I'm looking for some novels involving time travel, but I have read quite a lot of them already, so I will try to give a lot of examples of what I like/don't like. There are two aspects of the genre that I enjoy: (1) a person faces an unknown cultural experience and the difference between the two times is explored (essentially, a social history), or (2) an unusual or non-conventional way of traveling through time and the interesting paradoxes or problems it exposes. Examples of (1) include Kindred, Doomsday Book, Blackout, All Clear, and Time and Again. Examples of (2) include The Seven Year Slip, The Time Traveler's Wife, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Recursion, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, and The Other Valley. I enjoyed all of those books.
A bit more on my preferences – In general, I prefer that books do not include a fictional future time or technology (except, of course, for time machines!). Examples of books with a fictional future include The End of Eternity, The Time Machine, The Many Colored Land, and In the Garden of Iden. All of these books were okay but I didn't love them. It isn't a dealbreaker, it's just less likely to hit. My favorite concept is where someone from the past struggles to deal with a period that lies in their future, but this type of book seems to be rare. The only examples I know of are The Ministry of Time and The Outcasts of Time. (I also like vampire novels that focus on the fish-out-of-water aspect more than the monstrous side; they are traveling forward in time at the usual speed but still reaching the distant-to-them future.) Please, absolutely no time travel historical romance or YA! Some romance if fine, but I do not want it as the ultimate goal.
Some other books I quite liked are Sea of Tranquility, The Kingdoms, This Time Tomorrow, Oona Out of Order, Life After Life, and The Psychology of Time Travel. Some books I found okay but didn't love were: Wrong Place Wrong Time, Cassandra in Reverse, Time Enough for Love, Island in the Sea of Time, Lost in Time, A Rip Through Time, A Murder in Time, How to Stop Time and All Our Wrong Todays. Some books I disliked were This is How You Lose the Time War (because it had an invented future and a stylized letter-based narrative) and A Slip in Time (because it is a historic romance).
My current read is The Frozen People (about 50% done), and I like it so far.
by AnotherPointlessName
4 Comments
an ocean of minutes by Thea Lim. Loved this book and thought time travel was used in an interesting way
Have you tried the Jodi Taylor St Mary’s series?
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis! So good.