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Damnation, you've traveled through time and have no clue when you've ended up! How are you to ascertain what time period you're in, or where you are? Surely you can't just ask a random passer-by — they would think you mad!
Of course, that's what most people do. In Speculative Fiction you would be surprised just how helpful random passers-by are. Asking them suddenly " What Year Is This?!?" or "Where am I?", rather than scaring them and convincing them of your lunacy, elicits, "Why, sir, it's the year 30025; we are in the heart of the Great Space Empire. And did you notice that massive explosion the other day, and how strange everyone's been acting since?"
Perhaps surprisingly, in Real Life, people will generally give a straightforward and honest answer if you ask this question. This is either because people are too polite to not answer the question, or because some people forget the year frequently. (It could also have something to do with the fact that as far as we know, time travel doesn't exist in real life.)
This is usually very useful for our time traveler: he now knows not only where he is, but also what his random task for this week's episode is.
Compare Expospeak.
One variation on this trope is for the character to ask for "the date", then clarify, once given the day or the month and day, that the character needs the year.
More subtle travelers seek out a newspaper, if such thing exists during the time he traveled to.
If the time traveller had a specific purpose in mind, this may be followed up with a line describing how they feel about their destination; examples include "That can't be right!" and of course "Then it's not too late!"
Note that time travel is not always necessary to invoke this trope. A long and agonizing prison sentence in the dungeons of the Evil Empire, the end of the world as we know it, or just plain old amnesia can do it.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Haruhi Suzumiya example: While fixing the FUBAR Yuki created due to emotions, Kyon uses her Emergency Escape Program to get out. He lands in summer, feeling extremely warm in his sweater (it was winter then), and he realizes he has travelled through time. His first instinct is to find out where he is, followed by when is it. And since nobody would feel happy about being assaulted by an apparently delusional guy in a winter coat, he decides on Newspaper Dating instead.
Comics
- In a Marvel UK Transformers Generation 1 story, when Galvatron travels back in time to 1986, he asks this question of a passing human. The human answers before running off in terror.
- In The Mighty Thor #371, a time-travelling lawman appears out of thin air and asks a bystander "What's the date, citizen?" He has to ask a second time, less politely, before the bystander pulls himself together enough to reply.
Fanfiction
- In the Firefly / Doctor Who crossover fanfic The Man with No Name, the Doctor spends much of the story confused about where/when he is and eventually simply asks. It does nothing to help get the Serenity crew to think he isn't completely bonkers.
Films
Literature
- In the Discworld novel Night Watch, Vimes averts this — mostly because he doesn't know he time-traveled until later.
- Later in the story Dibbler (who is not a time traveller) asks him what year it is.
- The main character of the novel The Time Traveler's Wife time-travels involuntarily, and ends up disoriented in other times so often that friends and family close enough to know about his condition will sometimes tell him the year before he has a chance to ask.
- Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World. After traveling back through time about 33,000 years, Slippery Jim De Griz captures a man and asks him what year it is. He's told it's 1975.
- Happens in Connie Willis' novel Doomsday Book. Slightly inverted, because the character had purposely gone back in time, and had been in the past for several weeks in what she thought was 1320, but turned out to be 1348, when the Black Death reached England.
- A non-time travel example that may also be the Ur Example occurs in The Count of Monte Cristo: during his time in prison, Dantes has lost track of the time passed, and so when he escapes he needs to ask What Year Is This? to the sailors who pick him up from the sea.
- The Animorphs ask a French knight this question in Elfangor's Secret. He looks at them like they're mad before humoring them. Later, they get smarter and use the newspaper trick, but since Rachel had already morphed an elephant in front of them, subtlety was pretty much a moot point.
- Occurs and played with in Warhammer 40,000 Night Lords novel Lord of the Night. Commander Zso Sahaal crashes on an Imperial Hive World after being waylaid by the Eldar. He knows he's been gone for some time and is unwilling to risk exposure by seeking a public outlet. So, he kidnaps a man to tell him what year it is. The terrified man simply tells that the year is 986, making Sahall think he's been gone for 600 years. While pondering the implications, he gets a nagging afterthought and asks the man if he meant 31,986. Cue BSOD after the man tells him that the year is, in fact, 40,986.
- In Lest Darkness Fall, Martin Padway finds himself transported to Rome in 535 AD. He tries to ask people the date in his shaky Latin, and at first gets the year in the old Roman calendar then has to ask how many years since Christ was born to get the proper year.
- A version where it's not the year, but with the same "How could anyone not know that?" factor - Ebeneezer Scrooge asking an urchin what day it is. "Why, it's Christmas Day, sir!"
- In Robert E. Howard's "The Scarlet Citadel" Pelias asks Conan the Barbarian this, and realizes it's been ten years, which explains his lack of coherency.
- Inverted in Lawrence Block's Tanner on Ice, when Evan Tanner is perfectly sure of what year it is — 1972 — except that thanks to a Swedish agent (long story) who turned him into a Human Popsicle, he's wrong by a quarter of a century.
- The Eyre Affair: Thursday and Bowden stop a temporal rift by driving into it, and after re-emerging they ask mission control what year it is. Doubly subverted: not only does Chrono-Guard understand the question exactly (because dealing with temporal anomalies is their job), they are so jaded that they tell Thursday a ridiculously exaggerated date, just to mess with her head.
- Averted in book seven of The Pendragon Adventure. When Bobby asks passers-by on Quillan about things absolutely anyone would know, their response is to back away slowly.
Live Action TV
Video Games
- The Edutainment Game Amazon Trail II (in which you Time Travel by passing through "the blue mist") includes a version of this line in its Dialogue Trees. When asked this question, NPCs helpfully reply with the whole date. One can only assume they think you've been traveling through the rainforest for a long time.
- Some people you talk to aren't that helpful - for example, one native responds to the question with "the end of the rainy season".
- A recurring situation in the Infinity series:
- In Ever17, The Kid asks this not due to being a time traveler, but because he has amnesia. Of course, in some routes the person he asks lies to him, because even if he's not asking because he's a displaced time traveler doesn't mean he isn't one.
- In Remember11, Kokoro is told by Satoru that she is time-traveling, and asks this of people to confirm or disprove it. She gets conflicting results. The conflict is due to the fact that several of the characters are unknowingly time traveling (or have time-traveled), so the people she asks aren't necessarily all from the same time period
- This exact phrase is used by Nigel in The Lost Crown, because so much of Saxton's architecture, technology, and even its people seem to date from an earlier time. And not even the same time, at that.
- Final Fantasy XIII 2, in which the playable characters Serah and Noel travel throughout time, but the question often isn't unexpected, because people know that there are strange things going on with time and in some cases also know of the fact that they're time travelers. Serah, however, gives the exact line in a dream version of New Bodhum in The Void Beyond and only earns an insinuation that's she's gone loopy, because it's a fantasy world in which she never started a time travel journey.
- In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha As Portable: The Gears of Destiny, Vivio was Genre Savvy enough to ask this to an unusually young-looking Yuuno who seemed perplexed when Vivio called him Head Librarian, confirming her fears that she had somehow landed in a Time Travel story.
Web Animation
- In The Cloak
 , the disembodied head of Robert Mitchum uses this phrase, despite not actually having traveled through time.
Web Comics
Western Animation
Web Original
- One piece of 4chan copy pasta advice for Instant Seduction involves disappearing for a week, growing a beard, getting a tan(including wedding ring tan line), and being found "semi-conscious" in the target's house, naked and injured, demanding to know the answer to this question. Somehow, Coitus Ensues.
- Played straight when Team One in Suburban Knights released Chuck Jaffers from a magic book. When he asked what year it was, it turns out that he had been trapped in 30 years.
- Used in Nan Quest when it's discovered that people entered the hotel at vastly different times.
Real Life
- Real Life (sort of): Pretend To Be A Time Traveler Day (bottom of the page) got casual results to questions like this. The bystander may think you're crazy, but they'll still answer your questions.
- Back when people used to write checks (and dinosaurs roamed the earth) this kind of thing happened in early January.
- Huh? I wrote a check yesterday... what year is this again?
- Or when those TPS reports have to be faxed.
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