Wow, that IS a good topic, Steve!
Let's see... I'm not even sure exactly WHEN my interest in time-travel began, but I definitely became fascinated with it ever since I was a young boy. I can remember specifically being in like 5th grade and thinking how cool it would be to have something like Star Wars, only with time-travel, and it could be called "Time Wars."
Actually, now that I think back far enough, I believe it might have been 2 specific movies that really showed me how fascinating time-travel is:
Time After Time with Malcom McDowell as H.G. Wells, Mary Steenburgen as his love interest, and David Warner as Jack the Ripper; and
Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. If you haven't seen these two movies, I strongly recommend them. They were released in the early 80's, but I consider them classics. The scene in
Superman when he turned the world backwards was probably another scene that exposed me to time-travel, and
Back to the Future and
Star Trek IV definitely had me hooked.
Around the time I entered high school, I also read a few novels that really got me into it: the "Dragonlance Legends" trilogy of books by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, "Lightning" by Dean R. Koontz and "Millennium" by John Varley. All very well-written books, in my opinion, that really get the brain working in hyperdrive. I was also introduced to the world of comics in high school too, and read an interesting crossover series called Armageddon 2001 about infinite numbers of possible futures. And then, of course, I discovered Quantum Leap in 1990 and the rest, as they say, is history.
And now, nearly 20 years after imagining my "Time Wars" idea, the first inklings of an epic storyline have formed in my head in the form of a trilogy with the working title, "Timescape." It's such an ambitious and complex saga that even I don't know where to begin, LOL! Especially since it contains so many biblical analogies and references, and only tells the story of the history of the UNIVERSE starting from the end of time and going backwards! Yeah... I think big!
The major inspirations behind it are Star Wars, Terminator, Back to the Future, the 1985 comic maxiseries Crisis on Infinite Earths, and a 1995 video game called Chrono Trigger (greatest RPG of ALL TIME!)
Okay, now that I've given an historical overview of time-travel stories from the past 20+ years, I'll let someone else put in their two cents! :nut