Gystere Time Machine (2020)
Rip Van Winkle was a Dutch-American living in the years before the American Revolution. One day, while in the Catskill Mountains, he encountered a group of strangers, joined them for a drink and soon became so intoxicated that he fell asleep.
Rip woke up to a sunny morning, discovering his beard had grown a foot long and turned gray. When he returned to his village, he found it larger and filled with unfamiliar people who didn't recognize him. Asked about his vote in the recent election, he professed loyalty to King George III, unaware that the American Revolution had taken place during his absence. He only escaped the fate of a traitor loyal to the king when an old woman finally recognized him.
You may have guessed we're dealing with fiction here. Rip Van Winkle is a 19th-century iteration of a plot found in ancient Greece (the story of Epimenides), all three major Abrahamic religions (e.g. the legend known as Seven Sleepers in Christianity) and Far Eastern traditions (e.g. Muchukunda in Hindu mythology). The narrative theme typically revolves around involuntary time travel.
Indeed, intentional time travel is a relatively recent phenomenon in literature. It appears that the liberation from the idea of being solely at the mercy of the gods’ / God's will, and thus having limited control over one's own fate, made the notion of self-determined time travel conceivable.
A very recent example of a literary work about self-determined time travel or the desire for time travel is the song "Time Machine" by French artist Gystere, who, over a slightly sinister, slow funk groove, dreams of a time machine that could whisk him back to the last day of a romantic relationship...
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