I suggest that there have been three peaks of time travel fiction:
Poul Anderson's two Time Patrol volumes;
Jack Finney's two Time novels;
Audrey Niffeneger's The Time Traveler's Wife.
For a while, there were two peaks, then The Time Traveler's Wife was published.
The following works are close seconds:
"By His Bootstraps" by Robert Heinlein;
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers;
There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson.
As ever on any such lists, Anderson must appear at least twice. Even on these lists, only those works that confine themselves to the circular causality paradox avoid any logical problems.
I would like to find a fourth peak. Either it has not been published yet or it has been published but I do not know about it yet. I have been given an anthology of twenty five relatively recent time travel stories. However, another factor intervenes. Unless we are professional critics, we need to have some reason to think that a work of fiction might be worth reading before we are motivated to begin reading it. This does not involve prejudging anything. I never set out to read a formulaic Mills and Boon romantic novel although no doubt many of these are good at what they do and it remains possible, however unlikely, that one such will transcend its genre to become a fully rounded novel.
I have read some of the new time travel stories but am having trouble reading them all. In "Palely Loitering," Christopher Priest builds what seems to be an elaborate circular causality structure, then spoils it, in my opinion, with a sudden causality violation. The events described cannot fit into a single timeline but, if our hero has initiated and remained in a divergent timeline, then he cannot return home as he sets out to do at the very end because he is now in a timeline where his younger self's life went differently - although maybe we are supposed to realize this?
I continue to derive more aesthetic and intellectual pleasure from rereading and reassessing the Time Patrol than from reading most other accounts of time travel.
