The Real World by Steven Utley

"The Real World" is a 2000 science fiction short story by Steven Utley. It is about a scientist who has the distinguished honor of being the first person to travel back in time using a recently discovered time funnel. The question is: did he come back to the same world he left? Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell: The story is about Ivan, a pedologist who is going to visit his brother in sunny California. He arrives to find his niece all grown up and learns that his brother, a big shot Hollywood screen writer, is going to take him to a lavish birthday party for some famous actor. Along the way we discover that actors are being replaced by computer generated movie stars and that Ivan's claim to fame, being the first person through an anomalous time tunnel, isn't even recognized as the major scientific achievement it was. Amidst all this Ivan starts to wonder about this world he supposedly returned to. Nothing moved along the whole beach, nothing except the curling waves and the tangles…