Time travel books and themes

And then there's the one that brought me to this site, Moorcock's Escape From Evening found in the anthology The Time Dweller.
This deals with another scenario, the past being empty and the future just unformed chaos.

(Found) Time travel short story where past is void and future is unformed matter

I'm looking for the title and author of this short story. The premise is that the main character invents a time machine, but when he travels to the past, there is nothing but void and when he travels to the future there is nothing but chaotic, unformed matter. The conclusion of the time...
www.sffchronicles.com www.sffchronicles.com
 
I thought Robert Silverberg edited an anthology for the young adult market called Travellers through [or in] Time, but I don't find it.
 
I really enjoyed Time Traveler's Never Die by Jack McDevitt. Edge of Forever by Melissa E. Hurst was also pretty good from what I remember. I haven't read the second book yet though even though I have it (ah, the ever growing TBR list you never quite get around to :LOL:). Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeline L'Engle also involved time travel.
 
I think Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates definitely deserves a mention.
Montero said:
Thank you everyone. :)

I have read a couple of Connie Willis, forgot that. I've forgotten the title but it had excellent WW2 history and it all chimed with what my father told me about his experiences.
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That might be the Blackout/All Clear duology.
 
hitmouse said:
A Sound of Thunder a short story by Ray Bradbury is probably necessary in this list.
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Thanks. A mega collection of Bradbury just turned up from the public library and I've read it.
Realised I've read it before, a long time ago. Definitely is a root story for a number of other later works.
I went on to read Murderer and that was interesting, seeing the prediction of information overload before the internet existed. One of those stories that splits between "well that was prescient" and "ah, no the future isn't quite like that". (I liked the characters a bit more than A Sound of Thunder.)
 
Just so happens...

I just watched "Totally Killer", a surprisingly well done Amazon Original ('23). Very tightly written and (again) surprisingly well thought out story about going back in time to stop a serial killer and the conundrums involved. Not even very gory for a serial killer movie. Casting was great and the dialog realistic. Main characters are in their early twenties playing late high school so it's a convincing match.

It's a jump back to '87 and the clash between then and now was handled brilliantly. Load evenly with a lot of subtle humor. Laugh out loud at times. Lots of twists due to the altering of the time line trope. A little heavy on the SJW stuff but that's Amazon and (once again) it's surprisingly subtle considering their last few years output. Lots of slight of hand on the killer. Nice.

I've only watched it once but I was looking out for time conflicts and didn't notice any. Next time I'll plot it. This time I just enjoyed the comedy.
 
I recently read "One Day All Of This Will Be Yours" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It was a fun, if frivolous take of one man at the end of time after a time war kills practically everyone.

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Another sort of time travel is old fashioned forward travel, such as the Peace War or relativistic novels where the characters miss entire epochs.
 
hitmouse said:
An Alien Heat by Michael Moorcock, and numerous related books. Naive far future romantic goes back to Victorian England and has difficulty understanding the world he finds. Lots of time travel in Moorcock.
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I got that thank you, and I'm afraid gave up at the stage of the time traveller-to-be where him and his mates/competitors were all reshaping the world in themes and awarding artistic merit to each other and being utterly decadent and not caring about how they were treating anything lesser than themselves.

Karapace said:
I was also a fan of Julian May's "Many Coloured Land" back in the day.
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I read them all about 20 years ago. May re-read sometime, thank you. I think I ground to a halt at Jack the Bodiless


Karapace said:
Oh and the excellent "This is how you lose the time war" by Amal El Mohtar and Max Gladstone
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That just turned up from the library and the writing style is very much not my thing - on a par with Anne Leckie style or indeed The Time Traveller's Wife. Too indirect.

But still thank you everyone for suggestions.

Incidentally, I came across a review blog on time travel books, which I cannot now find, and that was dividing them into literary time travel and sf time travel, which I thought a strange distinction given time travel is sf, but clearly it has become and accepted mainstream trope - in moderation.
 
Montero said:
I got that thank you, and I'm afraid gave up at the stage of the time traveller-to-be where him and his mates/competitors were all reshaping the world in themes and awarding artistic merit to each other and being utterly decadent and not caring about how they were treating anything lesser than themselves.
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Thanks for trying it. I have to say I enjoyed the unrestrained depiction of an infantilised society with limitless resource and immortality, but I think the meat of the series is the comical inability of one of these beings to understand Victorian England and the rather straight-laced lady from that era with whom he falls in love.
 
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Thanks. I hadn't thought of "infantilised" as a definition for it, but you're right. I was kind of looking forward to seeing him in the past, not coping, but didn't want to keep reading long enough for him to get there. It is a very well written book.
 
hitmouse said:
An Alien Heat by Michael Moorcock, and numerous related books. Naive far future romantic goes back to Victorian England and has difficulty understanding the world he finds. Lots of time travel in Moorcock.
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Including the notion that all attempts at time travel always end up at the End of Time to the point that one of the characters who lives there collects them and keeps them in a zoo.
 
I recently read The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman, and it blew me away. Manking is at war with an alien race which they call the Taurans. Both sides of the war travel using devices called collapsars, that transport them at near lightspeed. That, of course, has relativistic effects. Time passes differently for the ones that are traveling. What makes the book special is showing how society changes over the years by dropping the protagonist (who barely ages throughout the book) in different ages.

Although not conventional TT, I'd recommend Robert Silverberg's Enter a Soldier: Later, Enter Another, a short-story originally published in Asimov's. A scientist finds out how to replicate the minds of historical figures. How the "clones", so to speak, react to conversation with the scientist is very funny. It's available for free online.
 
Kelly Country by A. Bertam Chandler This novels asks the question of, what if Australian outlaw Ned Kelly fate had been changed by a time traveler . What if , instead of being hung on November 11, 1880 , he'd lived ? What you end up with is an excellent alt history novel by one the best science fiction writers of all time. :cool:
 
'The Time Machine' is a timeless classic that will probably stay relevant forever. Well, unless maybe in like 800,000 years, when humanity stops caring about stuff like culture, science, and technology...
 
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