Time Travel Fiction
Updated 5/09
Travel to other time periods along with the characters in these novels. The importance of a time travel novel is not where/when the traveler goes, but what effects his/her actions will have on other time periods, as well as the effects on themselves and other people.
Time Patrol by Poul Anderson (Science Fiction)
A compilation of the author's short stories about The Time Patrol in which readers are given fascinating glimpses of people and places throughout history – prehistoric, Persian, Roman civilizations, etc. – as seen through the 20th-century eyes of agent Manse Everard.
Riding Shotgun by Rita Mae Brown (Adult Fiction)
Horrified when her beloved husband dies while making love to her sister, Cig Blackwood ventures into the woods and emerges in 1699, a period that she grows to love before she is harshly returned to the present.
Kindred by Octavia Butler (Science Fiction)
Inexplicably pulled back in time to the antebellum South, a contemporary black woman, raised in the age of Civil Rights and Black Power, must confront the harsh realities of black history in America.
Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card (Science Fiction)
Three time travelers from a ruined and doomed future Earth journey to the time of Columbus' landing, hoping to alter events so that the contact between the Eastern and Western hemispheres will be less disastrous for the American Indians – indeed, for the whole world. Also try Card’s Enchantment.
Timeline by Michael Crichton (Adult Fiction)
Sometime in the future, a group of students is studying an archaeological site in France when the professor in charge disappears. While uncovering 600-year-old documents from the remains of a monastery, they discover a note dated April 7, 1357, and written in the professor's hand that says "Help me."
The Little Book by Selden Edwards (Adult Fiction)
Forty-seven-year-old Wheeler Burden is living in 1988 San Francisco until he is mysteriously transported to fin de siecle Vienna, a city that he finds strangely familiar, where he finds a mentor in Sigmund Freud, falls in love with a young American woman, and gains insight into the war-hero father he never knew.
Time and Again by Jack Finney (Adult Fiction)
Simon Morley moves into the Dakota apartments and returns to the year 1882 under hypnosis, where he falls in love and refuses to change records for the government agency controlling his experiment. Also try the sequel From Time To Time.
1632 by Eric Flint (Science Fiction)
A mysterious accident in time causes 21st-century American democracy to collide head-on with the Thirty Years War in 17th-century Germany as Mike Stearn and a group of armed miners take on a gang of strangely attired invaders who are threatening peaceful Grantville, West Virginia. Also try the rest of the Assisti Shards series, written by Flint and David Weber, and also Time Spike.
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (Adult Fiction)
In Scotland with her husband on a second honeymoon after World War II, Claire enters a circle of stones and is transported back to the Battle of Culloden 200 years earlier, where she must marry a Scot to save her husband. Also try the rest of the Outlander series.
Fallam’s Secret by Denise Giardina (Adult Fiction)
Following a strange note left to her by her late uncle, Lydde finds herself transported back to England in 1657, where the ruling Puritans have outlawed all forms of entertainment and where she falls in love with a bandit named Raven.
Replay by Ken Grimwood (Adult Fiction)
In 1988 43-year-old Jeff Winston died of a heart attack. But then he awoke, and it was 1963; Jeff was 18 all over again, his memory of the next two decades intact. This time around Jeff would gain all the power and wealth he never had before. This time around he'd know how to do it right...until next time.
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers (Science Fiction)
Takes readers from contemporary America to Regency England and beyond. Brendan Doyle is hired to act as a specialist for a group of time-traveling tourists on their way to hear a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Doyle is stranded in a time for which he is ill equipped to survive. He becomes embroiled with rival beggar guilds and crosses paths with Horrabin, a grotesque and evil clown. But Doyle has other concerns, as well: Egyptian sorcerers, an urban werewolf and the fate of a mysterious poet are all part of an ancient plot that could cost Doyle his life.
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (Adult Fiction)
A Yankee of the late 19th century is accidentally hit on the head and finds himself in King Arthur's English court, where he tries to show the people there how to change things and advance the culture.
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut (Adult Fiction)
After the universe decides to back up 10 years and everyone must live through the ‘90s again, author Kurt Vonnegut finds himself trying to write a book called Timequake, which he knows he will never finish since he already did not finish it. Also try Slaughterhouse Five.
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (Science Fiction)
Beginning in the comfortably prosperous world of the Victorian professional classes, a scientist proposes the possibility of traveling in the fourth dimension – Time – and is propelled into the far distant future to find shockingly different “people” living there.
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (Science Fiction)
A young, 21st-century historian travels back in time to the Middle Ages, mistakenly arrives at the time of the Black Death, and becomes stranded there because a virulent influenza epidemic has broken out at the Oxford research facility back where she started. Also try To Say Nothing of the Dog.
Updated by D. Brooks—05/09—Cary Public Library / Wake County Public Libraries—Annotations from Library Catalog and Novelist