A while back I read and enjoyed Stephen King’s 11/22/63, which is all about time travelling back to stop the Kennedy assassination. It was pretty good and unlike most King stories, didn’t end with a giant spider.
What I enjoyed most about it was the time travel and all the interesting questions and problems that arose. Can you recommend another novel that centers on time travel? (I read All Clear by Connie Willis, but didn’t particularly enjoy it. The time travel aspect seemed secondary to the rest of the story.)
I highly recommend “The Anubis Gates” by Tim Powers, which artfully blends magic & technology and has time travel back to the 19th Century. Excellent stuff.
Well there’s always **The Time Machine **by HG Wells. Really great and an easy read.
**Replay **is an excellent book about a guy who can go back to a certain time - where he can try different approaches to modify the future. Sounds like Groundhog Day, the movie, but it is very different and very good.
Sam:
They were with us before Romeo & Juliet. And long after too. Because they’re forever around. Or so both claim, carolling gleefully:
We’re allways sixteen.
Sam & Hailey, powered by an ever-rotating fleet of cars, from Model T to Lincoln Continental, career from the Civil War to the Cold War, barrelling down through the Appalachians, up the Mississippi River, across the Badlands, finally cutting a nation in half as they try to outrace History itself.
By turns beguiling and gripping, finally worldwrecking, Only Revolutions is unlike anything ever published before, a remarkable feat of heart and intellect, moving us with the journey of two kids, perpetually of summer, perpetually sixteen, who give up everything except each other.
Hailey:
They were with us before Tristan & Isolde. And long after too. Because they’re forever around. Or so both claim, gleefully carolling:
We’re allways sixteen.
Hailey & Sam, powered by an ever-rotating fleet of cars, from Shelby Mustang to Sumover Linx, careen from the Civil Rights Movement to the Iraq War, tearing down to New Orleans, up the Mississippi River, across Montana, finally cutting a nation in half as they try to outrace History itself.
By turns enticing and exhilarating, finally breathtaking, Only Revolutions is unlike anything ever conceived before, a remarkable feat of heart and intellect, moving us with the journey of two kids, perpetually of summer, perpetually sixteen, who give up everything except each other.
Since you like details and implications, you might enjoy the Conrad Stargard series, about a 20th century engineer who finds himself in 13th century Poland, and begins modernizing that society.
A Wrinkle In Time.
To quote from Wikipedia: “A Wrinkle in Time is a science fantasy[1] novel by Madeleine L’Engle, first published in 1962.[2] The story revolves around a young girl whose father, a government scientist, has gone missing after working on a mysterious project called a tesseract. The book won a Newbery Medal, Sequoyah Book Award, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award.[3] It is the first in L’Engle’s series of books about the Murry and O’Keefe families.”
Highly recommended – Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. Archaeologist finds himself in ancient Rome at the time of the Fall of the Empire. He learns to support himself first, then tries to prevent the Hall.
de Camp also wrote other time travel short stories. Aristotle and the Gun has a physicist from Brookhaven going back in time to try to convince Arisatotle to be more practical. A Gun for Dinosaur was his response to Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. He eventually wrote a whole series of time travel stories using the same characters, collcgted as Rivers of Time
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain – the original time-travel novel, and still worthwhile.
James Hogan’s The Proteus Operation takes that classic idea, time travellers trying to change the outcome of WWII, and does a deceny job of it. It’s also the only time travel novel I know of where the author got permission from surviving people depicted in bhis novel to use them as characters.
For that matter, Harry Turtlefove’s Guns of the South is an excellent trying-to-chyange-the-outcome-of-the-Civil-War novel.
Another vote for Replay, as well. It’s the first book where, as soon as I read the last page, I immediately flipped back to the first page and started reading the book all over again.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read it, but if memory serves, A Wrinkle In Time is not really a time-travel novel—although its later sequel, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, is.