Recommend some time travel novels (potential spoilers)

Cafe Society
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I will enthusiastically, heartily second Heinlein’s “By his own bootstraps”. It is without question the best-written piece of time-travel fiction ever written. Well, at least, ever written up to now; I can’t speak for future works.

Heinlein also did a good job with time travel in The Door into Summer, Time Enough for Love, and “All You Zombies”. Be careful, though: He also did a lot of bad time travel stories. Don’t bother with The Number of the Beast, The Cat who Walked through Walls, or To Sail Beyond the Sunset unless you’re a hardcore Heinlein fan.

Asimov wrote The End of Eternity to prove that he could write good time-travel stories, too. He failed miserably. The best time travel story Asimov wrote was the short “The Red Queen’s Race”.

I haven’t read Crichton’s Timeline, but he tends to research a subject just enough to sound plausible, but not enough to actually be right. What I’ve heard of Timeline seems to confirm this.

Time travel is rather incidental in Carl Sagan’s Contact, but it was a very good book and well worth the reading.

Piers Anthony’s Bearing an Hourglass didn’t do a particularly good job on the time travel front, but it makes for a fun read. I would recommend that you read the series in order, though, starting with On a Pale Horse

The earliest example of time travel was Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but in neither of those is the mechanism scientific.

Finally, any story entailing reliable prophecy will wncounter the same peculiar situations as does time travel. The best modern example is probably Heinlein’s “Lifeline”, but the ancient Greeks were also fairly adept at the genre.

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How could you not like that book? You’re the star… :smiley:

Zev Steinhardt

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If time Dialation type of travel counts, Steven Baxter’s Manifold: Space is a good read. So is Poul Anderson’s Boat of a Million Years. (though this is about Immortals more than Time Dialation) Another one I should mention that follows this Dialation theme would be Larry Niven’s A World Out Of Time.

Closer to the mark of time travel, though not quite hard sci-fi is Ben Bova’s Orion. In which our hero travels backwards in time, from the future to the dawn of mankind to fight an age old enemy bent on our destruction. Certainly entertaining.

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Is Roger MacBride Allen ever going to publish a second novel in The Depths of Time series?

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Y’all wanna get yourself a copy of the “Encyclopedia of Science Fiction”, a huge, amazingly researched, and quite well written book. Search on the topic of “time travel” and be prepared to spend some quality moments with amazon.com hunting down books that sound too tantalizing to miss.

My first time travel story was “The Time Traders” by Andre Norton. Basic stuff, but fun.

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I have to second The Technicolor Time Machine - Tons of fun, vintage Harry Harrison with a final plot kicker I just love.

Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps (a short story) is the first time-loop paradox story.

Keith Laumer’s The Great Time Machine Hoax is light and very entertaining.

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If we can include short stories, Ray Bradbury’s “The Toynbee Convector” has an entertaining twist in it.

Poul Anderson’s novel There Will Be Time was about people born with the ability to travel through time. He also wrote The Dancer from Atlantis, in which a 20th century man, a medieval Russian, a Hun and a woman from the distant past are all swept together; it’s actually very poignant.

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Oh – I forgot. Isaac Asimov did write what I think is a great time-travel story: “The Ugly Little Boy”. I think that’s one of the stories that he and Robert Silverberg expanded into a novel in the 1980’s; haven’t read the novel, but the story is unforgettable.