Time Travel in Science Fiction
Rev up the DeLorean: time travel is another big theme in sci-fi. We'll find characters in these works zipping into the future, or back in time. Often, the whole plot of a Sci-fi work is set in a distant time, usually in the future.
Sci-fi writers are obsessed with exploring times that are very different from ours. This, again, is one of the defining characteristics of the genre. If we're reading a book where things are taking place in the distant future, odds and good that it's a sci-fi book. And, because it's a sci-fi book, the goods are also pretty odd.
Chew On This
What is it like to travel forward in time? H.G. Wells' Time Traveller tells his audience that it's pretty hard to describe what the future is like (he's been there. He knows). Check out these quotations from Wells' novel The Time Machine.
Let's not get too excited about the future—it may not be all it's cracked up to be. In Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, everything feels dead and sterilized in the future tense. Even the light.