Here are 88 books that The Technicolor Time Machine fans have personally recommended if you like
The Technicolor Time Machine.
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I’ve always loved stories that rearrange reality in some simple, allusive way, including movies like Groundhog Day or The Truman Show. They remind me of a quote about Italo Calvino that I first read when I was a teenager and have loved ever since: ‘He holds a mirror up to life, then writes about the mirror.’ I tend not to be attracted to stories that simply depict reality and even less so to stories that completely abandon reality for an invented fantasy world. All my favorite fictions take place somewhere in between, in the blending of the real and the impossible.
It always seemed unfair to me that not only do we get just one life, but we only get to live it once. So I fell in love with this novel from the moment I read its premise: Ursula Todd is born and dies and is born again… and again… and again.
I love that she doesn’t remember her previous lives except as vague intuitions that help her avoid making the same mistakes twice–and I also love that avoiding those mistakes often means she makes other (often fatal) mistakes. I found this book funny, moving, and thought-provoking, but what I love most about it is the way its down-to-earth, realistic style allowed me to fully inhabit the impossible conceit at its heart.
What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve spent my career with my students exploring microbes in all kinds of worlds, from cosmetics on our skin to the glaciers of Antarctica. In Antarctica, I discovered bizarre bacteria that form giant red blobs; we call them the “red nose” life form. In our lab at Kenyon College, we isolated new microbes from a student’s beauty blenders. These experiences, and those of the books I list here, inspire the microbial adventures of my science fiction. If microbes could talk, how would they deal with us? Find out in my novel, Brain Plague. And I hope you enjoy all the microbial tales on this list!
This is the best novel I’ve read about bubonic plague.
Student historian Kivrin travels back in time to England of the Middle Ages—unknowingly at the start of the Black Death. The cause of Black Death was the plague bacteria, unknown to people of that time.
What makes the book memorable is its depiction of everyday life, where children who get lost in the forest must find their way home by the tolling of the village church bell. Ultimately, the bell tolls for all the plague’s victims.
The vivid characterization makes me experience people of a time so distant their minds feel alien to us, yet still deeply human.
"Ambitious, finely detailed and compulsively readable" - Locus
"It is a book that feels fundamentally true; it is a book to live in" - Washington Post
For Kivrin Engle, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing a bullet-proof backstory. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.
I grew up in a family of readers who valued humor above all else. I’ve always sought out novels that weren’t full of themselves or too serious. For example, I don’t actually like literature for the most part (sacrilege?) As a result, I’ve veered toward upmarket genre books that amuse me. My list reflects what I discovered as I explored this realm. It also led me to write mysteries and thrillers that are infused with my version of humor, which I must admit will never match the authors on my list. These guys are amazing.
Like the other authors on my list, Pratchett is outright funny, endlessly inventive, and he finds a way to weave a satisfying plot through all the absurdity.
This is a fantasy that takes place in a world that is a disc, not a globe. In this context, there’s a lot of room for satire and commentary on the foibles of mankind. Since the main character is a policeman of sorts, the book features crimes, villains, and mysteries. Part of a series, some of which I really enjoyed, others I didn’t.
A beautiful new hardback edition of the classic Discworld novel.
Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch had it all.
But now he's back in his own rough, tough past without even the clothes he was standing up in when the lightning struck...
Living in the past is hard. Dying in the past is incredibly easy. But he must survive, because he has a job to do. He must track down a murderer, teach his younger self how to be a good copper and change the outcome of a bloody rebellion.
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I was seven when our headmaster told us about Stone-Age people using stone tools and living in caves. This seemed so unlikely that I checked with my Dad before believing it, but after that, I loved history. I adored the idea of time machines: a day trip to Ancient Rome! A selfie with a saber-tooth! Writing allowed me to time-travel to whenever I liked and to use what I learned about how people lit and warmed their homes, cooked their food, and worshipped their gods. It was inevitable that I would write a time travel book, and it’s a real pleasure to revisit some books that inspired me.
I read this classic sci-fi way back when I was a teenager and I think, over the years, it has been a quiet, persistent influence on my own writing.
Two groups of time-travellers go back and forth along ‘the corridors of Time,’ fighting to influence history their way. The protagonist is taken from a prison cell to join one group and has to catch up with what’s going on as he’s taken to the future, the seventeenth century, and the Bronze Age.
What stayed with me most vividly was Anderson’s recreation of the Danish Bronze Age and the fact that the main character chooses to give up his own time in order to remain in the Bronze Age with the people he has come to love.
A young man from the twentieth century is recruited to fight in a war that rages throughout time in this classic science fiction adventure from a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning master.
College student, ex-marine, and martial artist Malcolm Lockridge is in prison awaiting his trial for murder when he receives an unexpected visit from an extraordinarily beautiful woman named Storm. Claiming to be a representative of the Wardens, a political faction from two thousand years in the future, Storm offers the astonished young man a proposition: freedom in return for his assistance in recovering an unspecified lost treasure. But…
I’ve always been a sucker for a good time travel novel. So when I started writing my Librarian Chronicles I quickly learned that there is just so much you can do with the theory of time. My characters have gone to many places and times and in order to perfect these locations and eras that required tons of research. For my first novel, The Librarian, I researched for nearly a year before I wrote the book. I sincerely hope you’ll enjoy my Librarian Chronicles and I look forward to writing more in the series. Each novel is unique and they can all be read in any order.
I am most excited to talk about this book since Cidney Swanson became one of my favorite authors. I’ll admit a lot of people don’t know who she is, but she’s a very sweet and talented author more people should know about.
Halley, our main character, ends up house-sitting for a well-to-do scientist. As she’s sitting for him in his fancy house, an earthquake hits and Halley is now face-to-face with an earl definitely not from this time period. The earl is confused to say the least, but Halley and her friends are now responsible for helping him get back to where he belongs. Turns out the scientist has secrets in his fancy house, and he’s not willing to share. When Halley and her friends find themselves involved in the scientist's mess, they are now trying to help the earl and save themselves. This book has danger, intrigue, and sweet…
8 BOOK SERIES - EACH A COMPLETE TALE! Halley, who covers house-sitting jobs for her self-absorbed mom, has Hollywood dreams but no real life. Until the day a job for her mom leads to a tumble back to London, 1598, where Halley meets a hot, rich earl named Edmund. And accidentally brings him to the 21st century.
Her dull summer just got a whole lot more interesting as she tells Edmund to keep his hands off tech he doesn't understand and a deadly sword he can't use in public. All while trying to keep from falling in for him, which…
I’ve always loved reading time travel stories and gobbled up most of what I could find. Over the past few years, I decided that I wanted to try writing one for myself. After reading the books I’ve recommended along with others (including some having to do with the physics of time), I finally took up the challenge and wrote the Waters of Time series which combines my love of the Middle Ages, romance, and time travel all into one.
The main character of this novel travels back in time to 18th century Cornwall. The time-travelling element is beautifully done and swept me from the present to the past seamlessly and with such intrigue that I felt like I was struggling to adjust to the differences of the past with the heroine. The ambiance of medieval times stays with me and helped inspire me as I wrote my time travel book.
When Eva's film star sister Katrina dies, she leaves California and returns to Cornwall, where they spent their childhood summers, to scatter Katrina's ashes and in doing so return her to the place where she belongs. But Eva must also confront the ghosts from her own past, as well as those from a time long before her own. For the house where she so often stayed as a child is home not only to her old friends the Halletts, but also to the people who had lived there in the eighteenth century. When Eva finally accepts that she is able…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I’ve always looked at the world with a sense of wonder. As a child, I was drawn to the magical and the fantastical, but a budding fascination with the scientific method eventually led me to discover the beauty and wonder of the natural world. I assumed science fiction would scratch that itch, but too many genre novels left me feeling empty, like they were missing something essential—what it feels like to be human. Novels that combine a wonder of the world with an intimate concern for character hit just the right spot for me. Maybe they will for you as well.
This book is a literary novel set in part on the Moon. That’s not a sentence you’ll read often, which is a big part of why I love this novel—it’s not what I expected, even though there’s a big hint in the title.
Like many readers, my introduction to Emily St. John Mandel was her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. In that story, the most interesting characters aren’t concerned with simple survival…if they are going to fight to live, they want a culture worth fighting for. When I picked this book up, I deliberately chose not to read the story summary and was completely caught off guard by how the novel unfolded. Typically, stories questioning time and our perception of reality do so by sending the protagonist on a dangerous quest looking for answers.
Like all my favorite novels, the scope is intimate and vast in this one. The story…
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads
“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times
I'm a long-time role-player/gamemaster and reader of SFF, and I've read, created, and played (and written!) a lot of stories.Good stories come from good characters. We all know that. But part of what makes characters good is that they're believable, and to me their believability is inextricable from the worlds they come from. A world-build—setting, weather, technology, magic, science, cultures, and languages—should BE as much of a character as the protagonist(s). While I admit a fond nostalgia for ye olde semi-Euro-medieval setting, I lovea world-build that challenges or surprises me, and I love the characters and stories that come out of those worlds. I hope you do too.
I love a good re-imagined fairytale, and Tidbeck delivers...except it's more like she took all the fairy tales, smashed them, and reassembled them in a mosaic that's both familiar and alien at the same time.
Dora and Thistle are two among many children trapped in the Garden, servants to the fairy-like overlords who, when those children grow up, will eat them. Dora and Thistle escape, but so does one of the wicked overlords....
The prose is gorgeous, and the story is all the things fairytales should be: magical, terrifying, fantastic, with journeys and helpers and—well. I won't tell you if the ending is happy or not. Read to the end and find out.
From the award-winning author of Amatka and Jagannath—a fantastical tour de force about friendship, interdimensional theater, and a magical place where no one ages, except the young
In a world just parallel to ours exists a mystical realm known only as the Gardens. It’s a place where feasts never end, games of croquet have devastating consequences, and teenagers are punished for growing up. For a select group of masters, it’s a decadent paradise where time stands still. But for those who serve them, it’s a slow torture where their lives can be ended in a blink. In a bid to…
I am an author of history books as well as children’s fiction. My books for Pen and Sword Publishing tell the stories of the places associated with Henry VIII, and with the Princes in the Tower, the boys who mysteriously disappeared from the Tower of London during the reign of King Richard III. So it was obvious that I should use my passion for late medieval and Tudor history when it came to deciding on a setting for my first children’s book; The Secret in the Tower is set during Henry Tudor’s invasion and his assumption of the English throne. I hope readers enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it!
Another book set amidst the colour and vibrancy of Elizabethan theatre – but I enjoyed this book particularly for its featuring of William Shakespeare himself as a character!
A young American actor comes to contemporary London to perform at the newly-built Globe theatre – and finds himself transported back in time to the first Globe theatre and the world of Shakespeare and his players. A plot against Queen Elizabeth I drives the action forward in this unusual time-slip adventure.
I lay very still, with all my senses telling me that I had gone mad. The plague? Nobody's had the plague for centuries . . .
Nathan Field, a talented young actor, arrives at the newly rebuilt Globe Theatre in London to play Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. As rehearsals begin, eerie echoes of the past begin to haunt Nat, and he falls sick with a mysterious sickness.
When he wakes, Nat finds himself in 1599, an actor at the original Globe - and his co-star is none other than the King of Shadows himself: William Shakespeare.
I was born and raised in Mississippi, where ink and river mud run through our veins in equal measure. My parents were readers, and thus, I followed in their footsteps. Before long, I was reading their library choices and mine and still running out of books before it was time to visit again. From the moment I laid eyes on Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series, I was hooked on historical mysteries. It took me forty years of life to realize I had stories of my own to share. I now live in Oxford, England, with my husband, two daughters, three cats, and lots of shadowy corners for inspiration.
I am fairly convinced that Grace Burrowes is a time traveler, for I have never seen a modern author get period-specific language so right. Unlike all the other books on my list, the Lady Violet series does not include any murders.
Instead, Lady Violet’s penchant for solving “puzzles” made for a nice break from the more macabre. I got lost in the twisty details and adored the Agatha Christie-style reveal at the end of the book.
