Category Archives: Time Travel

Review: 11/22/63 by Stephen King

I’m a fan of Stephen King, and 11/22/63 is one of his best. There’s more humor than horror, and a fantastic, convoluted run-up to one of the most infamous moments in American history.

An English teacher is shown a hole in time that leads to a bright, sunny day in 1958. The teacher decides the best thing to do is travel back in time and prevent the Kennedy assassination, five years hence.

However, spending five years in the past isn’t easy, and there are complications he never could have predicted.

Recommendation: Read it. It’s a massive tome (850 pages), but King knows how to spin a story, and he’s in top form here.

Review: Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Connie Willis is one of the few authors capable of humor, humanity, and what must be an ungodly amount of research, and she brings all these skills together in the masterful Doomsday Book.

In near-future Oxford, where time travel for purposes of historical research is relatively common, an eager young historian travels to medieval times. Unfortunately, things immediately go very wrong for her. Then a devastating pandemic hits the present day, and no one is able to help her, or even know she’s in trouble.

Recommendation: Read it. The characters range from deeply human to hilariously Dickensian, and the descriptions of the horrors of daily life in medieval times are some of the best I’ve ever read. Oh, and it’s a great story that won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.

Review: All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

All Our Wrong TodaysTom Barren in All Our Wrong Todays is from an ideal version of our present time. No war, no poverty, jet packs for all, and pretty much every starry-eyed prediction made in the 1950’s has come true. It’s awesome. But then Tom loses the love of his life and in his iffy mental state, does something stupid with a time machine. He screws everything up so badly that his amazing 2016 turns into a crap 2016: that is, our 2016. Now he’s got to fix it. Except that the love of his life is alive in our 2016…

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23 Best Time Travel Science Fiction Books

time travel

I’m not a huge fan of time travel because of all the paradoxes that are usually ignored or explained away badly. I also watched way too many Star Trek episodes where time travel was used as a fix-it for almost any situation, like some temporal Gorilla Glue.

Fortunately, the books below deal with time travel in intelligent (or just fun) ways, introduce cool ideas, and are generally excellent stories that are very well written.
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