Now that we’re in the enlightened 21st century, every self-respecting reader is intimately familiar with all the early time travel classics. Anno 7603, Paris avant les hommes,[/em] “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Clock That Went Backward,” El Anacronópete, The Time Machine, blah blah blah. But let’s be honest and call a Morlock a Morlock: All those old tales are tales of vacuous travelers through time, none of them giving a thought to contorted paradoxes, none wondering which lover they would get back (or get revenge on) if given the chance, none fretting about what might happen should they kill their younger self, and none having impure thoughts about sleeping with their mothers or the consequences of doing so. Yep, I’d always proudly boasted that it was my generation who discovered such sauciness.

And then I stumbled upon Jacques Rigaut’s century-old gem that managed all that and more in under 1,000 words more than a century ago.

When Joan Carmody sends a plea to her ex-boyfriend Bert Redmond, he barrels from Indiana to upstate New York in a trice, only to see Joan and her borderline-mad brother Tom kidnapped by metal monsters from another dimension. Fortunately, a mourning, immortal wanderer through time and space also sees the abduction and fills in Bert with all the salient details and some unsalient ones, too.

Time traveler Emmet Pennypacker kills one ancient Hun without realizing who will disappear from the racist world of 1935.

Terry Donovan realizes that it’s possible to travel through time in 60,000,000-year increments, so naturally he travels back to the Cretaceous where he meets dinosaurs and aliens.

This story was under Tremaine’s Astounding editorship, but the sequel, “Coils of Time,” (May 1939) appeared after Campbell became editor.

You’ll need some patience with “Coils of Time," seeing as how it takes the hero, Rutherford Bohr Adams, twenty-some pages before you’ll realize that the story is a sequel to “The Sands of Time,” and it’s going to fall to space pilot Adams to travel through the 60-million-year coils of times into the future and the past, saving Earth from the evil Martians and their zombies, while also saving his own boss’s beautiful daughter from a fate worth than death.

Andrew Harlan, Technician in the everwhen of Eternity, falls in love and starts a chain of events that could lead to the end of everything.

A short picture book of the 2014 Mr. Peabody and Sherman movie. The images are all from the movie’s CGI (or at least generated by the same process).

Time travel is implied right from the first episode of the CW’s rendition of The Flash where a newspaper from the future is seen in the closing scene. The rest of the first season builds a fine time-travel arc that includes a nefarious time traveler from the far future, a classic grandfather paradox with a twist (sadly not examined), a do-over day for the Flash (which Harrison Wells calls “temporal reversion”), and a final episode that sees the Flash travel back to his childhood (as well as a hint that Rip Hunter himself will soon appear on the CW scene).