Okay, this weekend I had the opportunity to read “The Man Who Folded Himself”, and it was a great quick read. I’ve also read H.G. Well’s book and “A Wrinkle in Time”.
So I’m on a sci-fi time travel/multiverse kick lately and I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions for good books along this line. If anyone has any suggestions for books of this nature (or even very well done sci-fi books), please suggest them to me.
Thanks,
Haven’t read either of the books you mentioned, but I enjoyed “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” IMO, it was a literary version of “Memento” where your brain hurts trying to put the pieces together.
Heinlein novel: The Door Into Summer
Heinlein short story: By His Bootstraps
I’ve been working my way through The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century and I highly recommend it. Full of big name authors - Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K Le Guin, etc. There’s a lot of early sci-fi time travel stories included, which are an interesting contrast to some of the more modern ones.
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. Deals with sending a researcher back in time to the England of the 1300s at the height of the Black Plague. It’s pretty engrossing - at least I found it so.
We did a time travel cycle for my bookclub. Time Travelers Wife, To Say Nothing of the Dog and The Eyre Affair. Brainiac4 will point out that The Eyre Affair isn’t much of a time travel book, though there is time travel in it. All were really good books.
Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny is pretty fun. It’s a road through time; you can find it if you know where to look. Different exits take you to alternate histories and 1 mile = 1 year.
The protagonist, Red, travels the road in a Ford pickup looking for the exit to the timeline where the Greeks won at Marathon.
He’s always thought the Greeks should have won at Marathon.
If it’s something bleak you’re looking for, I’d recommend The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, a novella by paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson. The story of this man displaced into the Cretaceous is made known in the 23rd century because his stone-tablet diary is found in some very old strata.
Actually I have the Time Traveler’s Wife, but I haven’t read it. I lent it to my mother and she’s been reading it…
Hmm…
The problem with asking for time travel books is that you’re going to get a very varied range of stories. I’ve yet to read The Time Traveler’s Wife, but it certainly sounds interesting - but that seems to be more of a romance novel, disjointed in time. Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book is more about human reactions to epidemics, than time travel, from where I’m sitting. Her To Say Nothing of the Dog, is more a send up of Late Edwardian manners than anything else - great fun, but while time travel is central to the story, it’s not really about time travel. Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South is an alternate history of the US Civil War, aided by time travelers, but it’s really looking at the causes and effects of the Civil War, not time travel.
Then there’s S.M. Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time where modern day Nantucket, and the USCG’s Eagle, are sent back to about 1200 BC. No further time travel takes place in that story, just people trying to surivive a disaster. Nor is there any further time travel in Eric Flint’s 1632 books.
These are a couple of my favorite books that include time travel, but none of them are really what I’d call ‘time travel’ stories. So, take the advice for what it’s worth. And good reading!
‘Dinosaur Beach’ by Keith Laumer. I remember it was good even though I normally don’t like books that deal with time travel.
I’ve enjoyed
My favorite site on the subject, although it hasn’t been updated in a while. The Time Machine Links.
Time & Again, Jack Finney.
Hey, I’ve read that, but I thought I was the only human being that had.
Replay by Ken Grimwood – it was different from other time travel stories in that the time travel takes the character back to a younger self, so instead of a 40-year-old man going back as a 40-year-old man, he’s 18 again, with memories intact.
Grimwood explores living your life over again, without being sappy or sentimental.
Making History, by Stephen Fry.
In this book, it takes tremendous amounts of energy to move a tiny amount of mass back in time – so, instead of people being sent back, they have to be inventive in order to alter the present. (It’s one of those alternate WWII deals, but it’s not pants.)
You’re right, AuntiePam – Replay is one of the great forgotten classics of modern SF. Terrific book.
Others:
Millenneum by John Varley
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers (highly recommended)
Alternaties by Michael P. Kube-McDowell (the best pure alternative universe book – since he postulates thousands of them)
Kindred by Octavia Butler
No Enemy But Time by Michael Butler
Short stories to seek out:
“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester
“The Bird of Time Bears Bitter Fruit” by George Alec Effinger
“Rainbird” by R. A. Lafferty
“Hobson’s Choice” by Alfred Bester
“Get a Horse!” (aka known as “The Flight of the Horse”) by Larry Niven
If you can find them, I enjoyed the Conrad Stargard books from Leo Frankowski. The first one was The Cross-time Engineer , I think. There are five in the series all together, although the first three are probably the best.
Mrs. Furthur
I was sure someone would already have posted this, but they haven’t, so i’m going to suggest Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It’s a classic.
I would also recommend a fun little book by Clifford D. Simak, called Catface. It’s about an alien, stranded on earth, who has the ability to make time travel “roads” that people can use to travel into the past. It’s not an especially deep or philosophical look at time travel, but it’s a fun read an you can get through it in an evening.
Actually, after some poking around on the internet, it appears that Catface was also published under the title Mastodonia.
Harry Harrison’s The Technicolor Time Machine. It’s about a failing movie company that has 2 days to make a new film or they go bankrupt. The use a time machine to go back in time and film the vikings discovering North America to make into a historical drama.
L. Sprague DeCamp’s Lest Darkness Fall, is about a guy who finds himself back in Roman times and decides to do what he can so the dark ages never happen.
Larry Niven’s collection of short stories called Flight of the Horse. Most of the stories deal with a guy who goes back in time, but ends up entereing different time lines. In the first story he tries to go back and get a horse but ends up with a unicorn. There’s a couple of stories in the book that have nothing to do with time travel, but they’re entertaining.