And then there’s David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself, the twistiest novel about time travel complexities ever conceived of.
The absolute best time travel story ever written or ever likely to be written is Heinlein’s “By his Own Bootstraps”. Heinlein, in general, is capable of both extremes of the spectrum: His good time-travel stuff (BhOB, “All You Zombies”, The Door into Summer, Time Enough for Love) is all excellent, but his bad time-travel material (“Elsewhen”, The Cat who Walked through Walls, The Number of the Beast) is terrible.
And I’d like to add a negative vote for The End of Eternity. There’s no time travel in it. All it is is a really bad space opera, with the word “time” substituted for “space”, “physiotime” for “time”, and “century” for “planet”. I mean, Eternity is supposed to be the only medium for exchange between different Centuries? What, does the planet dissappear and start from scratch every time the year shows a double zero?
Asimov’s best time travel story is probably “The Red Queen’s Race”. “The Ugly Little Boy” wasn’t too bad, but its appeal had nothing to do with the time travel aspect (which Asimov mangled as usual). And “The Dead Past” was good, but it wasn’t really a time travel story.
I’ll also throw in a mention of The Stars My Destination, here (I know I’m not the only fellow on the SDMB who likes that one). Who wrote that one, again? It’s a bit surreal, but definitely good if you like that sort of thing.
Not disagreeing about the quality of the books, but the main character in Quest for Rubber is not Conrad. And did you know that there is another one out in hardback? Conrad’s Time Machine Looked like more of the same.
Lok
Stanley Shapiro’s A Time to Remember and these others.
I agree completely with Greywolf73’s and Captain Amazing’s recommendation of
The Doomsday Book, and To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.
Thanks to Hazel to pointing out “Time Watch” from Time Watch & other Stories.
Actually thank to all of you guys, this makes a great reading list.
The Smithsonian Institution - Gore Vidal
Alfred Bester
Haven’t read many; vote best novel Time and Again. Worst, I’m sorry to say, is Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planetthen Slaughterhouse 5.
best in short story, April in Parisby Le Guin.
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
Many years ago I read one about a team of mercenaries who go back to the Alamo and hand out some whoopass to Santa Ana, all so a super-rich guy can gain control of the Mexican oil fields. They are stuck in that time, since there isn’t enough power in the world to bring them back. The day is saved when somebody from even farther in the future imports another Mexican army, and Davy and the boys get wiped out one day later. Anybody remember this one?
I’m not a big fan of time travel books, but I’ll join the crowd and agree with the round of applause for Connecticut Yankee… it combines Arthurian fiction (one of my favorite genres) with some of the best satire this side of Monty Python. How can you not like it?
I’ll also second Atreyu’s recommendation of Replay by Ken Grimwood. One of the finest time travel stories i’ve ever read, if only because it takes it from a very unique perspective.
My original recommendations… Stephen King’s short novel “The Langoliers.” Again, a refreshing take on time travel that doesn’t involve the reverse causality problems most time travel stories get into. A pretty good story, and an original one, with King’s usual footprint on it. 
And though it’s not strictly about time travel, Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman is one of the best books I have ever read. Time travel (or ideas about time travel) certainly play a large part in most of its vignettes.
I tried reading the first Outlander book, after my wife recommended it to me. We lived near Gabaldon’s family and she was a frequent visitor in our local bookstores at the time (nice enough woman, at least then). I finished it, but I can’t say I was all that impressed. As a time-travel story, it’s a fairly standard progression of causality loops and such. As a historical romance, it’s above the cut of most books of that genre (and yes, I have read others). As a historical novel, it’s all right. An interesting book, in ways, but not compelling enough for me to read the rest of the series. She got the history mostly right, but the story was thin to me.
That would be Gregory Benford.
Whoa! Hold on there! I read that book when it came out, mainly because of the positive quote from Salman Rushdie on the back of the book. When I finished the it, I was sorely tempted to send Salman a letter which said, “If you think that’s a great book, you really need to get out more.”
Well, if we include that, we should mention the ultimate time-dilation story, Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero, in which the crew of a ramjet-type starship is unable to shut down their engine and stop accelerating, and consequently push so close to lightspeed that they actually ride out the collapse and rebirth of the entire universe.
Can I pleeeeze be the 48th person to also mention Finney’s Time and Again?
It’s one of my favorite novels of all time and based on your OP, it’s perfect.
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges is an excellent short story as well, though more in the alternate-worlds mode, IIRC. I read it years ago.
There’s a rather strange site based on the story right here.
(As good as they are, I don’t think either Tau Zero or The Forever War really count as time travel, even though time is the whole basis for both. Read them anyway!)
Julian May’s Pleistocene Saga is a tetrology that is also an absolute hoot, space opera in the grand style without being over the top even when you throw in a pair of alien races, a time warp in a French lady’s basement, advanced mental powers, kings and queens, combat on the fields of gold and the flooding of the Mediterranean Sea.
Also near the absolute top of my time travel list is a short story by **Clifford Simak ** called “Time and Again.” Similar titles, have been used for books which bear no relation to this gentle story about the way many of us fantasize about time travel. The hero goes to sleep one night and wakes up the next morning as a teenager in his old family home with all of his memories intact. His father finally figures out that his son is acting different and son confides in dad. They end up preventing a neighborhood murder that the son knows is coming. Top notch work by one of the most overlooked writers out there, IMHO.
Aarrgghhh.
I hate people who don’t read through threads and then go and post something that had already been said.
And here I go and do it not once, but twice, in the same thread.
So my apologies to Athena and Sam Stone.
I don’t know how I missed your posts, but I did, and I now feel like an idiot.
Good thread, though, and good books, so I hope mentioning them more than once gets them noticed so at least some good comes out of it.
While Simak may have written a story with a similar plot, this sounds like Time and Time Again by H. Beam Piper. It was originally published in 1947, so it predates Simak by a while.
Lok
Hometownboy and Lok, I’m positive that the story you are both describing is actually Time and Again by Jack Finney. The murder involves the loan of the father’s gun, right?
Did Clifford D. Simak and H. Beam Piper both write similar stories, or are we all experiencing some sort of time-travel glitch, here? 