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history of - Which was the first sci-fi story featuring time travelling by passing memories back to your former self?


I've finished watching an anime called Steins;Gate (2011), where one of the time travel methods they feature is traveling back in time by passing memories back to your former self, similar to X-men: Days of Future Past (1981) if I recall correctly.


This seems to be a common idea in sci-fi stories. Which was the first story featuring this idea?



Answer



1947: "Time and Time Again", a short story by H. Beam Piper; first published in Astounding Science Fiction, April 1947, which is available at the Internet Archive; also available at Project Gutenberg.




"I wish I could he sure, myself, Dad," he said. "You see, when I woke, this morning, I hadn't the least recollection of anything I'd done yesterday. August 4, 1945, that is," he specified. "I was positively convinced that I was a man of forty-three, and my last memory was of lying on a stretcher, injured by a bomb explosion. And I was equally convinced that this had happened in 1975."

"Huh?" His father straightened. "Did you say nineteen seventy-five?" He thought for a moment. "That's right; in 1975, you will be forty-three. A bomb, you say?"

Allan nodded. "During the siege of Buffalo, in the Third World War," he said, "I was a captain in G5—Scientific Warfare, General Staff. There'd been a transpolar air invasion of Canada, and I'd been sent to the front to check on service failures of a new lubricating oil for combat equipment. A week after I got there, Ottawa fell, and the retreat started. We made a stand at Buffalo, and that was where I copped it. I remember being picked up, and getting a narcotic injection. The next thing I knew, I was in bed, upstairs, and it was 1945 again, and I was back in my own little thirteen-year-old body."



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