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Old 07-22-2021, 11:51 AM   #819
Mennonite Mennonite is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2014
More time travel stories:


"Try and Change the Past" by Fritz Leiber
"Caveat Time Traveler by Gregory Benford
“The Third Level” by Jack Finney
“Such Interesting Neighbors” by Jack Finney
“Time and Time Again” by H. Beam Piper
"The Wind Over the World" by Steven Utley
“Twilight” by John W. Campbell
“Life-Line” by Robert Heinlein
“By His Bootstraps” by Robert Heinlein
“—All You Zombies—” by Robert Heinlein
"Against the Current" by Robert Silverberg
“Absolutely Inflexible“ by Robert Silverberg
The Guardians of Time by Poul Anderson
"Soldier" by Harlan Ellison
“Time Wants a Skeleton” by Ross Rocklynne
“As Never Was” by P. Schuyler Miller
“Compound Interest” by Mack Reynolds
“Let’s Go to Golgotha” by Gary Kilworth
“Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation” by Larry Niven
“Who’s Cribbing?“ by Jack Lewis
“A Statue for Father” by Isaac Asimov
“The Hundred-Light-Year Diary“ by Greg Egan
”The Fox and the Forest” by Ray Bradbury
“Night Meeting” by Ray Bradbury
"The Very Slow Time Machine" by Ian Watson
"In the Beginning, Nothing Lasts..." by Mike Strahan
"After-Images" by Malcolm Edwards
“Flight to Forever” by Poul Anderson



Thoughts:


1- The stories dealing with paradoxes ("By His Bootstraps" "Let's Go to Golgotha!") are fun and often clever, but never seem to resolve in a satisfactory manner.

2 - Harlan Ellison is an asshole and it's preposterous that his story "Soldier" is given credit as an influence for Terminator.

3 - I give credit to "The Very Slow Time Machine" and "The 100 Light-Year-Diary" for trying something different but neither of them manages to stick the landing. Both are worth a read though.


The best of this bunch was probably Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever." Its concept was blatantly ripped off by one of the better latter day episodes of Futurama "The Late Philip J. Fry." It's about a time traveler with a time machine that really only works when going forward in time. He can only go backwards in short hops. So he's forced to go further and further in time in the hope that future generations will find a way to make backwards time travel possible.

My only real complaint is that I wish Anderson had done a better job explaining why you can't travel far into the past. What's the difference between one long jump, and several small jumps? He says there is a difference, but I wish he had concocted a more concrete reason as to why it is so.





I guess this is the end of my time travel story reading for a while. Mostly disappointing, but that 's true of everything I guess. The stories that I liked best::

"The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells
"My Object All Sublime" by Poul Anderson
"The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" by Alfred Bester
"Twenty-one" by Michael Merriam
"Sailing to Byzantium" by Robert Silverberg
"The Man Who Came Early" by Poul Anderson
"Flight to Forever" by Poul Anderson
“The Lost Pilgrim” by Gene Wolfe
“The Mouse Ran Down” by Adrian Tchaikovsky
“Under Siege” by George R. R. Martin
“Fire Watch” by Connie Willis
“Vintage Season” by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore
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