The best time travel novels

6 min readOct 18, 2021

Time travel is one of the most familiar tropes in science fiction. Many scholars trace the idea to Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol (1843) and Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). (Others differ, finding antecedents as early as 1733 in Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century.) But time travel’s first occurrence in modern science fiction came in 1895 with the publication of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

Early in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, time travel anchored popular works such as L. Sprague de Camp’s novel, Lest Darkness Fall (1939), Robert Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps (1941), and A.E. van Vogt’s The Seesaw (1941). Prominent later examples include Isaac Asimov’s A Pebble in Time (1950), Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder (1952), Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), Harry Harrison’s The Technicolor Time Machine (1967), and Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station (1968). During the first half-century of modern science fiction, it was rare for any well-established author not to write at least one time travel novel. Many wrote several.

Having read many of the time travel stories published during the genre’s early years, I’ve concentrated largely on more recent works. Below I’m listing the best of those I’ve encountered so far. They’re listed in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names.

TIMESCAPE BY GREGORY BENFORD (1980) 514 PAGES ★★★★☆ — AN INGENIOUS TWIST ON TIME TRAVEL

Physics can drive you crazy. Solid matter isn’t solid. Black holes don’t just make matter and light disappear; they suck up information, too. And Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Go figure. And if paradoxes like these rattle your nerves, you may want to avoid reading Gregory Benford’s masterful hard-science-fiction novel about time travel, Timescape. It’s a brilliant story, and gracefully written. But it will challenge your reading comprehension unless you’re well versed in contemporary physics. Read more.

FATA MORGANA BY STEVEN R. BOYETT AND KEN MITCHRONEY (2017) 384 PAGES ★★★★☆ — CLEVER PLOT TWISTS IN A TIME TRAVEL TALE

Science fiction authors love time travel stories, because it affords them abundant opportunities to build plots full of clever plot twists and turns. Sometimes the surprises are really anything but shocking. But that’s not the case with the ingenious tale Steven R. Boyett and Ken Mitchroney have written under the title Fata Morgana. Perhaps someone more discerning than I am could suss out the plot twists in advance, but I was taken aback when the reality descended on me of what really happens in this well-paced story. Read more.

HERE AND NOW AND THEN BY MIKE CHEN (2019) 336 PAGES ★★★★☆ — A NOVEL TREATMENT OF TIME TRAVEL IN THIS PROMISING SCIENCE FICTION DEBUT

Time travel is one of the themes most commonly found in classic science fiction. But it’s taken a back seat in recent years to dystopian novels and space opera, not to mention epic fantasy (which I don’t consider science fiction at all). Of course, time travel back to the past has no basis in known science (although relativity makes time travel forward quite easy). But the paradoxes that open up in any logical treatment of the subject offer a wealth of possible plots. That’s the opening for suspense that Mike Chen found in his promising science fiction debut, Here and Now and Then. Read more.

THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE BY ANNALEE NEWITZ (2019) 344 PAGES ★★★★☆ — ALTERNATE FEMINIST HISTORY BY A GIFTED SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR

What is history, and how does it work? We know, of course, that history isn’t fixed and immutable. It’s subject to the revision and reinterpretation of successive waves of scholars. Sometimes the fresh approach is based on new information that comes to light. But more often what we call history is merely a story historians tell us using carefully selected facts filtered through the cloudy lens of their own values and beliefs. We know, too, that history doesn’t travel in straight lines. But what makes it swerve? Indeed, how does change happen? Is it the product of the individual genius of so-called Great Men or the inevitable outcome of the ideas and social movements that engage a nation or an era? These are among the questions explored in Annalee Newitz’s thought-provoking feminist alternate history, The Future of Another Timeline. Read more.

THE CONTINUUM (PLACE IN TIME #1) BY WENDY NIKEL (2018) 174 PAGES ★★★★☆ — AN INGENIOUS TAKE ON TIME TRAVEL

Novels about time travel frequently twist themselves into knots about the paradox that comes into play when travelers attempt to change something in the past that might mean they would never have been born. In The Continuum, the first of a series by science fiction newcomer Wendy Nikel, the grandfather paradox never surfaces . . . but somehow it seems that it ought to. The novel is a truly original take on time travel. Read more.

THE DOOMSDAY BOOK BY CONNIE WILLIS — A TIME TRAVEL NOVEL ABOUT THE BLACK DEATH

What do we know about the past, and how do we know it? Historians rely largely on the contemporaneous written records they call primary sources. But other disciplines make important contributions to history as well, including archaeology, physics, and genetics. Still, what they learn comes exclusively from what remains of the past. What if historians could learn first-hand by sending scholars into previous centuries to compare the historical record to the reality? Award-winning author Connie Willis explores that idea in her monumental 1992 science fiction tale, The Doomsday Book, a novel about the Black Death. Read more.

TIME TRAVEL NOVELS THAT DIDN’T MAKE THE GRADE

Of course, I’ve read a lot more time travel stories than these few. I’m listing above only the best ones I’ve come across in recent years. Below, however, are several additional time travel novels I’ve read and reviewed that don’t merit inclusion above.

Permafrost by Alastair Reynolds (2019) 178 pages ★★★☆☆ — Time travel and the apocalypse

The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson (1965) 186 pages ★★★☆☆ — A legendary sci-fi author makes a mess of time travel

Feedback (First Contact # 3) by Peter Cawdron (2014) 462 pages ★★★☆☆ — Time travel dominates this tale of First Contact

Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg (1967) 166 pages ★★★★☆ — A science fiction Grand Master gets it wrong about the future

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