Islands In The Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years and On the Oceans of Eternity by S.M. Stirling are quite good. The basic premise is that Alien Space Bats send the island of Nantucket and surrounding area back in time to 1250BC. Adventures abound.
Didn’t Andrew Zimmern eat them on an episode of “Bizarre Foods”?
Yep, yep , yep. I’ve read The Anubis Gates several times & it’s not only great writing, but great fun. I’ve often wondered if Stephen King was inspired by Power’s character Horrobin when he created Pennywise the Clown for the novel It.
Quoth Cal Meacham:
You’re not alone. I think that “All You Zombies” is a good story, and definitely worth a read, but “By his Bootstraps” is the absolute pinnacle of the genre.
Speaking of Cal, if you’re willing to extend the definition of “literature” to the ultra-micro-short-story, a good one is a sig line he used to use:
“Of course”, said my grandfather as he stepped from the time machine and drew his gun, “there’s no paradox if I kill you.”
And on movies, the best time-travel movie I’ve ever seen is 12 Monkeys, which really suffered from having a marketing team who had no idea how to pitch a great SF movie.
By his Bootstraps is a more complete (and earlier) examination, but All You Zombies is a little gem, time travel paradox pared down to the absolute minimum.
Time travel stories in general leave me cold. They are fine as little gimmicks, like deal with the devil stories, or as a way of combining characters from two times, but in general I don’t like do-overs and time travel not spawning off alternate universes will be an eternal do-over - until we get the situation at the end of Asimov’s The End of Eternity that is.
Seconded.
The Accidental Time Machine is a fun read. Flashforward (the book, not the TV series) is good too, except towards the end…(not a big spoiler) it gets a little too meta-physical/new-agey in a weird way.
Regarding time travel movies, there were two based on the works of Catherine L. Moore (with Henry Kuttner) that didn’t get a lot of publicity. In both cases, the short stories were extended, and they took the darker shading off both stories to make them (in my opinion) too damned happy and upbeat. But they’re not run-of-the-mill. One is The Last Mimzy (based on Mimsy were the Borogoves), which probably got more publicity. The other is Timescape (based on Vintage Season)
Yeah, I’d second this. It was a five star book up until the last 30 pages or so, but on balance I still think it was a four-star, even after the end (which almost felt like one of those “oh crap, I have no idea how to end this story” moments).
I’m not a seeker of time-travel stories in particular, but I like it when Heinlein follows the Long family around.
Ooh it’s nice to see a fellow fan of this fun little gem. Malcolm McDowell was an odd choice for bookish wimp H.G. Wells, at least at that time (not long after Caligula), but he really sold it. And David Warner seemed to be having a ball.
I really enjoy time travel stories especially when there are paradoxes to resolve, and when the writer manages to pull it off relatively believably. For example, watching the Back to the Future series unfold, and seeing all – or at least most – of the various threads get tied up together in the end. Heck, even Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban did a good job of this. Loved watching the action a second time and seeing everything from a new angle.
Speaking of Time After Time, recently I wrote a time travel romance where the heroine finds herself manipulated into going back in time to Victorian England, where she joins forces with a Holmesian detective to help solve a Jack-the-Ripper-esque series of murders … and, naturally, might end up one of the victims herself. Standard romance fare but the whole fish-out-of-water element (of a modern character stuck in the past, and/or vice versa) was a hoot to write.
That’s also a big element of my enjoyment of time travel stories: the inevitable adjustment period for the traveler, and the practical issues that result from not understanding the technology or culture of the time.
Jack Finney wrote two dandies - “Time and Again” and “From Time to Time.” These handled the time travel paradoxes about as well as they can be handled, and were good yarns to boot. He also wrote some lesser ones, such as “The Woodrow Wilson Dime”, but IMHO the two mentioned above were the best.
He also wrote “The Body Snatchers”, but that of course had nothing to do with time travel.
I prefer time-travel fiction that excludes any paradoxes, etc., and just gives you a fun romp putting the characters into a past or future milieu, whether that involves them just trying to survive, or trying to change things Connecticut-Yankee style.
I think you have it there. All You Zombies is one of those short stories without many wasted words. By His Bootstraps is great too, but not as succinct.
What does it mean to not believe the Grandfather Paradox? Does that mean he didn’t believe it’s possible to kill one’s own grandfather, or that he didn’t believe it’s impossible?
Quoth Voyager:
Asimov wrote The End of Eternity to prove once and for all that he could write time travel fiction. He failed. It’s not a time travel story; it’s a space travel story, just with the word “space” replaced with “time”, “planet” replaced with “century”, and “time” replaced with “metatime”.
This seems pretty harsh. It’s been a while since I read it, but to my recollection the plot turned on the possibility of changing the past in a way that would make the present impossible. That’s irreducibly time-travelaic stuff.
Most of my favourites have already been mentioned, except for Stephen Fry’s Making History.
Are there any convenient ways to dig up old short stories like the one mentioned here? Do you have to, for instance, buy a complete collection of Heinlein’s short storie to find “By His Bootstraps” or is it available online?
You certainly don’t need to get a complete collection; it’s available in the collections The Menace from Earth, Adventures in Time and Space, and a few others. It is probably also possible to find the complete text online, but since I suspect that any such online find would be illegal, and because I respect Heinlein too much for that, I’m not going to be the one to look for it.