February 27, 2006

• I can think of two: The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenberger (I hope I wrote that right) -- about a man who has a disease that causes him to randomly move about in time. It doesn't deal so much with coping with his surroundings, but it's still damn good. He bumps into himself a lot and it deals with the girl he ends up marrying in a very complicated way. Cross Stitch aka Outlander in the US, by Diana Gabaldon. Chick-lit at it's best, about a woman who walks into a henge in Scotland in 1946 and travels back to 1737 or thereabouts. Girl meets boy, boy is big highlander type, fighting abounds! She travels back and forth more than once and describes technology, trying to "invent" penicillin, that sort of thing. Surprisingly good if you only read the first three of the nine books.
• Nine books! Ai Chihuaha!! Ta!
• The Time Traveller's Wife - I can recommend this one too.
• Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock is superb, about a 20th century theologist travelling back to meet Jesus
• there's a list of time travel themed books here. i second the moorcock recommendation. some friends highly recommend jasper fforde, though i've yet to read anything by him.
• Alfred Bester's short story "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" is completely hilarious.
• Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" was probably the first timetravel story that I ever read. It had me marvelling for days. It's only a short story and it will take you about 10 minutes to read. (All the reviews I've read said to not bother at all with the movie) Others that spring to mind: * a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court. (mark twain) - also a very early read of mine; i think i had a cutdown reader's digest version of it. * arthur dent on prehistoric earth in the hitchhiker's series. * back to the future (the book-of-the-movie). Yes, I'm cheating with this one.
• yeah - I've read Hitchhiker's, and had thought about Twain - I think I saw a cheesey film version of it when I was a nipper...
• Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal.
• How about that one where the guy goes back in time?
• How about that one where the guy goes back in time? You drunken bastid.
• I wish I was.
• I wish I was. OK, sorry.
• I wish I was stoned, as well.
• Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge. Easily one of my top five scifi books. You simply must read it if you haven't already.
• I haven't read them, but I have heard many good things about Jack Finney's time travel novels, particularly Time and Again.
• ... oh, yeah, and from that list roryk posted, Connie Willis's Doomsday Book. It's really, really depressing, but interesting enough to be worth it. (Capsule summary: Gee, the Black Death was a lousy experience.)
• oh yeah jasper fforde totally rocks.... but it's not so much time travel as spatial through another medium, in a really twisted way kinda travel with some back and to the future thrown in.... hope that is nice and clear
• HelLO? Schlachthof-funf!
• And if you're looking for the best time-travel movie ever...
• Just finished The Shroud of the Thwacker by Chris Elliot. Yes, the same Chris Elliot from David Letterman, Cabin Boy, and Get a Life. There is time travel back to late 19th Century Manhattan. And it smells very badly there. I thought the book was rather funny, and I thought that it had some clever ideas. But it is still Chris Elliot. The book is definitely not for everyone.
• Timequake by Vonnegut. Not your classic time-travel story, but it's damn good.
• Oh, and Wells's The Time Machine, of course. Worth reading if you haven't.
• The best, by far, time travel story I have read is John Crowley's novella Great Work of Time. It is a very complex little novella, and a fairly quick read. I don't even really know how to describe it. Definitely a story you will want to re-read after you go through it the first time. You can find it in the omnibus Novelties and Souvenirs .
• I highly recommend Mark Twain-A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court. Humor and satire and political commentary oh my! Besides, it's a classic, you get bounus points there.
• Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five is all about bopping back and forward in time, and is, of course, a classic.
• Yeah, but Schlachthof-funf was already recommended, so I went with mine. =P
• Two of my faves have had movies made of them. Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return was the basis for the two-hankie film Somewhere in TIme, and Karl Alexander's Time After Time became the movie of the same name. Gotta second (third?) the Wells; one of the best weekends of my middle-school years was spent reading that one.
• But doesn't Wells' Time Traveller travel forward? Heinlein's short story "All You Zombies" is pretty good. The "Door into Summer" is another one, but not because it's a good time travel story - I like the cat. Also try Night Watch by Terry Pratchett (although you won't find it as interesting if you don't read the previous Guards series of Discworld novels).
• Try reading Roads Not Taken. All of the stories are great alternative history tales but there are a few time travel/altered history tales in there. Fantastic reading, you may also want to try doing a search for "alternate history" stories. Many of them deal with the consequences of time travel.
• I've read Slaughterhouse Five. I'm afraid I didn't think it was all that. Sorry! All these other suggestions are good though...cheers!
• But doesn't Wells' Time Traveller travel forward? Oops, sorry, that's correct. Didn't realize kitfisto was a temporal bigot.
• kitfisto, maybe it's too mainstream for you, but I have read Michael Crichton's Timeline over & over again. I *love* this book. I hated the movie, though.
• Connie Willis, To Say Nothing Of The Dog: members of the Oxford History Faculty (which now uses time travel as research) go on a merry romp through Victorian England, with side trips to World War II. I actually preferred it to Doomsday Book; I guess it depends whether you prefer tragedy or comedy. Another interesting take on Victoriana is Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time, which migrates between a completely decadent and amoral society in the extreme future and the rigid world of late-nineteenth-century London. I finished the book unable to say whether it was really good or really bad, but knowing that I liked it. I also really enjoy Kage Baker's series of novels of the Company, particularly the first two, In the Garden of Iden (Tudor England) and Sky Coyote (tribal America.) That, and the other excellent suggestions on this thread, ought to be enough to keep you going for a while. Hurrah.
• arrgh bugger html sod it.
• Moorcock is one of the most over-rated writers ever.
• "Moorcock is one of the most over-rated writers ever." But one of the best Celebrity Jeopardy answers of all time.
• But it is still Chris Elliot. The book is definitely not for everyone. True. It's only for people with taste and good breeding.
• I second (or third) Kage Baker's Company novels.
• cabingirl, are you the daughter or wife of Chris Elliot?
• Replay by Ken Grimwood has always been one of my favorites. It's a time travel/Groundhog's Day type of thing. And I'll also endorse Jasper Fforde. I adore his stuff.
• bernockle: No, but my love burns with the fire of 1000 suns. No, really, I just dig him.
• Ach, this seems to be Obituary Day. Just heard on the radio that Octavia Butler is dead, aged 58. Her novel, Kindred, centres on a contemporay black woman going back in time and encountering a white forebearer.
• .
• Trashy fun: SM Stirling's series starting with Island in the Sea of Time. 199x Nantucket gets sucked back to ~1500BC. Hijinks ensue. Charlie Stross's The Family Trade isn't time travel but has a similar spirit to what you describe.
• I say we just write one. It's bound to be better than all that piffle up there ^.
• "The Underpants Monster Goes Back in Time to Fight the Codpiece Monster." Now THERE'S some good readin'.
• Eventually they team up with Sumo Loincloth Monster to stomp Tokyo and fight crime.
• Umm... There's this one where this guy goes back in time to kill Hitler's baby but when he does it turns out that he can't because Hitler's baby was... HIS FATHER!!!!!!!! OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!! HIS FATHER!!!!!!!!!!! And that ... uh... like, he had to sleep with his own grandmother too.
• Does "Time's Arrow" by Martin Amis count?
• A very cool novel: The Exile by William Kotzwinkle. From Publishers Weekly: "Middle-aged actor David Caspian, living in the Hollywood of properties, deals, unflappably pushy agents and wickedly self-deprecating chit-chat, begins to have hallucinations. He imagines himself a black marketer in Nazi Germany, trading in everything from nylons to stolen masterpieces. Most disturbingly, when his mind dissolves into this "fourth dimension," his Nazi counterpart appears also to imagine himself crossing over." In other words, a trippy good time.
• I mentioned Octavia Butler's death above; woods lot links to various articles on her work, and influence within the SF community (scroll down, about the seventh section).
• Your description almost matches Eric Flint's Assiti Shards Series to a tee. A small town (Grantville, West Virginia) and its inhabitants are transported to Northern Germany, 1632. Their presence and attempts to survive have a massive impact on the course of the thirty years war as they introduce new technology and ideas to the region. You can actually download several of the books, 1632, 1633 and the first Grantville Gazette anthology for free in a variety of formats from here. As you've specified they all contain some pretty non-rosy views of the past and are rip-roaring reads. Impressively the anthologies, (five volumes - some published and some ebooks) based in the universe Flint created, grew from fanfic posted on a discussion thread about the books, which shows how engaging readers have found the basic idea behind the books.
• scartol - I second your movie recommendation. I loved the movie, then find out that it was made for something like $8000. Made me wonder what the hell I was doing with my money that was so important.
• Oooo - lots of ideas....