To put it short, the concept of tenses in the English language may become very different in a world where time travel exists, especially time travelling to the past or sending messages to past/future versions of oneself. Can anyone recommend a reading that has clever use of (potentially new) tenses in such settings, or provide a basic guideline on such issues, or perhaps point to your own works that have one? Or can anyone point out other consequences to the English language in such settings? Thanks.

Hmm, what? I'm... not sure I really understand why you would need to get too clever with tenses, if I'm understanding you correctly.

I mean, the only real example of this sort of thing I can think of off the top of my head is Doctor Who, which has a few lines every once in a while where the use of tenses sound a little weird. For example, when the Doctor's in 1963 and says, "the Daleks already took over Earth in the 22nd century". Sure it sounds a little funny because he's using the past tense to refer to something that happens in the (objective) future, but you still know what he means, especially since it's implied he saw it happen in his own personal past.

So... yeah, tenses are weird in time travel stories, but I don't think it matters much since you can still pretty much understand the intended meaning behind things even if the correct tense to use in a given sentence is rather debatable.

That's exactly the sort of things I'm looking for. English currently doesn't have such weird tenses because there's no time travel, so I want to know how competent authors add new tenses and other rules in an exciting way.

I feel like that's not an important enough niche to warrant a new tense, though.

How would one go about inventing a new tense in the first place?