Do books like Replay by Ken Grimwood (already mentioned in this thread) count? It’s an example of internal time travel. That’s when someone suddenly finds themselves back in their own body of several years before, but they keep the memory of the times that they have already experienced.
If you’ve never seen the original kids show Land of the Lost it could actually qualify. It was way ahead of its time and could easily have been tweaked into adult fare. “Marshall, Will and Holly, on a routine expedition” are transported into a parallel universe, how exactly they get there not being particularly important (though it has to do with “the greatest earthquake ever known”). Since it’s a self contained universe it’s not exactly time travel, but dinosaurs and nascently sentient hominids that could be from Earth’s past are there as well as a highly evolved reptile-human and his devolved descendants and energy beings and even a Confederate soldier who was also transported there all co-exist, though not peacefully, and amidst it all the vestiges of the lost great intelligence that created the place.
Had they gone for a modern special effects updating for adults instead of the Will Ferrell comedy abortion it could have been a sci-fi/fantasy classic.
The movie Time After Time, with Jack the Ripper and H G Wells going to 1970’s San Francisco in Wells’s time machine.
“Lt. Gulliver Jones” by Edwin Lester Arnold, in which the protagonist rides a flying carpet that has crash-landed on Earth (killing the hapless Martian flyer) back to Mars. This is possibly the inspiration for Burroughs “John Carter of Mars” series.
Listen up you primitive screw-heads! 24 posts before someone mentions Army of Darkness?
Also **Black Knight **(film) starring Martin Lawrence.
He also went back in time and became his own grandfather!
“The Man Who Came Early” by Poul Anderson The Man Who Came Early - Wikipedia
Nah, it only took 9.
Harry Turtledove does this a lot eh? There’s also Household Gods, a lawyer sent back to ancient Rome to inhabit the body of one of her ancestors.
There was an episode that parodied the concept the Disney Channel show Dave the Barbarian. The guy accidentally winds up in the past, but also has a bit of technology with him.
The parody is that he tries to set himself up as a god, but no one believes him. Either he can’t get the stuff to work, it’s viewed as useless, or there’s an old-time equivalent.
“Behold the Man” by Michael Moorcock.
The Country of the Blind, by H.G. Wells sort of turns this genre on its head. A sighted guy winds up in an isolated culture (in South America somewhere) where everybody is blind. He thinks he will be able to become their king, but fails, and is frustrated when none of them will take his accounts of stuff he can see seriously.
There are a number of books that involve time-traveling “safaris” with the past as a tourist attraction.
“Vintage Season,” by C. L. Moore is an early version of this. Robert Silverberg wrote a sequel novella and they were published together as a Tor Double as In Another Country/Vintage Season. Silverberg is also the author of the classic Up the Line, which is a great romp through several historic pasts. John Kessel’s Corrupting Dr. Nice is a dark humor version.
And this documentary. The names were changed to protect the originals, of course.
There’s the 60s TV show It’s About Time
There is the Wizardty series by Rick Cook - software developers use programming to cast spells.
Brian
I feel we’re drifting a little out of the genre. Time travel is often involved in these books but they’re not regular time travel stories. They’re more about people who had no intention of traveling through time (or even awareness that time travel was possible). I’m looking more for stories where the characters get stranded in time.
Apart from the 1632 series by Eric Flint that’s already been mentioned, there’s his Timespike, which is separate but related, in which an entire high security prison (among other people and things) ends up back in prehistoric America…
Or James F. David wrote Thunder of Time, in which whole areas of the earth’s surface swap places with earlier eras so that there’s a patchwork effect. All sorts of prehistoric eras are now represented in the present time and their displaced current time areas are scattered all across prehistory, back to before the age of the dinosaurs! The plotlines follow both people stranded back in time, and people still in the present exploring the ‘new’ areas that have appeared (complete with dinos, etc.)
Sounds kind of similar to The Flying Sorcerers by David Gerrold and Larry Niven, although that was a space traveler stuck on a primitive planet.
Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” sort of belongs to this genre. A guy is transported in time from more or less the present day to a future where everyone (especially the women!) are beautiful and compliant, and becomes their ruler, with, in effect, a harem of beautiful and willing slaves, under the name “Diktor.” He does not have much difficulty in establishing his dominance, though, because no-one in the future seems to have any will of their own, and his own future self helps him set things up. The main interest of the story (apart from the blatant wish-fulfillment aspects, as so common in Heinlein) lies in the temporal paradoxes through which the hero somehow brings about his own travel through time using a time machine that is yet to be invented.
"**The High Crusade **by Poul Anderson is similar in substance: a group of knights heading off to the Hundred Years War are attacked by advanced aliens and manage to defeat them, after which they take the spaceship to fight against the alien empire. "
Sounds like **Ranks Of Bronze **by David Drake, except with a Roman Legion, and they’re press-ganged by aliens.
Both Marvel and Dc Comics have done the stranded in time idea, with Captain America and Batman, respectively. Since it’s the comics, they both got better.
David Weber’s **Heirs Of Empire **has a somewhat similar concept: Several characters from an extremely high tech society spend most of the book stranded on a primitive planet (muskets and pikes) and wind up sparking a religious war.
As far as getting stranded in the past, how about Back To The Future, where the protagonist introduces Rock and Roll and skateboards?
As far as getting stranded in the future and not knowing how (until the final scene), how about Planet Of The Apes?
And, IIRC, contains one of my favorite exchanges:
“Are you a magician?”
“No, mechanic. On this world it’s the same thing.”
(might be “engineer” rather than “mechanic”)