Time and Dimension Travel Books?

Question

What are some of your Favorite Time and/or Dimension Travel books?

I like the "Myth" books by Robert Aspirin.
The "Time Quartet" by Madeleine L'Engle
The Time Keeper Trilogy by Barbara Bartholomew

I ask, because books like these fascinate me. They all have such interesting views.

Answer 1

You will find this an unconventional answer, but I hope you get around to picking up Martin Amis' TIME'S ARROW. It is a tale of time travel, but not in the way we normally think of it. Amis is one of the best known of the current crop of English satirists, and his works are often quite acerbic. He is the son of another great satirist, the late Kingsley Amis.This story, though, is wonderfully weird.

You see, the tale is told in reverse. Not merely in sequential reverse, as in the last scene coming first, but as if events were actually flowing backwards. It begins, as all lives inevitablty begin, in an emergency room, as doctors bring the protagonist to life with their equipment. A strange narrarator is inside the head of the central character, and he tells us events as he sees them. He has no notion of the human experience, so he doesn't realize that he's seeing things backwards. He calls himself Tod T. Friendly.

The result is a strange and bombastic narration which keeps you clutching your gut in laughter. Our narrator believes, for instance, that nutrition comes to us in long brown pellets that we suck up through the toilet, into our rectums. Several hours later, we regurgitate it through our mouths, and arrange it into distinct groups on our plate. Then we put this material through a baking or cooking process, obviously to purify it. Next the regurgitated matter goes into cans, bags or boxes. We take all of this to the grocery store, and cashiers give us money for it. It then leaves the grocery store to be reprocessed.

This is how the whole novel goes, and its really really brilliant. At one point, Tod muses about John F. Kennedy, brought into this world by snipers and assassins. Elsewhere, he dreads his fate, which is the fate of every human - that he will eventually grow smaller and smaller. His sexual functioning will cease. He will forget everything he knows, even how to read and count. He will lose his body hair, as do all the little elderly people. Finally, he'll just be a bawling lump and he will be forced to spend his last days inside his mother, until her body absorbs him.

Read this book, and your understanding of fiction will never be the same. You should know in advance, however, that the book does explore the holocaust. For some readers, that's just too difficult a subject. If you can deal with that, though, it ought to be an eye-opener of a book.

Answer 2

My fav dimension travel book would have to be the classic Alice in Wonderland.

You might like Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" series. The first is "The Eyre Affair". In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë's novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde's ingenious fantasy-enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel--unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix.

Answer 3

Assume time travel is not an original idea and the question is not the how but the why to travel in time. Quite often the best way to go forward in time is by accident. The best way to go back in time is by imagination and or contrivance. No one ever thinks to kill people to let them time travel. It is the easiest way to free one self from earthly constraints. Dead people do not have the same limitations as the living. So I suggest you find a biochemical bio physical solution the turns matter into something else and back again. Of course this is not original in its largest sense and connects to Frankenstein and cheating death at some point. Still, it has not been done well in this area.

Answer 4

A Wrinkle in Time- Madeleine L'Engle
Slaughter House Five- Kurt Vonnegut

Answer 5

Isaac Asimov´s The Gods Themselves

Answer 6

I absolutely loved The TIme Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

Answer 7

I like the instruction manuals for dimensional travel

Answer 8

Time line-Michael Crichton

Answer 9

"To Say Nothing of the Dog" by Connie Willis is really fun.