Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book.
I’ve read some quibbles with it (mainly revolving around cell phones and how she should have predicted their widespread use in her future world) but I thought it was a splendid, moving book.
It’s about a very recognizable near-future England in which grad students in history are sent back to do practical exams in the time period they have chosen to specialize in. It’s realistic, although not very scientifically plausible AFAIK, so maybe not up your alley.
L. Sprague de Canmp’s The Glory that Was, about Periclean Greece.
What?
Oh, yeah, and also his “A Gun for Aristotle”.
And Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man (both short story and book). Guy goes back in time to find Jesus Christ. Bound to be controversial, if nothing else.
Thanks for all the suggestions - I’ll check them out in the library / on Amazon.
I have read “Lightning” (guilty pleasure) and read & seen “Timeline”.
[QUOTE=sciguy]
Heinlein’s “Door into summer” has a pretty well-done time travel plot halfway through it. Or through the whole book, if you count frozen hibernation as one-way time travel.
That guy’s relationship with that little girl made me uneasy.It wrecked the book for me,actually
For a mroe humorous looks, there’s Harry Harrison’s The Technicolor Time Machine. The main character owns a near bankrupt mvie studio. He has a weekend to make a picture or his backers will leave and he’ll be bankrupt. The good news is that his scientist friend has invented time travel, so he takes and entire film crew back in time to film the vikings discovering America.
Contains one of my favorite things in time travel stories. An object that exists only in a closed loop in time and is never actually created.
“Dinosaur Beach” by Keith Laumer (1971)
“A Bridge of Years” - Robert Charles Wilson
A man discovers a “time tunnel” under his 1989 Seattle home that connects to 1962 New York.
Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg is pretty good.
And another strong recommendation for “By his Bootstraps” and “All you Zombies” by Heinlein.
You know what.
Check out the short story “The Sands of Time” by, if I recall, P. Schuyler Miller (may be wrong about that). Hokey by modern standards, but I found it moving when I was a kid.
Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line is one of the few novels that’s actually about time travel rather than just using time travel as a plot device.
Steven Baxter’s Timelike Infinity and The Ring both involve time travel based upon hard science concepts. (Well, at least as hard as superstring “theory” allows.) I believe the short story compendium, Vacuum Diagrams also has a couple of stories involving time travel. (I’ll save you the irritation of recommending his Manifold: ____ novels.) Baxter’s The Time Ships is an “approved” sequel to H. G. Wells The Time Machine, so the technology and base setting is Victorian, not contemporary, but very entertaining nonetheless.
While it’s not hard SF, one of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat novels involves a very amusing time travel story (DiGriz has to go back to Napoleonic Europe to pursue a master criminal), including a “Time Corps” that intrudes part way into the story to protest and police the manipulation of the time stream in the same way that the Special Corps regulates crime in the galaxy. Lamentedly, all of my SSR books mysteriously disappeared a few moves ago. Well worth the read, though.
Niven has written several time travel stories, as indicated previously, including “Wrong Way Street”, “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation”, and “Singularities Make Me Nervous” from Convergent Series (the middle one being the most amusing).
There are plenty of SF anthologies that deal specifically with time travel. Check out the local library.
Stranger
There’s a special name for that kind of object isn’t there? What was it again?
One of the many compilation volumes of Isaac Asimov called “Robot Visions” has a specially written story that combines robots with time travel, a winning combination.
I’m making my first post to give a hearty second to “The Anubis Gates” & to point out that it is by Tim Powers.
Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick was pretty good. It’s initially set in the present, or very near future.
The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer was great fun! It’s a short novel and has recently been collected into a collection of his called The Lighter Side…
While not dealing with mechanized time travel, nor time travel per se, I recommend Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis.
It is a story told in reverse. The protagonist dies, then moments later feels better, then progresses towards his birth. Dialogs end with start with “Goodbye” and end with “Hello.” Factories clean the skies, and the description of going to the bathroom made me wince.
While not about someone stepping into a time machine, it has the elements that make time travel stories enjoyable - and while the reverse-time-direction-device is contrived it is very well contrived and provides a fresh perspective on an oft done topic.