Okay, so my novel is containing time travel as a central theme. However I have come up with a downright silly way of travelling in time which can't be precisely controlled leading to my main characters being lost and having to discover a way back. They way mine works is by using resonant sound within a monolithic structure (think circle / barrow / dolmen) causing some kind of locallised distortion that results in (poorly explained) time travel. So, I was wondering if other people have come accross other such random or downright silly ways to travel.
I remember in Futuram the professor invented a time machine but it could only go forwards in time. To get back they had to go forward to the heat death of the universe and have the universe reset. They went too far and had to bring it around mutiple times to get right, then kill their duplicates. Why do you want such a strange time travel method? Sound waves have no impact on the fabric of spacetime.
Well recently a Temporal Tear, but it had a strange way of 'correcting itself' so the characters could go back to their time line.
You could always go with the solution from The Greatest American Hero. Aliens dropped the device off without directions.
Probably Time and Again, by Jack Finney. One can travel to the past through psychological means. I guess that's how it's done in the film Butterfly Effect, also.
Dang now I am going to have to read that Stephen King book, I swore off of him after completing the Dark Tower series. Not sure if I can find 9!'s book suggestion but suspect it is very good so it goes on my wish list too. (sorry 1-9 I always see nine factorial with your name)
In one of my stories I have the Fruit of Undoing. Basically, you eat it and it allows you to alter one choice you made in you life.
I started but have not yet finished (I think Oct-Nov are appropriate months to do so) 11/22/63. It's very good. Nothing literary. Time and Again is considered a classic. You could probably read 11/22/63 while using a Time and Again jacket. (kidding). Interestingly enough, I just read that Stephen King referred to Time and Again as"the great time travel story." Personally, I disagree. The Time Machine is the best time travel story.
How about put your hand on a neolithic standing stone, somewhere in Scotland, and wheech, you're back in the 18th Century with Bonnie Prince Chairlie & Co? And furthermore, when you get back to life as we know it, then go back to the same standing stone and put your hand on it again, wheech, you're back to the same crew in the same time and place? Wonder where she would have got to if she'd put her hand on a different stone? Maybe charging around Ireland with a blue-faced Mel Gibson in tow?
I believe Steins;Gate used a microwave that you could send objects back in time with, and/or connect your cellphone to send texts back in time, which would then create a new timeline in which time would be altered due to the information sent with the text. Don't remember the specifics since I watched it a few years ago, but I remember liking that show. You can go really silly with time-travel stuff and still have it be good, but you can also do so much stuff wrong. Time travel, I think, is the hardest plot-device to do right nowadays, especially if you want to be original.
Again, not a book, but I bet some members might appreciate how silly it is to go time-traveling in a police telephone box.
In Ken Grimwood's Replay the MC has a heart attack and when he wakes up, he's 19, it's 1963, and he's in his college dorm room. Time travel by heart attack.
In my book there are Dragons that when they die they simply change forms. One of the Dragons I created was named "Breach the Fractured" this dragon was capable of opening gateways or portals via a wormhole of sorts into the past present or future. Most instances a Dragon has been witnessed in history can be explained by this Dragon. However this Dragon is killed by the Lord of Atlantis and it transformed into a circular diamond shaped crystal that when the user peers into it they can move through time...
Not sure whether it's strange, but one of my favorites is Zelazny's 'Roadmarks' where you just get on a highway and drive to the time you want to visit. First, though, you need to know where the highway ramps are in your time in order to get onto it.
I read a short story once, probably in Analog, that posited that cats do really have nine lives, just at different points in history. When you can't find Fluffy at dinnertime, that's because she's popped off to 16th century France, or 27th century Greater Icelandia... In The Time Traveller's Wife, it was an involuntary thing, the MC would simply pop from one point in his life to another, sometimes overlapping with himself. He was confined to the period between his birth and death though.
There is an excellent book on time travel 'Thrice around the time' (J.P. Hogan) where scientists build a machine which sends particles (don't remember which ones exactly) back in time. They are confined to the time period when the machine was build first, of course. They alter history three times when the book stops
Your method is almost identical to that used by Diane Gabaldon in the "Outlander" series, in which the woman walks through some standing stones in Scotland in 1946 and finds herself, totally unexpected and unprepared, in Scotland 1743. Galbaldon did an excellent job of not explaining how these worked, just that they did, though the protag found that certain jewels helped make the passage less traumatic. She was excellent in not overdoing it. This was a deus ex machina to get 20th century eyes on an exquisitely-researched eighteenth century world which was the real object, so part fantasy, part historical fiction. And yes, getting lost in both time and space played a role in some of the series books.