The best time travel stories that have stood the test of… er… time

The first time-travel book I read, which is kind of appropriate, since it’s widely regarded as the first one written, and inspired many later works. It showed me that a great science fiction story, at its heart, is simply a great story set in a world that is somehow “other.” As a budding writer, I loved the freedom that a far distant future gave the author to imagine what might happen to the human race over the course of several hundred thousand years, and present a picture of an apparent utopia that had a hidden, and much darker, side. 

I found the breadth and depth of invented science in Asimov’s work breathtaking. The idea of a group of engineers who live outside time, calculating the “Minimum Necessary Change” in any situation to allow them to reset the passage of history in ways they believed benefited mankind is strangely compelling. The powerful lesson, that social engineering undertaken for the best of motives can have unforeseen and devastating consequences, has stayed with me my whole life. Lovers of science fiction often dream of setting off to explore the stars, yet here was a story of how our own naïve “cleverness” would ultimately defeat that dream and leave humanity alone in a dead universe.

I loved this book for so many reasons. Not normally a reader of romance, I picked it up because of its title, and immediately became lost in the story: the very epitome of a “great story in an unusual setting.” I was delighted with its fresh take on time travel, when I had thought the subject had nothing left to surprise me with. I found the characters well-drawn and easy to like, and the trials they face, as a result of the randomness of Henry’s time slips, are described with humour, pathos, wit, and high drama. The ending, with its poignant uncertainty, would normally have left me annoyed at the lack of resolution, but instead seemed to me to be the perfect way to close what is an extraordinarily original story.

Perhaps more of a “portal” story than strictly time travel, May’s Saga of the Exiles spurred my imagination from the very start, and was at least partly responsible for inspiring my own work. The scale is vast, and I found the mental (“metapsychic”) powers the Exiles develop cleverly categorized and utilized in the stories, both here and in the following Galactic Milieu trilogy. I was so wrapped up in these stories that, perhaps more than any other series I’ve read, I was sorry to leave them behind and have returned to reread them many times.

The time-travel aspect of the story – the Pliocene Gateway – is given an interesting set of temporal and geographical limitations which I found refreshingly realistic when compared with other tales of time travel.

What I loved about this is the way King, an acknowledged master of horror who is equally at home with SF thrillers, takes two long-standing tropes of time travel – that “the universe” will resist any attempt to change the course of time; and the law of unintended consequences that will trip up the unwary time traveler – and gives them a unique twist. Once again the time travel element has a limitation which both helps and hinders the protagonist as the stakes ratchet up throughout the story in ways I found both thrilling and entertaining, but the story is so much more than that, cleverly weaving in historical elements, a love story, and sub-plots that see the hero trying to solve multiple problems during his final trip to the past.

I have returned to reread this many times, finding something new in the story on each occasion. And after recommending it to my book club it currently sits in 21st place in their league table of 176 books read over more than 15 years.