Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Games

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Something has happened to time. In recent years the media have produced numerous films, television series, comic books, graphic novels and videogames that bend, shatter and rebuild the clock. Characters slip backwards, jump forwards and slide sideways in time more than ever before.

What caused this fascination with time travel? What does it mean to be out of one’s own era? How do different media formats tell these stories and what does this reveal about their relationship to time itself? This book, the first to address the genre across a range of media, responds to these questions by locating time travel narratives within their cultural, historical and philosophical contexts. From well-known classics (Doctor Who and The Terminator) to little-known gems (The Georgian House and Save the Date), and from major American movies (Back to the Future, Inception and Source Code) to indie games (Braid) and Italian comedy cinema (Superfantozzi), the texts discussed represent a broad cross-section of the genre.

Tracing time travel from its roots in antiquity and fairytales to the present day, the voices present in this collection make an important contribution to emerging debates about the stories we tell ourselves of falling through the cracks of time.