Please recommend some worthwhile time travel fiction

Cafe Society
41

Seconding the recommendations of Heinlein (especially The Door Into Summer) and Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself – which was written specifically to contrdict Heinlein’s deterministic theory of time. Also intriguing, though dated: H. Beam Piper’s “Paratime” stories, including Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen.

Not everybody’s cup of tea, but something that was strongly recommended to me by a gay friend, a fellow SF fan who knew I had no issues with gay people and gay-oriented fiction, and which I found fascinating reading. Do you want to try a bit of online fiction that – well, know what a “Mary Sue” is? The author’s idealization of herself, or himself, injected as a character. This is one of them, but just as some genre fiction works transcend the limitations of their genre, this one rises above the horrendousness of the typical Mary Sue story by the author’s ruthless self-honesty in the sequelae.

The story is Dan Kirk’s Do Over series. The set-up: Down-on-his-luck 35-year-old gay ex-Navy veteran jumps at the chance to make $10,000 by participating in a scientific experiment – which turns out to be, they’ll inject him with some (unspecified) chemicals and scan his brain with a MRI machine – and then transmit his consciousness back in time where he can observe his own past for 20 minutes. Only he discovers he’s stuck there, 35-year-old man with memories up through 2004, in his 12-year-old body in 1981. And far from being an observer, he can act – and discovers he can make some changes

Book One, “Do Over”, is the “Mary Sue” story – but is quite well done. Book Two, “Do Over Redux,” posits he needs to repeat the process – and things go disastrously wrong. Well, if at first you don’t succeed… And “Do Over Redux” ends with what I think is the most inevitable, satisfying conclusion I’ve ever read.

Book Three, “Doing It Right”, is fluff by comparison, but fun. And it makes the important point that even in an idealized world, there are sometimes tough – and costly – moral choices to make. And Book Four, “Let’s Do It,” examines the same general plotline-comple from a different perspective.

Like I said, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea – but I found it a refreshing variation on the concept of time travel and alternate universes.

42

Thank you for your kind review.

43

“A Gun for Dinosaur” by L.Sprague DeCamp.

44

Crap. I got Huxley in my head when I was talking about Brave New World with someone. I stand corrected.

45

I’m suprised Michael Crichton’s Timeline hasn’t been mentioned.

It’s quite an entertaining book. I think its one of Crichton’s best, though many people dislike as well.

I think it’s worth a try.

Oh, and do skip the movie it’s complete utter crap.

46

You beat me to it. Not time travel per se, but definitely worth reading.

Another not-quite-time-travel is Clarke’s The Light of Other Days. It’s worth reading even if it is probably just his nameplate on Baxter’s book.

47

Wasn’t there another, recent time travel thread?
Anyway
I want to second or third or whatever all the Connie Willis stuff, as well as the Time Traveler’s Wife, Replay, The Little Book, and Time and Again.
I also enjoy the Diana Gabaldon Outlander books, but sometimes, for me, the lovey-dovey stuff gets in the way of the story.

48

I’m surprised I get to be the first one to mention Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch. It’s a late entry in the Discworld series and I don’t know that someone who hasn’t read at least some of the others will be able to fully appreciate it, but I remember seeing at least one SDMB poster say that Night Watch was the first Discworld book he ever read and that he loved it.

Night Watch is one of the darker entries in the Discworld series, and has few fantastic elements other than the time travel. The way time travel was handled in the book was very clever and different from most other time travel fiction I’ve read, although I’d say there are some similarities to The Anubis Gates.

Basic plot: Hardboiled police commander Sam Vimes, who is transported back in time 30 years while in pursuit of a notorious criminal. Matters are further complicated by the fact that (as Vimes well remembers) a bloody rebellion against the city’s leader is about to break out. Vimes the time traveler soon finds himself serving as mentor to a novice watchman named Sam…himself as a teenager. Vimes must try to teach his younger self everything he knows while keeping history on track through the revolution and hunting down the escaped killer.

49

Yes, it was posted three weeks from now.

50

The first entry in post #35, along with its much-later sequels.

51

Let it be known that this post should earn Paul many accolades, and splendiferous titles when Fabulous Creature’s new regime comes to pass.
It seems that some wombat has snuck in and edited the code on the smilies. I can’t make the big grin.

52

Andre Norton wrote a few books about time travel:

The Defiant Agents
Here Abide Monsters
Key Out Of Time
The Crossroads Of Time
Quest Crosstime

Some short stories that come to mind:

Tolliver’s Travels, by Frank Fenton and Joseph Petracca.
Flight to Forever, by Poul Anderson.
A Little Something for Us Tempunauts, by Phillip K. Dick. (he also wrote a book called Martian Time Slip)
The Man who Evolved, by Edmond Hamilton.
The Jameson Satellite, by Neil R. Jones.
We Remember Babylon, by Ian Watson.
The Picture Man, by John Damas.
Doing Lennon, by Gregory Benford.
The World of the Red Sun, by Clifford D. Simak.
Jeffty is 5, by Harlan Ellison.
Sailing To Byzantium, by Robert Silverberg.

Some of these may be hard to find; it appears that I have been in a time warp when it comes to reading current fiction. :slight_smile:

53

I’m probably in the minority here - and its been a long time since I read it - but I really enjoyed Roger Zelazny’s Roadmarks.

54

I just want to thank you for recommending this. I just read the first book and loved it, although my eyes glossed over during some of the detailed descriptions of military things. I couldn’t stop reading, and found it somewhat inspirational as well. I’m a few chapters into the second book now and can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

55

If you know this book is about time travel it’s kind of a minor spoiler.

But it’s still pretty damn good.

Rant, by Chuck Palahniuk

But I thought it had one of the coolerst time travel theroies I had read in a long time. Maybe it’s not original, I don’t read a lot of Time-Travel fiction, so I don’t know. But I really enjoyed it.