November SFFFKit: Time Travel

It's time for time travel!

I was looking through my catalog and found that I've read the following four vastly different time travel books in the last few years:


I rated these from 3.5 to 5 stars, so you can hardly go wrong with any of them.

Lots of other great choices including classics like H. G. Wells' The Time Machine.

From BestScienceFictionBooks.com, here is their list of the best time travel science fictions books:
1. The Door Into Summer (Robert A. Heinlein)
2. The Time Machine (H. G. Wells)
3. Footprints Of Thunder (James F. David)
4. The Accidental Time Machine (Joe Haldeman)
5. Lightning (Dean Koontz)
6. Thrice Upon A Time (James P. Hogan)
7. A Sound Of Thunder (Ray Bradbury)
8. The End Of Eternity (Isaac Asimov)
9. Timescape (Gregory Benford)
10.Millennium (John Varley)
11.The Anubis Gates (Tim Powers)
12.A Rebel In Time (Harry Harrison)
13.This Immortal (Roger Zelazny)
14.First Dawn (Mike Moscoe)
15.Hawksbill Station (Robert Silverberg)
16.Behold The Man (Michael Moorcock)
17.The Proteus Operation (James P. Hogan)
18.The Langoliers (Stephen King)
19.The Time traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
20.Replay (Ken Grimwood)
21.Bid Time Return (Richard Matheson)
22.Time Enough For Love (Robert Heinlein)
23.1632 (Eric Flint)
24.The Chronoliths (Robert Charles Wilson)
25.Thief Of Time (Terry Pratchett)

And don't forget to update the Wiki!

I've got the following books on my list for November:

Years in the Making: The Time Travel Stories of L. Sprague de Camp
The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier and
Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon

>1 LisaMorr:, is Time Travel for October now? I kept waiting for the October thread to show up to get a better idea of what was meant by steampunk and the other genres listed, and had time travel marked for November... but now I'm confused lol.

Just realized I mis-titled the thread! Ugh - posting another thread now...

Re-titled this thread - I didn't think you could do that, so good to know...

Got confused because we didn't have a thread for October, sorry!

>4 LisaMorr:, No worries--I was just wondering if I'd missed something and the themes had suddenly been switched!

I am planning on a re-read of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. I know I read this as a child but have no real memory of it. It will be interesting to see if it comes back to me as I read it.

>6 DeltaQueen50: I re-read that last year - I'll be interested in hearing your thoughts!

I can also recommend 11/22/63 by Stephen King for this topic.

I may end up doing a re-read this month. I love both The Langoliers and Replay, and they're really tempting me. The only unread time travel I've got also looks to be 11/22/63, and as much as I want to read that book, it would be a heavy one to lug around in what's going to be a busy month (yep, I ended up with the hardback). We'll see, though...

I'm not sure what (if anything) I'll get a chance to read for this month, but I urge anyone else who's unsure to pick up some Connie Willis! Doomsday Book is great and sad, but there's also Blackout and All Clear (which are really just one novel in two volumes), as well as my personal favorite, To Say Nothing of the Dog!

>9 whitewavedarling: I read the hardback copy and it was even heavier than most books the same size. I think it had to do with the paper they used. I had picked it up at a FOL book sale so it was cheaper than buying the Kindle version.

>11 mamzel:, Yeah, it does seem really heavy lol. I'm going to look at some other time travel books and see if there's another option haunting my tbr pile, which isn't impossible. I want to read 11/22/63, but I'm justnot sure I want to pick it up when I'm going to be traveling on and off!

I think the only time travel book I have waiting is "Time Tunnel to Londinium" by Olli Tooley (no touchstones)

After some hunting around in my shelves, I stumbled across The Prodigal Hour, which involves time travel and won't be such a heavy (literally) read as King's 11/22/63, so I think that's going to be my plan. I want to get to the King, too, but I'd rather it wait for a month when I won't have to lug the book around and can afford to just curl up on the couch for long stretches!

I need to get to 11/22/63 one of these days as well.

I'm reading A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon, book 6 in the Outlander series. So far it is very good.

>1 LisaMorr: oh, great! I recently bought a stack of old Heinlein books at a FOL sale, and The Door Into Summer is one of them.

>17 fuzzi: Awesome - I haven't read that one yet, would be great to hear what you think.

>18 LisaMorr: I'll try to remember to post my review here. I avoid spoilers in all my reviews, so it would be safe to read.

I have decided to reread via audiobook the classic The Time Machine -- narrated by the marvelous Derek Jacobi!

If I have time, I might listen to Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog.

The Technicolor Time Machine shows off Harrison's strength: a rather irreverent look at time travel. It's from 1967 and set in Hollywood, so very sexist, but it was inspired by recent (at the time) discoveries of Viking settlements in North America, and although some clichés are obviously ineradicable, he makes a nice effort to include dialogue in Norse. Very entertaining.

>18 LisaMorr: here is my review:

#125 The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein

This book was written and published almost 60 years ago, and unfortunately it does show its age. While the author does a fairly decent job of fleshing out characters, this story doesn't have the depth and feel of later works, and has a bit of a "rushed" feel to it.

I still love how Robert Heinlein describes situations (especially with cats), often with his tongue firmly in cheek, but I can't rate this more than a "pretty good" read, and recommended for those who like older sci-fi, or those who enjoy Heinlein.

I have completed A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle and found, to my surprise, that I had not read this book previously. I can see why it is held in such high esteem, but it didn't totally work for me.

>22 fuzzi: Thanks for your thoughts on The Door Into Summer. My introduction to sci-fi, from my dad, was Heinlein and Bradbury (I know, two totally different authors) and I have enjoyed a lot of Heinlein over the years. I'll probably give The Door Into Summer a try at some point.

>23 DeltaQueen50: I re-read A Wrinkle in Time last year - I absolutely adored this novel when I first read it way back when, but the re-read wasn't as good for me. I want to read the whole series (I think I may have only read the second book way back when), but I have less of an appetite now...

I finished The Prodigal Hour today, and I enjoyed it more than I've enjoyed any other time travel book in recent years; I'm fairly picky about them and tend to either love them or hate them, but this one was a pleasant surprise. Full review written!

(I should note, the one other one I really remember enjoying in the last five years or so was The Door into Summer.)

>24 LisaMorr: I don't think I will be continuing with the rest of the series. I think I would have loved the book if I had read it when young but as an adult I found there was simply too much religious symbolism and that pulled me out of the story.

>26 DeltaQueen50: That's exactly the way I felt - I didn't remember that when I read it as a kid. I have all the books, so I might just give the second one a go just to see if it's the same...(the completeist in me...)

I read the second book in the time travel series by Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog. Great book, hilarious.

I finished Timebound by Rysa Walker. YA so a bit light for me, but entertaining most of the time.

Starting The Taexali Game by Nancy Jardine

I am going to include The Forever War by Haldeman because of the way the soldiers travel through space which essentially is a collapse of time that allows travel but also results in the soldiers being gone fighting and when they come back, the world is much older than when they left.

I finished Connie Willis's second book, To Say Nothing About the Dog -- I much preferred this one to the first!!

COMPLETED Time Tunnel to Londinium by Olli Tooley (no touchstone)

My review:

Novella for children about a boy who goes back in time to Antonine Londinium.

Just a germ of an idea which really could do with being expanded. Boy goes back in time, meets another boy, explores the city and has dinner with him, and then comes back to the present. And that's it.

>32 leslie.98:, agree!

Well it almost took me the whole month, I have finished A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon, book 6 in the Outlander series. It was a great read, all 1400+ pages of it.

>35 Roro8: 1400+ pages? Ouch.

I've read some 900+ page chunksters, but I don't think I've ever read a book as long as that one!

December thread is UP!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/242393#

This does not take me anywhere that is a December thread?

>35 Roro8: Wow, that is a real doorstopper!

I finished 1634: The Baltic War from the Ring of Fire series, about modern-day Americans that settle in Germany at the time of the Thirty Years' war.

I finished L. Sprague De Camp's Years in the Making: The Time-Travel Stories. Eight short stories, interspersed with time travel poetry (yes, really!). They ranged from 14 to 170 pages; my favorite was Lest Darkness Falls about a guy who gets thrust back to ~500 AD Italy. Martin is a historian, maybe an archaeologist or anthropologist, and proceeds to do what he can to make a living and try to change the future direction of his time in Italy such that it doesn't get taken over by the Goths, "lest darkness falls". He invents brandy, the printing press, the telegraph and all sorts of stuff. Pretty fun!

Glad we got some good reading in for time travel month. I meant to point this out at the beginning of the month, but I forgot - there is a group here called Time Travel, Alternate Histories and Parallel Worlds that has some interesting threads and good resources and you might want to check out.

>39 mathgirl40:, I reckon it will be at least a year before I'm ready to take on the next one...... unless there is another time travel theme earlier.