I saw it. I agree - it is the best.
RoadMarks by **Roger Zelazny **hasn’t been mentioned yet -
Thirded. Amazing books.
This is one of my favorite movies as well.
Supposedly, about half of the chapters he wrote for that novel he then shuffled into a random order and then inserted between the other chapters.
That phrase has some plot significance, as it’s discovered somewhere where it shouldn’t logically be written. I mostly threw that in for the people who had read the book.
Another clever bit from The Anubis Gates which I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else:
The way that the time travelers from the future used the tune from “Yesterday” as a call-and-response recognition signal - one whistles the first three notes, the other responds with the following nine.
Glad to help. I enjoy these story identification questions very much, so if you’ve got more, bring them on.
The Chronoliths has a fair amount of time travel, even if none of the travelers are people. I like how it handled the future coming back to change the present, and the ending was pleasant as well. It’s about all I can add to the discussion, unless you count relativistic time travel, which Manifold: Space contains a fair bit of.
My personal favorites have already been mentioned, the Nantucket trilogy and the Axis of Time trilogy, even if the time travel was a one off thing. I did like Time Travelers Never Die a bit as well. I’ve been waiting for a modern series about a time traveler going back to Rome in the late Republican or early Imperial times and playing things out by introducing modern techniques to make Rome even more dominant than before, allowing it to expand to the point where outside invaders aren’t a concern because there is no longer any outside.
In the meantime, can anyone think of any books that have come out in the year+ since the last post? There’s tons of great suggestions here, many of which I’ve already read, and a few I’ve added to my list to read, but I just can’t get into the older books as much, with a few exceptions (D. Adams books being the main ones) of course.
There’s a similar paradox in the Star Trek movies.
Doctor McCoy gives Kirk a pair of antique spectacles. The crew tijme travel into the past. In order to raise a bit of petty cash, Kirk sells the spectacles to an antique dealer. The spectacles then spend the next 200 years being passed from one collector to the next, until they are acquired by McCoy, who gives them to Kirk. (At least that’s what Kirk thinks is going to happen.)
And Scotty gives the secret of transparent aluminum to its inventor. So where did it come from originally?
Dirk Gently is simply a recycling of a Doctor Who story City Of Death, co-written by Adams, and nowhere near as good as the original.
Here’s a quick list of what I’m aware of from the past year. Formats vary, some are hardbacks, some are paperbacks. No doubt there are others.
In Stephen King’s latest someone travels back and tries to stop the Kennedy assassination
Sherwood Smith has Coronets and Steel; a woman researching her family ends up back in the Renaissance (iirc)
I don’t remember anything about this YA novel but thought it looked interesting when it came out: Gary J. McCleary – A Time for Susan
Virginia DeMarce – 1635: The Tangled Web
Joe Kimball – Timecaster about a time patrolman
Eric Flint – 1636: Saxon Uprising
K. W. Jeter – Morlock Night re-issue of this sequel to The Time Machine.
Glen Cook – A Matter of Time
Jerry & Sharon Ahern - Written in Time time travel back to 1904, with hi-tech and guns!
Joshua Palmetier & Patricia Bray (editors) – After Hours short stories told in a time-travelling bar that’s been around since the Sumerians
Not really what you’re after, I suspect:
Gene Wolfe – Home Fires time dilation due to near light speed travel
Gene Wolfe – Pirate Freedom includes some time-slip at the beginning, iirc
Gareth L. Powell – The Recollection his brother has disappeared and his wife and brother must venture through time- and space-spanning ‘arches’ to hunt for him…
Time Traveling Zombies!
don’t forget YA stuff when looking for a particular genre or theme. YA aurhot Margaret Haddix, for example, has a new series out which involves time travel.
Nonsense. It’s very funny and very intricately plotted. His best work.
I could not disagree more. Not only is “By His Bootstraps” too neat, and cut and dried, more importantly, like too much of Heinlein, at heart it is a ludicrous adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasy. (No doubt that was what sold stories.) The hero is magically granted a lifetime of luxury, power and free sex, without having to deserve it in any way, or indeed, to do anything much beyond passively going along with the arrangements made by his own future self. Oh, and he will totally avoid having to form real human relationships for the rest of his life.
Sure, I loved it when I was 15 and terrified of growing up, and of having to deal with the opposite sex, but you should not have to grow up very much to realize that Diktor’s life is actually going to be horrible. He has sentenced himself to life in solitary confinement (no real people around him, just empty headed, will-less slaves) in a luxurious but sterile gilded cage, with hot and cold running houris and no challenges. If Diktor or Heinlein showed any sign of awareness of the awfulness of this, it might be ok, but they do not.*
In comparison, “All You Zombies” is dark and disturbing. Jane’s situation is no wish fulfillment, it is grubby and frightening, and although in a sense she also avoids relating to other people (because it is always herself) this is not a fate she deliberately embraces, and it is not held out as something desirable. What is more, we are left with an interesting mystery to tease the mind: where does Jane come from, or is it really (as she defiantly, but far from triumphantly concludes) she, self-generating, who is normal and real, and all the rest of us who are somehow unreal or inexplicable. “All You Zombies” is perhaps not quite as neatly structured as “By His Bootstraps” but it is infinitely more grown-up and, I think, more mentally stimulating.
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*Not within the story anyway. Perhaps “All You Zombies” represents Heinlein’s acknowledgment of what was wrong with the pandering of “By His Bootstraps”.
Check out Kage Baker’s Company books. It gets a bit *deux ex machina *at the end, I thought, but for the most part it’s very well written, and even the *deux ex machina *grew out of the story.
**Meurglys **already beat me to the Glen Cook book.
Andre Norton had a couple of books dealing with time travel, but I’m not at home so I can’t look at the titles. Time Traders, maybe? They were definitely of the “one way trip back in time radically changes the future” variety.
That makes it an inferior coming-of-age story. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s an excellent time travel story.
Same paradox in Back to the Future. Marty McFly learned to play “Johnny B Goode” from hearing Chuck Berry (presumably) some time in the 1980’s; Chuck Berry learned it from Marty McFly some time in the 1950’s.
Though it’s part of the silly (but excellent) science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf, the episode Tikka to Ride is a good time travel story. The crew uses a time machine in an attempt to restock the ship’s depleted supplies of Indian food. They accidentally interfere in Oswald’s attempt to assassinate JFK. They do something quite unexpected and clever to restore history.Kennedy survived, and was impeached due to scandal a few years later. J. Edgar Hoover becomes president and makes things a lot worse, and JFK ends up going to prison. The Red Dwarf crew go to the disgraced Kennedy, and convince him to return to 1963 with them, and shoot himself from the grassy knoll, thus allowing history to remember him positively. The Future Kennedy fades away after the shooting, as he no longer exists.The plot isn’t without holes, but it was neat, in its silly way.
Most of my favourites have already been mentioned. Let me add the short story Let’s Go to Golgotha which features time travelling tourists going back to view the Crucifixion with the injunction that they must act like the local populace.
So they all clamour for Barabbas to be spared, later realising that none of the genuine inhabitants has taken part in the debate.
I know it was a Spider Robinson story; I’m less sure that the title is “Father Paradox”. I recall the punch line, which was (approximately, quoted from memory):
As he died, he thought he was an unlucky bastard, never knowing just how right he was.