hmm

[Jerome Scuggs]

A baby girl is mysteriously dropped off at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945. "Jane" grows up lonely and dejected, not knowing who her parents are, until one day in 1963 she is strangely attracted to a drifter. She falls in love with him. But just when things are finally looking up for Jane, a series of disasters strike. First, she becomes pregnant by the drifter, who then disappears. Second, during the complicated delivery, doctors find that Jane has both sets of sex organs, and to save her life, they are forced to surgically convert "her" to a "him." Finally, a mysterious stranger kidnaps her baby from the delivery room.

Reeling from these disasters, rejected by society, scorned by fate, "he" becomes a drunkard and drifter. Not only has Jane lost her parents and her lover, but he has lost his only child as well. Years later, in 1970, he stumbles into a lonely bar, called Pop's Place, and spills out his pathetic story to an elderly bartender. The sympathetic bartender offers the drifter the chance to avenge the stranger who left her pregnant and abandoned, on the condition that he join the "time travelers corps." Both of them enter a time machine, and the bartender drops off the drifter in 1963. The drifter is strangely attracted to a young orphan woman, who subsequently becomes pregnant.

The bartender then goes forward 9 months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops off the baby in an orphanage back in 1945. Then the bartender drops off the thoroughly confused drifter in 1985, to enlist in the time travelers corps. The drifter eventually gets his life together, becomes a respected and elderly member of the time travelers corps, and then disguises himself as a bartender and has his most difficult mission: a date with destiny, meeting a certain drifter at Pop's Place in 1970.

[Scurvy]

i liked the third harry potter more.

[DoTheFandango]

Time travel is impossible, into the past beyond when the time machine existed.

[Jason]

reminds me a tiny bit of palahniuk's rant. and speaking of time travel, i just started reading stephen hawking's a brief history of time. talk about a page turner!

this drifter story, though, seems to me like it's a super giant paradox. all those past and future selves interacting with each other, you're looking at destroying the very fabric of time and all that jazz.

[Da1andonly]

I didn't know they made a Narnia sequel.

[Dack Falu]

That drifter has a pretty terrible memory.

[Zerzera]

He sure gets back to the drifter though.

[Dameon Angell]

It's like the game Timesplitters: Future Perfect. In the opening stage your character goes through this castle. At one point he comes across himself from the future while standing in front of a large door. Future self hands him a key to open it and tells him to hang on to it and pass it on. Way later in the stage you come back to that same area, only in some sort of air duct and see your past self come up to that door. You have the same conversation, pass the key down, and tell him to pass it along.

A neat, little time loop.

[milosh]

The drifter then spent the rest of his miserable days posting his story on the Trench Wars forums.

[DankNuggets]

sounds like the Terminator logic at work here

[Squeezer]

reminds me a tiny bit of palahniuk's rant. and speaking of time travel, i just started reading stephen hawking's a brief history of time. talk about a page turner!

this drifter story, though, seems to me like it's a super giant paradox. all those past and future selves interacting with each other, you're looking at destroying the very fabric of time and all that jazz.

I'm reading Rant right now.

It sounds like Middlesex to me, though I haven't got around to reading that yet. I loved the Virgin Suicides.

edit: The way I figure it, humanity will never be able to control time. If it were possible you would think that someone would have come back to alert us by now. The world will end long before we can master time and space.