Good time-travel fiction?

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…

… next thing you know it’s raining doughnuts.

Give Brian Aldiss’ Frankenstein Unbound a shot. You might enjoy it.

Any votes for H. Beam Piper’s Paratime short stories?

CMC fnord!

The Ivanhoe Gambit 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.

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.

John Varley recently wrote another time travel novel, Mammoth. It’s just as good as Millenium.

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. :smiley:

You beat me to it. Absolutely wonderful book, one of RAH’s best.

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.

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.

Oh, evidently you don’t really need any of these books, as the Google Ads have new and used time travel machines for sale.

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.

Gore Vidal’s Live from Gogoltha is the nastiest time travel satire ever written.

Yes, of course it’s offensive.

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).
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[QUOTE=Happy Clam]

Gah! Lousy coding.

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.

Andre Norton’s Time Traders. Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity.

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.

I will nth the recommendations for Willis and Benford, and nominate Summer of Love 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.