I second Mark Twan’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, follwed very close behind by L. Sprgue de Cmp’s classic Lest Darkness Fall, arguabl th best of its kind ver. It as recently been republished with David Drake’s To Bring the Light, which has the distinxcion of being the only time travel story I know of where someone from he past (circa 400 AD) gets sent even further into the past.
I also recomens Robert Silverburg’s Up the Line, which delves into Time Travel into the Byzantine Empire, James Hogan’s The Proteus Project, and Leo Frankowski’s novels. Robert L Forward’s Time Master is a time-travel novelk by a physicist who has looked into time travel. Also a guarded note about Michael Crichton’s Timeline.
I think the two Heinlein pieces are no longer than short stories. A novella has to be at least 15,000 words long.
One of the best recent time travel novels is John Kessel’s Corrupting Dr. Nice. The first section takes place in 1st century Jerusalem and layers modern time travelers over the lives of those who really lived there at that time and also over the lives of those who work for the time travel business and have been co-opted and corrupted by future ways. It’s as good an illustration of what time travel would do to a culture as anything in sf.
The rest of the book doesn’t quite live up to that, but there are a number of fun scenes concerning an apatosaur brought as a pet to suburban Connecticut.
Nobody mentioned The Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock. I have to go re-read it every couple of years. Time travel isn’t really a big part of the events of the plot, but did set up the situation.
I’ll of course second Connecticut Yankee and The Time Machine. (That last scene on the beach still shakes me up.)
Both of those Connie Willis books are great too. I just started To Say Nothing of the Dog, and would suggest the (non-time-travel) Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome if you like the boating scenes. Yes, that’s a spoiler!
If I Never Get Back by Daryl Brock which is about a guy who travels back to the 1890’s and end up playing with the Cinncinatti Reds of that time period and meets Samuel Clemens.
Very entertaining so rush on out and get it at your local bookstore or library.
It ended up at 12 novels. A fun read and you might really want to go and find the later books if that is the only reason you dropped the series and you were enjoying it up until then. Remember, we are talking time travel here.
Didn’t Ray Bradbury write a short story about an exhibit where you went back in time and were supposed stay within a certain path but some dude stepped on a bug (Butterfly?) and when he went back the alphabet was different? Isn’t that where butterfly effect came from? I can’t remember the story.
Not entirely true. It’s a sequel to the Time Machine by Stephen Baxter. It was reasonably good on it’s own, but it didn’t follow well from the Time Machine - the perspectives in the two are so different that it detracts a lot from the Time Ships IMO.
I’ll add yet another vote for ‘To Say Nothing of the Dog’
The Ray Bradbury story is The Sund of Thunder. I think that L. Sprague de Camp wrote the similarly-themed ** A Gun for Dinosaur** because he didn’t lik the way Bradbury andled time travel. Much, much later, de Camp wrote more stories using the same characters and published it as a book, Rivers of Time.
I am honored, Lynn.
I’ll get a copy of Millennium ASAP!
I also appreciate the list y’all provided, and I must say I’m looking forward to many winter nights curled up in bed and taking a trip backward in time!
Also looking forward to my re-read of Connecticut Yankee…!
Thanks for the reminder!
In addition to time travel stories I like alternate history stories. You know, what if something had happened differently, how would it affect history? My favorite author of this type of story was H. Beam Piper, who died over forty years ago. His Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen was booklength, most of the rest were short stories or novellas. The best short story was “He Walked Around the Horses.” It was based on the Charles Fort story about the British diplomat who disappeared in Germany early in the nineteenth century. If you know your history, the last line of the story will be very funny/ironic. Go and find it if you can.
Anybody else like Piper?
Here’s an obscure one I liked: Elleander Morning by some guy whose last name begins with a “Z” (my books aren’t yet unpacked after my recent move so I can’t double-check). It’s not a scienc-ey time travel book – more of a fantasy, I guess, and mixed with a lot of alternative history. Basically the woman in the title goes back in time to kill Hitler and stop WWII. But it’s a whole lot more complicated than that. The modern scenes set in a world where WWII didn’t take place are particularly interesting. Very good read.
No mention of Kevin Grimwood’s Replay? That’s kind of surprising. Although it may not be technically considered a time travel story in that the main character didn’t really have control over the time travel element in the story.
The aforementioned Pastwatch, Time and Again, From Time to Time, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court are all great reads as well.
I’d also recommended his book of non-fiction “Forgotten News,” in which he discusses things he picked up while doing research for Time and Again. Half of the book is about a notorious “Crime of the Century” that was played out in the pages of the newspapers of the day. He actually managed to find the house the murder took place in, looking remarkably the same considering it took place about 150 years before.
