This might sound like a dumb question but . . .

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine comes to mind. I can think of several works that deal with time travel, but none that have the characters perceiving it as an alien invasion.

There may be others who are better read in the genre than I am.

Kenteicher said:

This has brought me to an idea for a story. We are, and have been visited, except that it is not from some off world inelegance, but rather people from our own future. I do recall some stories dealing with this idea, but not very many. I'd like to receive comments on two fronts. First, does anyone recall reading this type of story? If so, how many have you seen with this premise? My second question is, does this sound like a viable (read salable) idea for a story or have there already been so many that it will immediately be rejected?

Click to expand...

I've read only one such story (where someone comes from our future) that I can remember, a short novel titled "Mannen från framtiden" (which is Swedish, it means "The Man from the Future") by Eugen Semitjov. I don't know how salable the concept is, but it seems SF books with all kinds of stories have been published...

I remember one book where charatcers came from the uture, and took all the people who were about to die in plane crashes / earthquakes etc ( and replaced them with mindless drones from teh future, to die in their place), to repopulate the future....

That's the closest I can think of at the moment.

Anyway, lots of stories have been done more than once, that doesn't stop you writing about it in your own way

Kuttner & Moore's short story, "Vintage Season." Dilettantes from the future come to visit the places in the past they're most interested in. Grim, and excellent.

Can't remember the author, but the ss, "Let's Go to Golgatha!" Quite unsettling.

Millenium, that was the book! Thanks, it was driving me crazy trying to remember the title.

The 4400 springs to mind, also 12 Monkeys. I think Millenium was based on a book.

For books: The Belisarius series by Eric Flint and David Drake (begins with An Oblique Approach)

Also, there was a series of stories in Analog a while back regarding a man who'd been sent back in time to prevent disasters which lead to a hideous future. Problem was, every time he corrected something, he wiped out his own memory of events as he adjusted to the changed timeline. Each story begins with him waking up with a note or recording telling him who he was and what he was doing. IIRC, the author was James Gunn.

To answer the original question, I don't this topic has been over-explored.

I'm confused; you accept the impossibility of visits from alien civilizations, but not the impossibility of time travel?

Sarpedon said:

I'm confused; you accept the impossibility of visits from alien civilizations, but not the impossibility of time travel?

Click to expand...

Hmm, I'd say that of long-distance space travel and time travel, time travel is the more improbable. But there are high-power physics brains that can make either of them look doable, and doubtless interrelated.

Kenteicher said:

We are, and have been visited, except that it is not from some off world inelegance, but rather people from our own future. I do recall some stories dealing with this idea, but not very many.

Click to expand...

Actually, think this has been a fairly common SF theme, but there's still enough potential in the idea for a successful book.

One of my favorites is Robert Silverbergs's Up The Line. about the time police whose job it is to travel up and down the time line making sure that our particular time line is not altered by those who wish a different outcome for history.

It is an extremely common theme in SF.

The closest would possibly be 'The 4400', as it is assumed that they are aliens - up until the end of the first series, where they are revealed to be from the future.

I'm a little curious how you've managed to miss so many 'visitors from the future' type stories .. so I suspect I've managed to misunderstand the question.

I'm sure there's plenty of room in that genre for another few decades of stories, though !

On thing to remember is that the 'visitors from the future' is only a BACKGROUND for a story - the actual story will have to be something else .. something with a plot. The audience won't be 'wowed' by that single concept enough to survive without a plot.

Good luck,

Mac

Don't forget about SPHERE by Michael Crichton. It has a similar beginning to your idea, people are investigating something under the water, and they think it is a UFO. Turns out to be a spaceship alright, but human. And from the future. There are no survivors or anything, so it didn't deal with interactions between humans from different times. But the beginning is still the same.

I wouldn't worry if anyone had done your idea before, to be honest, chances are someone has. As everyone here always says, it's the way you write your story that matters most, that makes it unique.

Back in the 1970's (possibly earlier) this very possibility was proposed by some scientists. It has been speculated that all UFO sightings are really time travelers from our own future. So the concept has been around.

I don't know if it's been made into fiction, but since it's been around so long I'm sure it has.


A friend of mine told me about a story he read (I don't recall the title) where our future descendants have been specifically targetting the 20th century and covertly abducting people and taking blood and DNA samples, etc, because they are trying to find a specific blood line in the human population of out time period. If they can just fine those five key people, they can ward off some impending disaster. Something about a plague and desperate search for the few rare people who are immune to that plague.

Isn't this is a common idea in UFO circles--that "flying saucers" are earth ships from earth's future? And maybe their apparent tangible, physical reality is an illusion, and UFOs are actually portals into, or from, the future?

What if a distant civilization masters the technologies of suspended animation and space travel. They send envoys to earth who arrive in say, 2309. By then people have mastered time-travel using disc-shaped timeships.

So earth people take these newly-arrived alien visitors for a recreational joyride back to 2008. Maybe they land and mix with the locals. Might land in your backyard. In the middle of the night, you investigate the disturbance in your backyard and come face-to-face with your own great-great-great-etc grandchild and his alien buddies.

I wonder whether, if such "timeships" exist in the future, they might be a common technology, maybe priced at $4,999. Such timeships needn't be officially-sanctioned-by-the-authorities devices. Buy 'em used, off the lot with a 5,000-travel-years warrantee. Might be a bunch of teenage punks from 2309 flying around up there, causing all this UFO confusion.

Technological achievement in one area doesn't mean achievement in all. Maybe by 2309, earth people are advanced in time travel, but rudimentary in suspended animation, thus very limited in our space travel. But maybe aliens know nothing about time travel. So we can swap, share, technologies with these aliens. Then what? Think of all the things that can go wrong. Then intergalactic lawsuits, happy earth and alien lawyers.

I suspect this has all been done.

Always remember: It's a cookbook!

I kind of lean toward this theory as well. That the UFO craft and objects are actually from our backyard, only travelers from our future.

I was watching a sceince program and Charles Berlitz (of Bermuda Triangle fame) was quoted stating this and is an absolute believer in the theory that our future high-tech earth occupants are coming downstream to check on us.

Interesting.

Tri

It's been done, and done, and done, and done. There have been single and series short stories, novels, blah blah blah. Yeah, I've been reading for some time.

But there is always room for a new wrinkle.

Before you begin, be sure to see:

The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés
http://www.geocities.com/evilsnack/cliche.htm

I still like the idea of UFOs containing both aliens and future-people. Maybe the aliens were shooting for 2008, but landed in 2309, and force future-people to take them back in time.

Matera the Mad said:

It's been done, and done, and done, and done.

Click to expand...

Heck.

Forget about spaceships--how about: there's these two guys, see...and nobody else around, everything and everybody's been wiped out in a combination nuclear holocaust and biological pestilence.

So they hold hands and walk into the sunset...to begin again...and it turns out they're...

Adam and Steve.

Phaeal said:

Hmm, I'd say that of long-distance space travel and time travel, time travel is the more improbable. But there are high-power physics brains that can make either of them look doable, and doubtless interrelated.

Click to expand...

Relativity
Causality
Faster-than-light/timetravel

Pick any 2.
FTL is basically the same as timetravel in that according to relativity the time dilation caused by speed can result in some strange phenomena. The basic example is that an observer observing someone going at FTL can see him arrive before he sees him depart with the correct frames of reference.
Though this would only appear as time travel to an outside observer, never to the person going FTL. (yeah, it's hard to imagine)

Anyway, i'd also say that time travel is the much less likely scenario, since to our knowledge time doesn't actually exist as some kind of dimension you can travel but is only a kind of statistical property of the universe. You can change the speed with which time passes for you, but no going backwards.

FTL might not be impossible though, as mentioned above, if the theory of relativity is wrong it could certainly be possible, or maybe causality can be violated after all.

Anyway, time travel stories are very common in SF, just to add another obscure(ish) one to the mix, there is one book from Hohlbein (german author) i remember reading years back that included time travel. Actually the main characters future selfs coming back in time to get themselves as children and show them a future which they are then supposed to prevent. Or some such if i remember correctly, which i might not since i don't even recall the title.
Another time travel story i read more recently was by neal asher. Don't recall that title either, my bookshelf's at home and i'm not.
I'm pretty sure a search at amazon will turn up tons of time travel stories, though i can't think of any more. Not surprising, i'm terribly bad at suspension of disbelief, which makes time travel kinda annoying to read about since it's almost never thought out well enough to at least avoid the most glaring paradoxa. (seven days for example is awful in that regard)

As for a time traveller's artifact being seen as alien, the only story i can think of is Sphere, though there might be others.

Lhun said:

Not surprising, i'm terribly bad at suspension of disbelief, which makes time travel kinda annoying to read about since it's almost never thought out well enough to at least avoid the most glaring paradoxa. (seven days for example is awful in that regard)

Click to expand...

I have a similar reaction to some time-travel stories. Sometimes writers cheat. Instead of basing time travel in a plausible projection, or extrapolation, of scientific knowledge and engineering, they in effect introduce magic. Such writers use time travel, or a time-travel device/machine, as a "magic wand," something that allows them to explore the drama inherent in time-travel paradoxes--kill your grandfather and all that.

Time-travel paradoxes are fun, brain-bending; but for me, magic wands belong in fantasy stories, not SF.

stc said:

I have a similar reaction to some time-travel stories. Sometimes writers cheat. Instead of basing time travel in a plausible projection, or extrapolation, of scientific knowledge and engineering, they in effect introduce magic. Such writers use time travel, or a time-travel device/machine, as a "magic wand," something that allows them to explore the drama inherent in time-travel paradoxes--kill your grandfather and all that.

Time-travel paradoxes are fun, brain-bending; but for me, magic wands belong in fantasy stories, not SF.

Click to expand...

Yeah, but the problem with basing time travel on current science is that it is very difficult if not impossible to make it work. Describing a world where causality does not hold is plain weird, and that's pretty much the only way you can get time travel to be consistent with science. Getting rid of relativity instead can lead to even more weirdness.
Anyway, the problem is that timetravel stories just don't really work. Making them fantasy and just avoiding the problems, but making them logically work, well, i don't see how. Causality is just to inherent to thinking i guess.

You can keep time travel while obeying causality. Think of time as a tree, with branches, instead of a simple line. When someone travels back in time they arrive at a fork in the tree. One branch is the timeline where they didn't arrive in the past, the other is the timeline where they did come to the past. The future that develops is then different from the future the traveler has come from, but both exist simultaneously. This can occur by invoking, and perhaps abusing, the many worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

The real trouble is that there's no hard science behind traveling to the past. You'll have to do a little inventing there.

Time travel to the future is used often and is more supported by science. A person on a ship going close to the speed of light will observe time passing slower than someone at rest. A strong gravitational field will also cause time to slow down. These concepts are used, respectively, in OSC's Xenocide and Pohl's Gateway.

Bear in mind that the universe is in constant motion, so time travel into the Earth's past might also require travel in relative spatial dimensions too.

In its rotation around the sun, the earth travels at almost 30km/s. At a diameter of almost 30,000km it takes only 17 minutes for the earth to vanish entirely from wherever it was, so if you travelled instantaneously even 20 minutes into the past, you'd find yourself in vacuum. And at 3 mins into the past, you might find yourself either inside the Earth or out in space.

There's also the question of what happens to your velocity and orientation. We share the earth's rotational velocity of around 500m/s at the equator, and our direction of motion is always roughly West to East. But if you imagine two ants on opposite sides of a spinning ball, at any time they're travelling in opposite directions, and their feet are facing one another. So if you could cleverly travel to a calculated time around 17mins into the past in which your current spot is occupied by a spot on the opposite side of the earth, then you might find yourself

1. upside-down; and
2. moving at around 1km/s in a Westerly direction - (500m/s from your speed, plus another 500m/s from the Earth's speed).

So the ability to travel back in time onto the same planetary surface seems to involve being able to:

1. travel vast distances instantaneously
2. shed and acquire large amounts of velocity (e.g. lose all your inertia)
3. instantaneously change your orientation

And if you've got 1) then you might also have 'teleport'-style space travel for free. And if you have 2) then you also have the ability to accelerate to lightspeed for nothing, since no inertia means no mass. . And 3) gives you the ability to do uh... interesting handstands.

Dunno why, but time-travel stories seldom worry about these things