Reddit mentions: The best time travel fiction books

I'm ashamed to admit it, but my first ride into town was in the back of a police car.

"I found a car for you," the officer said, not even bothering to glance back at me.

"For me?"

He nodded once. "Chevy truck. Got it off an Indian. You remember La Push?"

I shook my head, though he couldn't see it.

He turned off the freeway onto a backwoods road, glancing in the rearview mirror the whole time, until he saw me looking back and flicked his eyes away with a quick little blink. He looked like a mobster taking his friend into the woods to rub him out.

I looked out the window, and I watched the trees going by, lined up like boards in a picket fence and topped off with afros of leaves, bright green and shifting altogether like scales on the hide of an angry lizard. Above, the smoky skies hid away both moon and sun so as to leave we tiny earthlings to only guess at the time of day.

And then the rain started.

"It's cheap," he said.

I looked at the back of his head. "What is?"

"The car."

"How cheap is cheap?"

He glanced at the rearview mirror. "Well, honey, I kind of bought it for you. As a homecoming gift."

"You didn't need to do that, dad--"

He held up a hand. "I don't mind," he said, shaking his head. "I know you don't like riding around in a beat up cop car. And I want you to be happy here."

I stared forward as I said, "That's really nice, dad. Thanks. I really appreciate it."

"Well, now," he mumbled, a faint flush on his cheeks. "You're welcome."

By the time we arrived at his house, the clouds had dispersed just enough to reveal the vague shape of the horizon, where the setting sun painted its bleary shade of yellow in all that grey, washed out like an image rendered in watercolor. Twilight was coming. And with it, a New Moon.

The officer let me out of the car. "Welcome to Forks," he said.

"Thanks, Charlie--" I caught myself, stopped, looked down, and then looked him in the eye again. "Thanks again, dad," I said.

"Bella, you know you don't have to thank me for anything. Now let's get in before it gets dark." He smiled, and I could see in the way his skin folded around the curve of his mouth and his eyes squinted just slightly that it was an honest smile--something he wasn't often capable of.

"What're you scared of?" I said, smiling back. "Vampires?"

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If you liked this, you may like this other prompt I did a few days ago.

If you like my writing style, I've also written a book that you can get here.

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.

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

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.

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.

Anti Ice by Stephan Baxter is awesome (19th century England gets its hands on antimatter), as is his The Time Ships which is basically a sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.

I really enjoyed Lindsay Buroker's Flash Gold series about an inventor in the Yukon, and Michael Coorlim's And They Called Her Spider was also quite fun (an assassin is on the loose in London).

Finally, I'll hock my own steampunk short story, To Rescue General Gordon which is about 3 British soldiers who steal an airship to rescue General Charles "Chinese" Gordon in the Sudan.

Hey, I am with you. And I have seen many people on this sub have the same question/dislike for marketing.

One thing I have read pretty consistently is that until you have at least 3 books published, marketing is not that important. The rough formula being spend 90% of your time writing your next book and only 10% marketing until you get 3+ books. And even then the split is only like 70/30.

I have only one book out, New Alcatraz now and I am working on my second. I have done very little marketing. I have started a FB page (which is bare because I have avoided FB for more than a decade). But it is free. I have also started a blog (which is also bare because I would rather write my book than blog). This wasn't free. I had to pay for the domain name. These are all just outlets for people to learn about your book. But what about getting people to go to your FB page or blog?

That is a slow burn. As you write you can join forums, such as reddit and goodreads.

I look at marketing my book less as advertising and more of talking to people (who are interested) about something I am passionate about. The rest I am hoping word of mouth will get me a few more sales as well. There is no step by step guide that I know of. If it was "do XYZ and you will sell books" we would all be doing XYZ.

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.

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 Infinet (Oct. 2017, ~400 pages, about a quantum computer that takes over the Internet of Things)
  
• Army of God (Sept. 2017, 398 pages, Biblical speculation)
  
• Darkly Sweet (Dec. 2017, 352 pages, a magic fantasy)
  
• Journey to Aviad (Wind Rider Chronicles Book 1) (2011, 282 pages, Christian medieval fantasy)
  
• Prometheus, A New Dawn (2016, 228 pages, sci-fi)
  
• Echoes (The Echoverse Book 1) (Jan. 2018, 219 pages, cyberpunk thriller)
  
• Recursion (June 2017, 136 pages, time-travel thriller)

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

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

amazon.co.jp

amazon.fr

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, amazon.co.jp, amazon.fr, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

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.

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 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.

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.

Just published my first book if you're interested in checking it out! I also recommend Red Rising. Also check out "Off to be the Wizard" if you like RPO, it's in a similar vein.

https://www.amazon.com/Chronos-David-ORourke/dp/0692068368/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524085328&sr=1-7&keywords=chronos

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!

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.

Looks all science-fictiony.

Maybe like The Chronoliths or Epoch

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.

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

Bridgers series by Stan C Smith

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fir-Lodge-first-novel-Restarter-ebook/dp/B07BM2ZZ95/ref=nodl_