is VERY ambiguous which in this case works. A nice perk about it is, it's SHORT! :D Even if you aren't digging it, it only takes one afternoon (if that) to read, so you aren't mired in some 1000 eopic going nowhere.

I've liked the ones mentioned before of course, but I've also enjoyed Quantum Leap when I was a kid. It was interesting to see that you could go back into your own lifetime and change events there... Today I might find to show annoying but then I've liked it very much. Thank you for the giveaway!

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Humans are at war with an alien species, but the front lines are so far away that soldiers sent there (on ships moving the speed of light) experience time dilation. When they return, hundreds of years have passed on Earth. The protagonist is sent on many such tours, moving ever further into the future and no longer recognizing his home or his own people when he gets back.

The book is short and an easy read. I highly recommend it!

If you are sick of the usual time travel nonsense and the paradoxes that arise you could try Primer.
The script was written by an engineer who got his major in mathematics, so it's more hard SF not sparing the audience the technical details.

On the other hand I prefer the entertainment value of a film more with time travel just a plot device.
Back to the Future would be my favorite and good example of that.
Last movie with time travel I really liked was Looper, you can try that also.

Not in (bought the game semi-recently, so, unless you can buy it to me in the past, I'm not interested anymore). But -

1° Book : Dr Futurity. PK Dick toys with time travel, as it should be done, in an overly intricate plot that doesn't contradict itself, and seems designed only to make you OD on aspirins. Cool, crazy, rigorous and elegant.

2° Film : Retroactive. Not standard time travel : the movie's device sends you back in time, where you were, doing what you were doing, but with the memory of what had happened afterwards, and therefore the opportunity to change it for the best or the worst. When two or three antagonists get access to this, things get complicated. Great simple little action movie with James Belushi as an obnoxious psycho.

My choice is A Briefer History of Time and definitely not A Brief History of Time. The former deals with time travel in a way my little brain can understand, whereas the latter exploded my brain with complexity and boredom before I even finished the first chapter!

Thanks for the giveaway +1

What follows isn't a rant against you, but against the movie, which I really hate because it needlessly complicates things to confuse the viewer into thinking that they are not smart enough to understand this 'revolutionary' movie.

Primer just skips steps to confuse the viewer, thus making it extremely difficult to follow the actual sequence of events. What you need to understand is this: the writer of the movie heard about this <span class="bold">elementary</span> property of super cooled objects and decided to write this story. Basically if you super cool objects and place them in a magnetic field, you can notice the magnets in the clip, those objects will levitate.

For the first half of the movie the characters talk about about improving on this basic physics property by making objects at room temperature levitate. While trying to achieve this they build a time machine. This is just as absurd as me making a movie about inventing a way to boil water by using only a pair of pliers, and 'super fancy talk', but somehow I manage to create a wormhole.

The rest of the movie, the actual time traveling, is just a badly written Twilight episode, filled with plot holes, about the characters turning form researchers into mastermind super criminals.

I was not smart enough to get everything I explained here, during my first viewing of the movie but I just feel that something smelled of bullshit and after viewing the movie 7 times I understood enough. Seriously I saw Primer SEVEN times and I HATE IT SO MUCH.

Recently read Gregory Benford's Timescape which manage to mix traditional hard science fiction with strong characters and a great plot. The novel follows to separate story lines which intervenes as a group of scientist at Cambridge University in 1998 tries to send a message to the past using tachyons (faster than light particles). The receiver a young professor at UCSD, California, who lives in 1963 must then deceiver the information and hopefully prevent the ecological disasters ravaging in 1998. If you can manage to get over the relatively slow it is an excellent read which even provides a lot of references to other sci-fi books that the experienced reader will find amusing to discover.

What though really makes the book great, is that the writer obliviously knows what he is talking about. This book doesn't feature some far out time machine, which magically transport you back or forward in time, but instead offers a scenario which I find somewhat plausible, albeit I know zilch about science.

Star trek 4 - The human race realize what harm they have done to their planet as its nearly wiped out due to hunting whales to extinction... until Kirk n co save the day!

Day of the testicle - Playing three different character over past present and future... brilliant.

I'm in! Thank you for the opportunity, +1.... Hmmm... Deja vu...

The movie I most enjoyed, especially because it was such a surprise, is Triangle. The simple fact that I am posting it here has already ruined a twist in the movie, because it starts out as a 'slasher thriller' type movie and after about 20 minutes there's a reveal that it's actually a time travel story.

I like this movie because the twists just keep coming. You see the movie and you form an opinion based on the way the movie is filmed and then your expectations, such as that the movie is just a slasher, are smashed when the movie switches to a time traveling theme. And then another twist comes, and another, and another one. The best part is that each new twist doesn't invalidate what happened before, as it usually happens in these types of movies, and once the movie is over and you finally know the whole story, you'll immediately want to watch it again, from the beginning, to noticed all the small details that you missed the first time around(I'm trying to speak as vaguely as possible as to not spoil the movie).

However the most entertaining time traveling movie is Evil Dead 3 - Army of Darkness. Bruce Campbell is the king, baby!

I reccomend both "" and "[url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1862079/]Safety Not Guaranteed".
Both are indie flicks, both very well done!
Other than that I won't tell you why I like them as I suffer the same problem with time travel in creative media, and I fear anything I say to get you to watch them will be a spoiler, so just watch them.

I don't really care for it, but it should provde something different to the OP because he dislikes the usual stuff.

That's why Back to the Future is my favorite trilogy and films overall. While not making any scientific sense they have great script, are really funny in a smart way and they are carried by terrific performances all around.

The young adults novels The Boxes and Singularity, both by William Sleator, don't exactly deal with time travel, but rather time compression, but nonetheless are highly recommended. As are most of his works.

Star Trek did a number of good time travel episodes, including one in Deep Space Nine that explains the Roswell UFO crash. But the best in my opinion is the Next Generation episode Cause and Effect.