Time travel in fiction
[3][6] In other instances, the premise is that the past cannot be changed or that the future is determined, and the protagonist's actions turn out to be inconsequential or intrinsic to events as they originally unfolded.
Forrest J. Ackerman noted in his 1973 anthology of the best fiction of the year that "the theme of getting hold of tomorrow's newspaper is a recurrent one".
[20][21] The 1944 film It Happened Tomorrow also employs this device, with the protagonist receiving the next day's newspaper from an elderly colleague (who is possibly a ghost).
[20] In that story, a block of homeowners wake to discover that on November 22, they have received The New York Times for the coming December 1.
John Buchan's 1932 novel The Gap in the Curtain, is similarly premised on a group of people being enabled to see, for a moment, an item in The Times newspaper from one year in the future.
[1]: 165 The visual novel Steins;Gate features characters sending short text messages backwards in time to avert disaster, only to find their problems are exacerbated due to not knowing how individuals in the past will actually utilize the information.
B. Priestley wrote of it both in fiction and non-fiction, analysing testimonials of precognition and other "temporal anomalies" in his book Man and Time.
[27] Infallible precognition, which describes the future as it truly is, may lead to causal loops, one form of which is explored in Newcomb's paradox.
[28][29] The film 12 Monkeys heavily deals with themes of predestination and the Cassandra complex, where the protagonist who travels back in time explains that he can't change the past.
This is a very old concept, with some accounts asserting that English mythological figure Merlin lived backwards, and appeared to be able to prophesy the future because for him it was a memory.
[citation needed] Philip K. Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle features books reporting on an alternate timeline.
[citation needed] The plot of the film Source Code features a simulated and time-looped reality based on the memories of a dead man.
The term describes events observed in chaos theory where a very small change in initial conditions has vastly different results.
For example, in Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, the killing of an insect millions of years in the past drastically changes the world and in the 2004 film The Butterfly Effect, the protagonist's small changes to his past results in extreme consequences.
[4] An early example of another type, in which tourists from the future visit the present, is Catherine L. Moore and Henry Kuttner's 1946 Vintage Season.
She noted as an instance that Christopher Marlow's Doctor Faustus called up Helen of Troy and met her arising from her grave.
