# Good time-travel fiction? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 16, 2006, 12:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916 "2006-06-16T12:39:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2006, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/41 "2006-06-16T22:49:04Z")
That’s “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury. The dinosaur hunters are only allowed to shoot a dinosaur seconds before it would have died anyway of natural causes. Except one guy gets scared and leaves the path, steps on a butterfly, and… ---
**Author:** ![NicePete](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ee7513/32.png) [@NicePete](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NicePete)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/42 "2006-06-17T03:35:30Z")
[QUOTE=Lemur866] That’s “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury. The dinosaur hunters are only allowed to shoot a dinosaur seconds before it would have died anyway of natural causes. Except one guy gets scared and leaves the path, steps on a butterfly, and… [/QUOTE] … next thing you know it’s raining doughnuts. ---
**Author:** ![blondebear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blondebear/32/1022_2.png) [@blondebear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blondebear)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/43 "2006-06-17T05:32:19Z")
Give Brian Aldiss’ [Frankenstein Unbound](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0755100697/sr=8-2/qid=1150522243/ref=pd_bbs_2/102-8067040-0991313?%5Fencoding=UTF8) a shot. You might enjoy it. ---
**Author:** ![crowmanyclouds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crowmanyclouds/32/19884_2.png) [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/44 "2006-06-17T05:52:28Z")
Any votes for H. Beam Piper’s [Paratime](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beam_Piper#Paratime) short stories? CMC fnord! ---
**Author:** ![Tuckerfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/45 "2006-06-17T06:38:49Z")
[_The Ivanhoe Gambit_](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441377653/103-7863073-5998205?v=glance&n=283155) by Simon Hawke is a light, frothy souffle of a read. In the book, future societies settle conflicts by sending soldiers back into the past to fight, the side with the most survivors wins. The book follows the adventures of Lucas Priest as he’s sent back in time, not to fight a war, but to go after rouge soldiers, Priest and his team must assume the identities of various figures in England (Robin Hood to name but one). It’s the first in about a seven book (or so) series. The first several are enjoyable, but the later ones not so good. ---
**Author:** ![Dervish\_Jones](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e274bd/32.png) [@Dervish\_Jones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dervish_Jones)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 9:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/46 "2006-06-17T09:44:21Z")
_Kindred_ by Octavia Butler is about a young black woman who is pulled back to the 1850s (?) on several occasions to save her white ancestor from dying. She tries in vain to help him become a decent human being. ---
**Author:** ![Bill\_Door](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/50afbb/32.png) [@Bill\_Door](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bill_Door)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 11:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/47 "2006-06-17T11:47:25Z")
John Varley recently wrote another time travel novel, Mammoth. It’s just as good as Millenium. ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 12:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/48 "2006-06-17T12:02:38Z")
[QUOTE=Turek] As do I. [/QUOTE] No, having read them both, I place _Zombies_ marginally ahead, if only for the sheer brain-strain of… the same character being his own father, his own mother, and the person who takes his father back in time to meet his mother and then his infant self back in time to grow up and become his mother. :eek: Harry Harrison’s _Rebel in Time_ has the eponymous character going back in time to deliver a Sten gun and plans for more of the same to the Confederacy, this being a devastating weapon that the technology of the time could have manufactured had it known how, and the hero travelling back to stop him. And then there’s _The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World_, in which pretty much the entire plot, including the initial piece of time travelling, turns out to be Slippery Jim undoing the mischief he himself has perpetrated in another version of the timeline. Lightweight but funny was the Calvin & Hobbes story where Calvin, unwilling to do his own homework at 6:30, goes forward in time to 8:30 when it will have been done, only to find that it hasn’t, so the two Calvins jump to 7:30 to make _that_ version of Calvin do it in time to be collected at 8:30. Fortunately, while all this is going on, the 6:30 Hobbes and 8:30 Hobbes collaborate to write the story of Calvin’s time-jumping lunacy, and all is saved… except that Calvin doesn’t know what the story is about until he reads it before the entire class the next day. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Clothahump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/51bf81/32.png) [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/49 "2006-06-17T13:03:23Z")
[QUOTE=Sparrow] I can’t believe two people already have cited Heinlein and not mentioned “Door into Summer”! [/QUOTE] You beat me to it. Absolutely wonderful book, one of RAH’s best. ---
**Author:** ![FilmGeek](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/b19c9b/32.png) [@FilmGeek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FilmGeek)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/50 "2006-06-17T13:50:18Z")
**The Time Ships** by Stephen Baxter. This is my favorite time-travel book, followed closely by **The Time Traveller’s Wife** which was mentioned above. **Time’s Eye** and it’s sequel by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter. The sequel just hit paperback. ---
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/51 "2006-06-17T14:52:23Z")
Popping back in to **really** recommend A Shortcut in Time by Charles Dickinson. I’m about halfway through. The main character has had a couple of minor time bumps – 15 minutes, nothing major for him – but a teenage girl from 1908 is in his world, and he’s trying to help her get back. This is my third Dickinson, and I love his somewhat prickly characters. They’re not oddball or quirky, but they never do or say what I think they’re going to do or say. ---
**Author:** ![Zsofia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/7bcc69/32.png) [@Zsofia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zsofia)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/52 "2006-06-17T16:12:02Z")
Oh, evidently you don’t really need any of these books, as the Google Ads have new and used time travel machines for sale. ---
**Author:** ![Lissla\_Lissar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8491ac/32.png) [@Lissla\_Lissar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lissla_Lissar)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/53 "2006-06-17T17:17:29Z")
_The Time-Traveler’s Wife_ is the only book I’ve ever read about the dangers of inadvertent time travelling, time travel as a disease like epilepsy. It’s very interesting. I third Connie Willis. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/54 "2006-06-17T18:51:24Z")
Gore Vidal’s [Live from Gogoltha](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140231196/sr=8-1/qid=1150570066/ref=sr_1_1/002-0114305-2424877?%5Fencoding=UTF8) is the nastiest time travel satire ever written. > **[Answers - The Most Trusted Place for Answering Life's Questions](https://www.answers.com/redirectSearch?query=gore-vidal)** > > Answers is the place to go to get the answers you need and to ask the questions you want > [@](#): > > Networks compete to broadcast the Crucifixion during sweeps, and representatives from various religious denominations scramble to take charge of the media event. Yes, of course it’s offensive. ---
**Author:** ![Happy\_Clam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3bc359/32.png) [@Happy\_Clam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Happy_Clam)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/55 "2006-06-17T22:32:59Z")
[QUOTE=CalMeacham] **Happy Clam** , Niven’s recent bopok **Rainbow Mars** is part of the same series as the stories in **Flight of the Horse** (the volume actually includes several, if not all, of the stories. The main story has the heroes encountering all the fictional Martians that have been written (kinda like the opening chapter of the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), but the real center of the story involves …Trees that grow to be big enough to form natural “space elevators”. The problem is that they suck up all a planet’s water and evaporate it into space, which is why Mars is so dry. On the other hand, they do form the basis for “Jack in the Beanstalk” and other random literature. (And nothin’ to do with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red/Green/Blue Mars series.) [/QUOTE] **Cal** , love, thanks for the thought, but I did post: in the novel based in the same universe [Rainbow Mars] they travel to an amalglam of the different versions of Mars dreamed up by E. R. Burroughs, H.G. Wells and a couple of others). [/QUOTE] [QUOTE=Happy Clam] ---
**Author:** ![Happy\_Clam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3bc359/32.png) [@Happy\_Clam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Happy_Clam)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2006, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/56 "2006-06-17T22:34:52Z")
Gah! Lousy coding. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2006, 6:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/57 "2006-06-18T06:34:48Z")
**Roadmarks** , by Roger Zelazny. A strange, fascinating book (actually more of a novella - Zelazny liked to keep them short) about a man who makes his living travelling through time… in a pickup truck. Apparently, there’s a road which very few people can find that winds through time, with sideroads and offramps into various alternate pasts and futures. The story - which is non-linear, of course- involves some of the very strange denziens of this road, one of whom is trying smuggle guns to the Greeks before the battle of Marathon. Also featured are highway patrolmen, renegade Vietman vets, ninjas, alien robots, dragons and sentient poetry books. A fun read, if you don’t examine the mechanics too closely. Zelazny was never all that interested in the nuts-and-bolts of SF. ---
**Author:** ![Grimpen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/82dd89/32.png) [@Grimpen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grimpen)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2006, 11:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/58 "2006-06-18T11:27:29Z")
Andre Norton’s **Time Traders.** Isaac Asimov’s **The End of Eternity.** ---
**Author:** ![Caprese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a9a28c/32.png) [@Caprese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Caprese)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2006, 11:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/59 "2006-06-18T11:43:49Z")
I’ll second **Roadmarks** , third **The Time Traveler’s Wife** and **Jack Finney,** and fourth the works of **Connie Willis**. I will add: Time Out of Mind by John Maxim: murder, deceit and snow in 1880’s NYC. and: The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser Time travel (and body exchange), Boulder, Colorado. The first part of the story is more satisfying than the latter, but still worthwhile reading. ---
**Author:** ![plankter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/7ba0ec/32.png) [@plankter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/plankter)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2006, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916/60 "2006-06-18T16:08:12Z")
I will _n_th the recommendations for Willis and Benford, and nominate [Summer of Love](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553572415/qid=1150645677/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/103-5208614-7291069?s=books&v=glance&n=283155) by Lisa Mason. The premise will IMHO either appeal instantly or turn you off; I loved her memorable characters and the setting, although I don’t much care for the “I’m my own Grampa” closed-loop dealie in time travel plots. It’s out of print but worth a search. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/good-time-travel-fiction/360916.md?page=4)