Time Travel Stories

Like anything, time travel can be handled either well or poorly. Some books I can immediately think of that handle it well are:

Fritz Leiber's The Big Time
Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun
John Kessel's Corrupting Dr. Nice
Gregory Benford's Timescape

I've always liked time travel stories. I'm pretty easy to please, though. The only one I can think of that I truly didn't like was Crichton's _Timeline_.

I really liked Dean Koontz' _Lightning_.

While it's not really my taste now, I was an avid reader of Anne McCaffrey's Pern books back in my early teens. So while I'm not sure that Dragonflight is necessarily an example of time travel done right, I can say that reading it was the first time that a time loop plot made me go all weak and shivery and teary-eyed just contemplating the enormity of it all. Maybe it was my first time encountering that kind of plot at all, but there was something... numinous, I guess, hiding between the lines, and it pounced on me.

The other book that had a similar effect on me--same time period--was a YA novel called ... you know what? I can't remember! It involved two kids, a magician, a monkey, and an heirloom locket that got thrown through a magic mirror and into a time loop. I want to say "Other Side Of The Mirror," but searching on that title gets me MZB/Darkover, a Harlequin title, and a murder mystery. Poot.

My first published fiction was a short story involving time travel. It was a fun story that depended upon paradoxes to be a story. Essentially, a guy enters a time travel agency where he's asked where he wants to go. During the conversation, the clerk keeps changing into different people because of changes brought about by some other time traveler. Eventually, our hapless visitor is also changed a few times. It was titled "Dead Time" and saw publication in print in Keen Science Fiction.

Dave, that sounds great! Good for you.

NicoleJLeBoeuf said:

The other book that had a similar effect on me--same time period--was a YA novel called ... you know what? I can't remember! It involved two kids, a magician, a monkey, and an heirloom locket that got thrown through a magic mirror and into a time loop. I want to say "Other Side Of The Mirror," but searching on that title gets me MZB/Darkover, a Harlequin title, and a murder mystery. Poot.

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I had a poke about on abebooks and found "On the Far Side of the Mirror" by BB Hiller and Neil W Hiller, pub. Scholastic 1986. I can't find any details of the plot but this is illustrated children's fiction, and so is probably your bird.

whitehound said:

I had a poke about on abebooks and found "On the Far Side of the Mirror" by BB Hiller and Neil W Hiller, pub. Scholastic 1986. I can't find any details of the plot but this is illustrated children's fiction, and so is probably your bird.

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Chapter book with illustrations here and there, yes--I think you've found it. Great sleuthing!

Crosshatcher said:

Is there a book you would recomend or not? I'd like to know.

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I'd recommend An Idiot's Guide to Time Travel.

Crosshatcher said:

As an avid Science Fiction reader in my youth I cared little for the paradoxes brought about in most time travel stories. After I began to write my tastes took on a more logical track. A affected B which affected C and so forth.

As much as I loved the entire Star Trek group of series every time they had a time travel story I was left quite irritated; especially the way Voyager ended.

About the only book I liked was HG Wells' "Time Machine". I lose interest with others as the anomalies pile up.

What do you think about time travel stories? Is there a book you would recomend or not? I'd like to know.

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Marty, it's all in the flux capacitor! Most time travel is simply entertainment. I teasingly did a little time travel story, then deleted it on the AW Idol contest. But it was a poke at humor. In it I had two roomates at M.I.T, and one of them was convinced that time was moving backward.

His roomates obvious question was, "Then why are you talking forward". And as the story went on, you had the countless paradoxes, which became tongue twisters in the story.

In it, the only constant was this journal that had entries for six months into the future, but since everything else was going backwards, he could predict the next days events by reading his "yesterday's" entry. And then tomorrow (which is actually yesterday), he would read the next earliest entry, which would be his next tomorrow. And eventually, he convinces his roomate that time is going backward.

Well, this makes tomorrow yesterday, and yesterday tomorrow. And today is tomorrow, and yesterday at the same time.

I shouldn't have deleted it. It'd be a hoot of a screenplay.

The most complicated, yet best-worked-out time-travel story I know is Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones. It involves a machine which plays around with time and tries to get a situation to work out the way it wants by jumping the characters back and forth to replay scenes over and over in random order, so that their subjective and objective chronologies are completely out of synch - and five people who share a telepathic link even though some of them are living centuries apart.

I think the *creepiest* story I've read like that was not so much time travel as parellel worlds. I think it might have been by Poul Anderson (comments, anyone?) but it's about 25 years since I read it so I'm not sure. It involved a character setting out from a pub into a heavy mist which filled the street outside, but the mist actually was a blurring of the boundaries between parallels. Every time there was a mist he would walk into it, trying to get back where he came from, but instead he kept drifting further and further from his point of origin and the worlds kept getting wierder. In the end he stopped going into mist *at all.* Anyone remember it?