Best time travel fiction books according to redditors
We found 111 Reddit comments discussing the best time travel fiction books. We ranked the 24 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 111 Reddit comments discussing the best time travel fiction books. We ranked the 24 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
I try to be honest about who I am and where I came from. When people ask about my parents, I usually keep it as vague as they'll allow. But there's always that one friend or date who, sitting across the table from you with a fistful of french fries, will end one of their long, humorless, self-effacing monologues by looking at you and saying, with an inflection in their voice, "Oh, but I've been talking too much haven't I? What about you? What were your parents like?"
I don't lie at this point. My mom says I should, but my mom's just ashamed that it even happened to her. And not even for a good reason. I remember on my fourteenth birthday when she was driving me to the toy store, she said, "Now Chloe, honey, a lot of people might ask where daddy is. And what are you gonna tell them?"
"In hell?"
"No."
"In a lake of fire."
"No!"
"But he is!"
"Yes, but we don't tell people that, do we?"
"Why? Shouldn't you be proud of being part of the second virgin birth ever?"
"No one is proud to be a virgin," she said, looking me in the eye. "No one."
She had me there.
Anyway, in such a situation as someone is seated across from me, waiting silently for me to tell them about my father, I just flat out say he's Satan, and they'll probably meet him someday unless they're really nice. Or lucky. That's when they'll laugh and change the subject, or persist until they come to the conclusion that I'm being difficult, or that my father's actually dead or, worse, the owner of the restaurant we're at.
"Is he watching right now?" a guy once asked, looking around.
"Who?"
"No one," he said. Then he saw a big waiter standing by a wall tapping his foot. "Is that him?"
I identified the worst thing about being Anti-Jesus a long time ago, but the second worst thing will either surprise you or seem obvious, depending on how far you live from the bible belt. See, as Anti-Jesus, I do actually have the ability to speak to divine and demonic beings. So I have sat down and actually chatted with God. I don't bother anymore though, because it usually gets weird fast.
Last time I got on my knees and prayed, I was seventeen, and I was doing it quietly in my bedroom. "Please God, don't let anyone tag me in those pictures from last night. Please God, I swear I'll feed a kitten and pet a homeless person."
"Uh, hello?" said a voice in my head.
"God! Hi!"
"Uhh."
"God, please. Listen."
"Uhh, we're sorry. The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Beep."
"But God!"
"Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!"
The number one worst thing about being Satan's daughter is knowing exactly how sinful every person around me has been in their lives. It's usually signified by an aura around them that I can only see when I close my eyes. I go by homeless men and blink for just a split second and get a flash of a blue aura. At my job as a bank teller, I see men with perfect hair, broad shoulders, sharp jaws and thousand-dollar suits walk in. Red aura.
I see these things and wonder what beautiful things this man has done that has led him nonetheless to be sitting in an alleyway on a December night in New York City, or what ugly things this other man has done that led him nonetheless to be pulling into the parking lot in a car that costs more than my house.
Sure the one will soar in heaven, and the other will burn in hell, but is that any justification at the end of the day?
And then there are the cases that break my heart, like this guy I'd had my eye on for months. I first met him outside the back of a convenience store at the edge of town. There was a big gravel lot behind it, and at the furthest corner where some trash had been piled near the wall, a momma cat and her baby kitties were hiding away from the world. I went there once a week to drop off some cat food, thinking I was their sole protector, until one week I went on a different day and found a guy who'd also taken up the job.
When he heard me coming, he stood up straighter and turned to look, slight panic in the tightening of the corners of his mouth.
"Hi," I said. "You too?"
He sighed and then smiled. "Me too."
"I just hate to see a little baby suffer," I said.
He nodded. "I know what you mean."
I refused to close my eyes. Refused to blink. Refused to judge him on anything other than what he presented me with. And every week we met back at that same spot, and we talked a little more, and then we left, until eventually we were talking a lot before and after feeding the cats, and most of the conversation wasn't about cats.
"Hey, you wanna get coffee sometime?" he asked one day as we were walking out of the lot.
"Sure," I said.
"How about right now?"
I smiled. "Sure, I'm not busy at the moment."
"Great. My car's over this way. I gotta stop at my house real quick and then we'll be on our way."
I nodded and stood there a moment. Silence.
He grinned. "What's wrong? Thinking about something?"
I nodded.
He waited.
I stood there, facing him, and finally decided to close my eyes.
And I saw his aura.
"I should've known," I muttered to myself.
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If you enjoyed my writing, I've written a book you may enjoy.
Also, here's another prompt I've done that you might like.
I have a recommendation, though I'm preparing myself for potential downvotes.
Perjure: Welcome to the Multiverse is a scifi story heavily inspired by ASOIAF. The tl;dr explanation is that the Multiverse is not an infinite set of alternate universes, but a void in which infinite separate universes exist. Basically the Multiverse is to a universe as the universe is to a galaxy--some people can travel between them and visit the planets within.
You end up with people from different eras mixing. Half-cyborg people interacting with worlds that are still in the dark ages, or trans-human half-AI intelligences interacting with the equivalent of 21st century people.
There's an organization called the Watchers who try to keep the universes segregated--humans in these universes, non-humans in those universes--and the plot centers around an alien race that is essentially a sentient disease. It spreads through food and water, and when it infects a human body it takes it over and adds it to the hive mind. The Watchers try to wipe this creature out, but the main character needs it alive because it can help him restore his home universe, which was destroyed--the universe Earth existed in.
The story is told over 4 POV's, and there's a lot of political maneuvering, backstabbing, plot-twisting and lore, which is all heavily inspired by book series like ASOIAF and TV shows like House of Cards.
Full disclosure, and the reason I might get downvoted, if anyone reads this at all: I'm the author. Still, this is honestly the story I've been reading and re-reading (editing, working on the sequel) as I await TWOW.
Well first of all, there's the book series that the whole show was based on; the Montauk Project book series. However, these are more like guide books without a plot and claiming to be non-fiction, but they are interesting. If you're willing to put up with the authors' many, many tangents in regards to aliens, Nazis and "sex magick", there's quite a bit of useful information about how psychics work, what MKUltra did, how isolation tanks function, what the psychic kids were like, how possessions and "spies" worked, what exactly the Upside-Down (or rather "the Outside" as it was originally called) is and how the "actual" 1983 gate-opening event happened.
There's also two novels based off of those books called Montauk and The Montauk Monster. The former is about a group of teenagers vacationing in Montauk who end up having to deal with the psychic kids, government cover-ups and creatures of the Outside. The latter concerns a cop having to deal with more government cover-ups to solve some disappearances and fight more monsters.
I haven't read either of those two books yet, but they both have rather positive reviews so they seem to be worth a read.
If you want to pick up a great anthology of flash fiction and also help out The Scares That Care charity, pick up Horror d'Oeuvres.
If longer stories are your thing, try Vices and Virtues.
Or maybe anthologies aren't your thing? Try out The Laws of Nature.
Perhaps you're into science fiction? Go for Space, and Other Bad Ideas.
The most obvious would of course be A Christmas Carol. It's a pretty good little book, if you haven't read it.
I love the poem "Nicholas Was..." by Neil Gaiman
I just discovered the Chronicles of St. Mary's by Jodi Taylor. Witty time travel sci-fi. It has apparently become a Christmas tradition for her to release a short story about some crisis that happens on/around Christmas and has to be fixed on the DL. I listened to "Ships and Stings and Wedding Rings" and it was a lot of fun. Plus, it looks like all 3 of the Christmas stories are free on Audible.
Julian May's Pliocene Exile series involves a one way time portal to the distant past, where immigrants discover humanoid aliens inhabiting the planet. More fantasy than SF, but a good read.
I loved Stephen Baxter's Anti Ice and his "sequel" to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine called The Time Ships (both a more "hard sci fi" take on the genre).
I'm also really digging Lindsay Buroker's novella series set in the Yukon that starts with Flash Gold (the first one is free)
Michael Coorlim's series is also quite good: And they called her Spider (and the first one is free as well).
I've not yet read Michael Moorcock's The Warlord of the Air but I hear that is also pretty excellent.
EDIT: For a kind of more out-there (but tons of fun) steampunk, check out Michael Forstchen's Lost Regiment Series (the first book is Rally Cry) about a Civil War regiment transported to an alien world where the natives raise and eat humans as cattle. The steampunk doesn't really show up until the 2nd or 3rd book, but a very engrossing series.
Sure, how about some amazing fantasy series recommendations from the 80s:
Wizard War
The Riftwar Saga
The Saga of Pliocene Exile
The Way Series These show as 2011+ because it is the kindle addition. It is scifi, as well, but basically fantasy and awesome.
The Chronicles of Amber. K this was the 70s but wow so good.
Here are all the local Amazon links I could find.
amazon.co.uk
amazon.ca
amazon.com.au
amazon.in
amazon.com.mx
amazon.de
amazon.it
amazon.es
Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
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Nobody mentioned Gregory Benford Galactic Center series. It is pretty ambitious in scale (though not as much so as Star Maker).
Also encompassing huge scope is Baxter's novel The Time Ships.
Bridgers series by Stan C Smith
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YQCDK9L
Frustrated with teaching and seeking a life of adventure, Albert Einstein builds a time machine intending to visit the 19th century and trade places with his natural doppelganger, Mark Twain.
Unbeknownst to him, Nazi scientists have secretly been developing their own time travel plans with ambitions to conquer the world two generations earlier using an army of reanimated corpses from the first World War! It's up to the world's greatest scientist to save history, but he's going to need help from a cantankerous writer to do it...
This is part three in the Farcical Zombie Trilogy. This is A GERMAN SCIENTIST ON SAMUEL CLEMENS' FRONT PORCH!
Finished my third "reading" and first listening-to of The Time Ships, a great book, an official sequel to The Time Machine written by Stephen Baxter. If you like amazingly complex stories of time travel, it's a real treat. Best of all was the performance by the reader, who got all the accents perfect, including Nebogpifel, the Morlock from the year 657,208. Highly recommended!
https://www.amazon.com/Time-Ships-Stephen-Baxter/dp/0061056480
I've never heard of any of these nor their authors. Of the ones that I surveyed at random, it looks like the best bets with high page counts + good reviews are:
The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter.
Includes all of the above(WW2, multiple alternate time lines, A time machine, War, Gov't meddling, etc. Sequel to the Time Machine. Fucking awesome.
http://www.amazon.com/Time-Ships-Stephen-Baxter/dp/0061056480
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Ships
I agree about Baxter. His characters are almost uniquely poorly drawn and he manages to turn high-concept SF ideas into quite boring stories. I have enjoyed his anti-ice stories though, and The Time Ships was a half good successor to the Time Machine.
For Future Reference: Time Travel Can Kind of Suck. The entire book doesn't take place in the future, but the future in the book is very much a settled, non-collapsing utopia.
How I Met Van and Numan: A comical look into a science fiction future that is both absurd and banal. Follow the misadventures of two clones named Van and Numan.
It's $15.00 and available [here]
(http://www.amazon.com/How-Numan-Future-Present-Past/dp/1500733431)
Odd. The Amazon page shows that you can buy it now for me.
The actual ebook is at
https://www.amazon.com/Paralysis-Paradox-Travel-Through-Adventure-ebook/dp/B00VX75TKU
The Chronothon: A Time Travel Adventure.
It's a sequel to In Times Like These where a group of friends meet with an accident that allows them to move through time.
I came across it as a free book a while back and found myself really liking it.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fir-Lodge-first-novel-Restarter-ebook/dp/B07BM2ZZ95/ref=nodl_