From The Terminator to Austin Powers, Quantum Leap to Life on Mars, the paradoxes and quandaries of time travel exert an uncanny influence on modern writers.
Even horror supremo Stephen King is to tackle the topic in his forthcoming novel 11.22.63, which involves a teacher travelling through a portal to 1958 in an attempt to save JFK.
Authors have dreamed of time travel for centuries. A folk tale from eighth-century Japan tells of a fisherman, Urashima Taro, who journeys to a world under the sea where he lives for three years, only to find, on his return home, that three centuries have passed.
Washington Irving related the story of Rip Van Winkle, a man who goes to sleep for a night to find 20 years have passed in 1819; Scrooge was given glimpses into the past and the "yet to come" in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in 1843; and Mark Twain sent a Connecticut Yankee to the court of King Arthur in his 1889 novel.
But, fittingly enough, the man described as the father of science fiction, HG Wells, is credited with inventing the time machine in his 1895 story.
The machine sends the traveller forward in time to the year 802,701, when humanity has split into the beautiful Eloi and their masters the Morlocks.
He then journeys 30m years into the future, where "the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a 10th part of the darkling heavens", and "all the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over".
The paradox for time travellers is how their actions in the past will affect the future, a theme explored by Ray Bradbury in the story A Sound of Thunder (1952), in which a time traveller kills a butterfly when journeying back to the time of the dinosaurs only to find his present has been irrevocably altered.
Dubbed the "grandfather paradox" – what would happen if you travelled back in time and killed one of your ancestors, thus preventing your own birth – this is ably explored in the 1985 film Back to the Future when teenager Marty McFly is sent back in time in a DeLorean car modified to become a time machine.
McFly unintentionally attracts his mother's romantic interest, and he has to ensure she falls instead for his father to ensure his continuing existence.
Just as the inner workings of the DeLorean are left to our imagination, so does the most famous time machine to grace our televisions, the Tardis, retain its mysteries.
The last of the Time Lords, Doctor Who, uses his Time And Relative Dimension In Space – much bigger, of course, than it appears from the outside – to travel through the universe and time saving planets and civilisations and, occasionally, to "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow".
Superman, on the other hand, in his first film outing in 1978, takes a less secretive approach to time travel, simply circling the world fast enough to reverse its spin, thus preventing Lois Lane from dying in an earthquake and saving the day.