The Best Of Times

I envisage a single collection of the very few very best works of time travel fiction, which I suggest are:

The Time Machine by HG Wells;
"A Stitch In Time" by John Wyndham;
"By His Bootstraps" by Robert Heinlein;
"The Sorrow Of Odin The Goth" by Poul Anderson.

These happen to comprise two British literary works and two American genre stories.

Wells implies but otherwise avoids the issue of causality paradoxes. The other three works are circular causality stories although the last is set in a causality violation scenario. The four works present a good balance of past, present and future -

Wells: nineteenth century to 702,601 AD, then the furthest future of Earth, and return;
Wyndham: time travel within a character's life time;
Heinlein: twentieth century to far future;
Anderson: twentieth century to the Dark Ages.

The Time Traveler interacts with Morlocks and Eloi. Anderson's Time Patrolman interacts with Goths and Huns. The Time Patrol's mass produced, streamlined, futuristic timecycles are conceptual descendants of the Time Traveller's elaborate nineteenth century contraption. The time traveler sits on, instead of being enclosed by, each of these vehicles. Both Wyndham and Heinlein instead envisage a machine that sends people through time instead of moving past- or future-wards, taking them with it.

Doctor Who

Doctor Who will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in November, 2013. Like Superman, Star Trek and Flash Gordon, it is a story that needs to be retold from the beginning, getting it right this time. The Time Lords should be:

not aliens but our future;
not extraterrestrials but extra-temporals;
our evolutionary successors, like Poul Anderson's Danellians.

The originals of the Doctor and his companions fighting the Daleks are the Time Traveller and Weena against the Morlocks.

On a Doctor Who fan's shelves, I saw:

a boxed set of CD's of the first three Doctor Who stories - the beginning;
a boxed set of DVD's of the two feature films starring Peter Cushing - an alternative beginning;
a "Doctor Who: Lost in Time" CD collection of episodes of early stories that no longer exist in their entirety - truly "lost in time";
the DVD of the television film starring Paul McCann in his single appearance as the Doctor;
CD's of various stories featuring different Doctors;
thus, television and cinema history.

The TV series is Doctor Who but the first feature film is Doctor Who And The Daleks and the second is Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD so the Daleks take over the titles. In the TV series, the second story is "The Daleks". Curiously, the poster for the second film prominently features not a Dalek but a roboman with Daleks and other figures in the background.

I have stopped watching the TV series which cleverly presented the circular causality paradox in the first "Weeping Angels" story but mishandled causality violation when Rose tried to prevent her father's death. I advise Whovians to read The Time Machine, The Time Patrol and The Time Traveller's Wife.

Whatever Happened To The Time Traveller?

Let us assume, as a fictional premise, that Wells’ true account, The Time Machine, was mistaken for fiction because the Time Traveller never returned. It follows that a nineteenth century inventor built a time machine in his laboratory whereas the collective approach of twentieth century science somehow prevented scientists from realizing that time travel was possible. What has been discovered once can be discovered again. 

Future time travellers, realising that Wells’ Time Traveller was a real person, will want to meet him. Perhaps the silent dinner guest was a time traveller who did not speak because he did not want to risk changing the conversation recorded by Wells? Future time travellers would show Wells’ account to the original Time Traveller before his final departure. Knowing that he would not return to the nineteenth century, he would accompany them to their period. They could: 

build bigger time machines;
explore past and future history;
rescue Weena;
round up Eloi into a reservation;
exterminate the Morlocks;
rescue people from disasters throughout history and
repopulate the paradisal Earth with undevolved humanity. 

Wells wrote no sequel but the Time Traveller might visit a twenty first century writer. Since I am not a fiction writer, it is unlikely to be me.