# What's the longest and shortest time period covered by a (fictional) book you've read? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [August 22, 2009, 7:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295 "2009-08-22T07:31:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/41 "2009-08-23T01:48:51Z")
John Hawkes’ _Travesty_ is a monologue by a guy about to drive his car into a brick wall at 140 kilometers an hour. The length of time the story takes is exactly equal to the length of time it would take to read the short novel out loud, which would probably only take a couple hours. ---
**Author:** ![Lok](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e8c25b/32.png) [@Lok](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lok)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/42 "2009-08-23T02:22:26Z")
My pick is [Replay by Ken Grimwood](http://www.amazon.com/Replay-Ken-Grimwood/dp/068816112X). For longest and shortest. It all happens in an instant, but it also covers 25 years, over and over again, each repetition getting just a little bit shorter. ---
**Author:** ![Siege](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/dbc845/32.png) [@Siege](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siege)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/43 "2009-08-23T18:27:31Z")
The longest span of time covered by a book I’ve read is Edward Rutherford’s [_Sarum_.](http://www.amazon.com/Sarum-Novel-England-Edward-Rutherfurd/dp/0449000729) It starts shortly before Britain is separated from the mainland of Europe and ends in the present day. I noticed one review in the web page I linked to said Rutherford was trying to do for England what Michener did for Hawai’i and Texas. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/44 "2009-08-23T18:45:03Z")
A remember a book by J J Jadway that covers only seven minutes of time. Can’t remember the title though. ---
**Author:** ![Zebra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/c0e974/32.png) [@Zebra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zebra)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/45 "2009-08-23T18:51:50Z")
The bible covers from the start of the universe to the end of days. ---
**Author:** ![Laalune](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/977dab/32.png) [@Laalune](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Laalune)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/46 "2009-08-23T18:56:48Z")
I’ve read _Evolution_, by Stephen Baxter, which goes from 65 million years ago to 500 million years into the future. ---
**Author:** ![Tenebras](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/977dab/32.png) [@Tenebras](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tenebras)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/47 "2009-08-23T19:05:31Z")
Yeah, but it only takes 6000 years to do it in. Michener’s got it beat by a country mile halfway down the second page. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/48 "2009-08-23T19:28:36Z")
> [@Lok](#): > > My pick is [Replay by Ken Grimwood](http://www.amazon.com/Replay-Ken-Grimwood/dp/068816112X). For longest and shortest. It all happens in an instant, but it also covers 25 years, over and over again, each repetition getting just a little bit shorter. A great, great book. I highly recommend it. What about the short story about that guy who’s hanged during the Civil War and keeps having the lyrics from Duran Duran’s “Rio” go through his head just before he dies, a heartbeat later? ---
**Author:** ![Jerseyman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/bbce88/32.png) [@Jerseyman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jerseyman)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/49 "2009-08-23T20:11:08Z")
Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 ‘First and last men’ covers 18 human species from the present for about 2,000,000,000 years into the future but Stephen Baxter has outdone him with ‘Evolution’ and ‘The Light of other Days’. ‘Evolution’ is what it says. I can’t quite remember how far back it starts but somewhere with dinosaurs and consists of individual stories at various stages with a catastrophe just past mid-way that destroys human civilisation and sets the human species on diverging devolutionary paths until the Earth becomes too parched for life, via a period dominated by intelligent rat descendents. I think Wikipedia is wrong on key points like moving to another planet but maybe I just missed that. His earlier ‘Light of Other Days’ is really two stories. Set in the near future, it involves developing a device capable of reading and displaying the past from effects on neutrinoes. (Wikipedia says gamma rays but I don’t think so). One story is the question that Isaac Asimov addressed in a short story, _when does the past begin?_ (Baxter has probably read it). Privacy becomes impossible and an underground culture develops around shielding cloaks. The second aspect comes from a way of tying the past viewer to mitochondrial DNA and being able to see through the eyes (literally) of maternal ancestors. This goes back through the whole of known evolution until it hits millions of years of ‘Snowball Earth’ following asteroid collision. When light appears again before the collision, it hits _unknown_ evolution with all known life descended from a sample put into safe storage by intelligent centipede-like creatures under a green sky to survive the collision. ---
**Author:** ![VarlosZ](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/d78d45/32.png) [@VarlosZ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VarlosZ)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/50 "2009-08-23T20:21:32Z")
> [@Intergalactic\_Gladiator](#): > > [The Forever War](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War) spans a long time, I’m not quite sure how long though. About 1,100 years IIRC. However, since there’s a definite, lone protagonist who experiences it as just a few subjective years, it doesn’t seem right to me to include it, for some reason. Ironically, though, I have to cheat a bit for my answer. I just reread the original **Foundation trilogy**. Technically three books, but I’ve got them here in one hardcover edition, so I’m calling it one big book. Anyway, it takes place over 300-400 years. Don’t have a good answer for shortest. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/51 "2009-08-23T20:36:06Z")
Elendil’s Heir writes: \> What about the short story about that guy who’s hanged during the Civil War \> and keeps having the lyrics from Duran Duran’s “Rio” go through his head just \> before he dies, a heartbeat later? I don’t know, but I think I read it once. In 1960. It took me about twenty minutes to read. Jerseyman writes: \> Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 ‘First and last men’ covers 18 human species from the \> present for about 2,000,000,000 years into the future but Stephen Baxter has \> outdone him with ‘Evolution’ and ‘The Light of other Days’. I can’t see how the Baxter novels are supposed to be over a longer period than _First and Last Men_, but in any case, as I wrote in post #6, _Star Maker_ takes place over a much longer period, since they last over the history of several universes. ---
**Author:** ![Apollyon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/apollyon/32/4238_2.png) [@Apollyon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Apollyon)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2009, 11:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/52 "2009-08-23T23:46:13Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > …in any case, as I wrote in post #6, _Star Maker_ takes place over a much longer period, since they last over the history of several universes. Perhaps not as long as _Star Maker_ then, but I’ve just started on _Spin_ by Robert Charles Wilson; 500 million years so far, and I’m only 1/8th of the way through the book. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2017, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/53 "2017-04-11T17:00:18Z")
> [@TV\_time](#): > > Hedging it a bit, I remember an Asimov short story (that he wrote as an exercise in writing a story in second person) that begins with the main character being confronted by his-time-traveler-self beginning to talk to him and then after many actions and activities, the story ends at the same moment. I can’t remember the title though. Resurrecting a zombie (sorry) to add that this is Lester del Rey’s 1951 short story “…And It Comes Out Here” available at Project Gutenberg [...And It Comes Out Here by Lester Del Rey | Project Gutenberg](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51046) ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2017, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/54 "2017-04-11T17:37:21Z")
A couple of honorable mentions: [_Marrow_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrow_%28novel%29) by Robert Reed, where the main part of the story takes place over 5,000 years and involves the same essentially immortal characters. [_Dragon’s Egg_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Egg), by Robert L. Forward, where the main part of the story takes place over 1 month, but for one of the two species featured that equals over 1,000 full lifetimes. ---
**Author:** ![Barkis\_is\_Willin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a183cd/32.png) [@Barkis\_is\_Willin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Barkis_is_Willin)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2017, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/55 "2017-04-11T17:51:01Z")
The first book that comes to my mind is _Cloud Atlas._ I don’t remember the exact time period, I guess about 500 years or so. And it covers that without time or space travel while connecting all the characters one way or another. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2017, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/56 "2017-04-11T18:59:38Z")
Longest, probably _ **Look Homeward, Angel** _ and _ **East of Eden** _. Both cover the period from the American Civil War to World War I. Taken as one work, \*\*\*I, Claudius \*\*\*and _ **Claudius the God** _, a “history” of the early Roman Empire, from Augustus to Nero. The shortest, probably _ **Going after Cacciato** _: In the story, GIs hike from Vietnam to Paris, but it’s revealed at the end to be nothing more than a night’s fantasizing while on guard duty. ---
**Author:** ![Weisshund](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ba8739/32.png) [@Weisshund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Weisshund)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2017, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/57 "2017-04-11T19:02:16Z")
Does the Torah count? It starts at the big bang, and goes on to modern humans, so about in excess of 4 billion years ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2017, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/58 "2017-04-11T19:09:12Z")
Douglas Adams’ _The Restaurant at the End of the Universe_ covers a period of time from near present-day to 576,000,000,000 years in the future, where (when) the restaurant at the Universe’s “End” is located. While the main characters travel there via time warp, Marvin the Paranoid Android is forced to wait for them in real time. “After that I went into a bit of a decline…” ---
**Author:** ![The\_wind\_of\_my\_soul](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecc23a/32.png) [@The\_wind\_of\_my\_soul](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_wind_of_my_soul)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2017, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/59 "2017-04-11T19:11:23Z")
I know it’s a zombie, but I like the premise of the thread so I want to participate anyways. Longest time period that I remember reading is _Middlesex_. This covers the lives of three generations of family (the main character, her parents, and her grandparents) from childhood through adulthood, so over a hundred years. And imho, the book is worse for it, because the book takes a good story and throws in so much detail and backstory that it ruins the actual story. Shortest time period I remember reading is a Stephen King novel where a man dies while having sex with his wife, who is handcuffed to a bed, and the story takes place during the time in which she is handcuffed to the bed, so maybe two days time. _Gerald’s Game_, that’s the name of it. And again, I think the short time frame didn’t work too well for the book, because to make it work as a novel, King had to stretch some brief moments into pages worth of text. It was a good premise that I think would have worked better as a novella or short story. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2017, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295/60 "2017-04-11T19:40:17Z")
> [@Weisshund](#): > > It starts at the big bang, and goes on to modern humans, so about in excess of 4 billion years It doesn’t start at the Big Bang. At least, the creation it describes is in no way comparable to the Big Bang. And internal evidence implies that it covers a time period of a few thousand years at most. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-longest-and-shortest-time-period-covered-by-a-fictional-book-youve-read/507295.md?page=4)