HG Wells: the story of the Time Traveler's journey to the future.
Robert Heinlein: two stories and one novel about time travelers experiencing circular causality in the future.
Harry Harrison and Tim Powers: one novel each about time travelers experiencing circular causality in historical periods.
L Sprague de Camp and Ward Moore: one novel each about time travelers experiencing causality violation in historical periods.
Poul Anderson: a long story about a traveler around the circle of time.
Poul Anderson: a novel about time travelers experiencing circular causality in Atlantean prehistory.
Poul Anderson: two novels about time travelers experiencing circular causality in historical and future periods.
Poul Anderson: a series of stories and novels about an organization of time travelers experiencing both causality paradoxes in many historical periods.
Jack Finney: one collection and two long novels about time travelers to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States.
Richard Matheson and Audrey Niffeneger: one novel each about circular causality in romantic relationships.
I do not rate A Connecticut Yankee highly but Twain was there before Wells and before the Wellsian phrase "time traveling." I had thought of Anderson's Time Patrol series and Finney's two Time novels as the two peaks of time travel fiction but later had to add Niffeneger's The Time Traveler's Wife. Adhering to a single consistent timeline, Niffeneger avoids the incoherencies that Finney generates with his causality violation.
2 comments:
My book club recently discussed '1632' by Eric Flint, & I mentioned a few other stories with a somewhat similar theme, time travelers trying to introduce higher tech to the past, mostly because they are involuntary time travelers & are doing so to survive. So I came up with a list plus a couple that aren't quite that but sort of related.
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain
exactly what it says on the tin :)
Lest Darkness Fall - L. Sprague de Camp
Martin Padway dumped from 1938 Rome to 535 Rome
He has unlikely but possible knowledge to give him a chance of personal survival & to make history better. Eg: he is an archeologist, is fluent in both 20th century Italian & Classical Latin so he can immediately converse in the intermediate language of the time. He has read with great attention the history by Procopius of what is about to happen.
The Man Who Came Early - Poul Anderson (one of my favorite SF authors)
Short story. Man dumped from 20th to 10th century Iceland.
A much more pessimistic take on the prospects of such a time castaway.
Anderson's Time Patrol stories may also be of interest.
Island in the Sea of Time - S. M. Stirling (& Sequels)
Another case of a whole village moved in time.
In this case Nantucket of about 1999 AD dumped to about 1200 BC.
Much of the conflict in the series arises from some of the time castaways preferring to use future knowledge to make themselves kings & aristocrats among the 'primitives' rather than being citizens of the Republic of Nantucket.
Safehold series - David Weber
Not time travel.
In the prologue humanity develops a Faster Than Light drive. They find evidence that one species has been exterminating possible competitors. Humanities preparations for the conflict aren't enough to win. The rest of the story is centuries later on the planet Safehold where a faction that wants to keep humanity permanently preindustrial to avoid attracting attention has control. Then what is done by some who don't like that policy drives the story.
Kind of related oddity:
Uncleftish Beholding - Poul Anderson
A short essay in English as it might have been, if rather than importing words from Greek & the Romance languages, English speakers had coined new Germanic terms for new scientific concepts. I enjoyed figuring out what the 'Ander-Saxon' terms meant.
Googling found a few online copies
Kaor, Jim!
Interesting comments4 albeit I would add some quibbles.
Yes, Martin Padway in DeCamp's LEST DARKNESS FALL did not esp. set to change the world when he got dumped into the Rome of the AD 530's, just trying to survive. But one thing led to another, as the saying goes!
Not quite related, except for being "Procopian," I would mention Dave Drake and S.M. Stirling's THE GENERAL series.
I too have read Eric Flint's 1632, and it is very much worth reading. But I found the more than 100 pages long Gretchen chapters in the middle over done and irritatingly preachy. The book was also marred by what I would call "unconscious" anti-Catholicism. Only unconscious, because that seems to have appalled Flint himself and these traces of bigotry were absent in later volumes.
Considering what human beings are like, I'm not surprised some of the characters dumped in the past in Stirling's Nantucket set out to use advanced knowledge to carve empires for themselves. Like William Walker.
"Uncleftish Beholding" should be thought of as Anderson's about what English might have become if there had been no Norman Conquest and hence nothing like the massive influence of French in shaping the language.
Ad astra! Sean
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