Help Wanted!

[realthog]

I've been asked to write a chapter on time-travel stories for an academic book about the subgenres of science fiction, and naturally I've been making notes on books/stories I'd be wise to include. There are plenty of obvious candidates, from The Time Machine through A Connecticut Yankee to The Time Traveler's Wife, but I was wondering if some of you folk could help me by suggesting gems I might otherwise all too easily overlook.

Kids' and YA books are eligible alongside adult ones (hello, Ms L'Engle, and you too, Mr Kipling), but the books/stories must have some significance in terms of either fame or their bringing of something interesting and new to the time-travel corpus. I'm going to be an elitist prig and discount entirely novels produced as elements of TV, gaming or movie franchises, although by all means suggest relevant movies or games. Timeslip romances (like Richard Matheson's Somewhere in Time) are certainly within my remit.

I'd be really grateful for your help, and as a token of my appreciation will be only too glad to raise a glass of beer on your behalf . . . Hell, I'm no scrooge: make that two glasses of beer!

Comments

[coth.livejournal.com]

Surprised no one has mentioned Heinlein's By His Bootstraps - surely the ur-time-travel story of them all? - even if only to make sure you've got it.

Octavia Butler's Kindred - absolutely essential - uses time travel to explore issues of identity, race and power.

Backward, Turn Backward (1988, in Crown of Stars) by James Tiptree/Alice Sheldon which involves a girl who travels back and forward in time while she insists on her own destruction - extremely powerful.

Lots of Steve Baxter's books involve manipulating wormholes to travel in time, starting with the Xeelee, including the Baxter/Clarke collaboration Light of Other Days, and carrying on in his more recent Manifold trilogy.

Very difficult these days to separate time travel from alternate worlds, of course.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Thanks for these! I'd not thought of the Tiptree; now for the fun of trying to track down a copy.