Time Enough For…Anything

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— Wombat-socho


Time travel science fiction tends to come in two flavors: conventional time travel, in which the heroes journey into the future or the past, and the parallel worlds type of story where there are multiple alternate time lines which can be travelled to. Keith Laumer did both; in Dinosaur Beach, his hero is a member of the Timesweepers, a group trying to clean up the messes left by previous time travelers, while in Imperium, Brion Bayard fights an alternate version of himself who threatens the destruction of the Imperium. Larry Niven, on the other hand, treats time travel as an impossibility in Flight of the Horse to comic effect, while its sequel Rainbow Mars is considerably darker.


Authors don’t always explain the details of how their heroes wind up in the past or the future. We never do find out how Asimov’s retired tailor from Pebble in the Sky winds up in a post-nuclear Earth, or how the feckless protagonist of Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee fumbles his way back to the Battle of Gettysburg to cost the South the Battle of Gettysburg – and the war. In contrast, Dan Davis in Hainlein’s The Door into Summer uses cold-sleep twice and an experimental time machine to make his life turn out the way it should have after his unfaithful fiance shanghais him into the future. Elsewhen, Lazarus Long travels back to pre-WWI America to meet his family in Time Enough for Love with nearly fatal results, but as the filk song concludes, “Nothing wrecks this Oedipus!”


On the other hand, some authors rejected the very notion that you could change the past. Alfred Bester’s nearly-forgotten classic “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” (collected in Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester) introduces what has come to be known as the concept of “quantum time” and its consequences for would-be meddlers. Fortunately, Poul Anderson and H. Beam Piper paid no attention to this and created separate law enforcement agencies to guard the time stream: Time Patrol and the previously mentioned Paracops of The Complete Paratime.


More recently, Harry Harrison and Harry Turtledove address the notion of present-time people going back to aid the Confederacy in A Rebel In Time and The Guns of the South, while Connie Willis’ considerably more depressing Doomsday Book sends a graduate student back to medieval England just in time for the Black Death. On a lighter note, there’s Leo Frankowski’s The Cross-Time Engineer, in which Conrad Schwartz winds up in 13th century Poland and resolves to save it from the Mongols. Its spiritual ancestor, of course, is L. Sprague DeCamp’s Lest Darkness Fall, in which Martin Padway takes it on himself to save the Western Roman Empire and its Gothic rulers from Justinian and Belisarius – and itself. Connie Willis can also do humorous time travel, as can be seen in To Say Nothing of the Dog.


Feel free to suggest your own favorites in the comments!


78 comments

  1. L. Neil Smiths Nagasaki Vector posits an area of time travel mixed with parallel universes. I love that book. It’s from a series called “North American Confederacy”. I’ve read most of them. I think that’s where I picked up the germ my libertarian leanings. He’s a major big L libertarian and the books are premised with that theme. At least to me.

    I also loved the first time travel story I ever read: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.

    Edit: Dang! I just looked and saw that Smiths book was released in ’83. I bought my copy new. I feel old now.

  2. spider robinson wrote a story in his first book
    Callahans crosstime saloon about a missionary
    who is locked up in a small central American country
    for ten years and hoe EVERYTHING has changed
    since he came back
    …….
    wow
    how much has changed in just 10 years

  4. I liked how “Guns Of The South” ended. I “loaned” my copy to my favorite “Damned Yankee” (he was a Union Reenactor) while I was still living in SE Ohio, and he loved it. Naturally, I never saw it again. What Jerry Pournelle calls “The Brotherhood of Book Borowers” bit me. 🙂

  12. David Drake wrote a riff of of “Lest Darkness Fall” entitled “To Bring the Light” where a Roman noble woman ends up ensuring the Eternal City is founded according to what she knows to be true. They were published as a double in 1996 with a Harry Turtledove introduction.

    Also, the inner issue with time travel is the changing history aspect. Just look at the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.” The idea of pre-destination paradoxes make my head hurt. It’s why I’m not much for the idea of two way time travel.

    But if the machine has one heck of a forward gear. . .

  13. Let me throw in a plug for Zelazny’s Roadmarks.

    The bit about Adolf searching for the place where he won reminds me of … oh, never mind.

  14. I read The Lost Regiment series, but Forstchen never finished it, and the ninth book ends on a cliff hanger. I liked the series a lot, but I wish he’d finish it.

    I’m three books into the Destroyermen series. It’s about an
    American Destroyer in WWII which disappears into a vortex and emerges on a parallel Earth, where both Lemurs and Dinosaurs have evolved. Very good so far. And there are T-Rexs in the jungle — but no worries, our Navy guys brought a BAR.

  16. Ah, you missed a classic time-travel story, and my personal favorite of the genre: Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”.

  17. “To Bring The Light” is included in the Lest Darkness Fall And Related Stories linked above – if your copy is missing. 😉

  19. Well, Forstchen’s not dead yet; there’s still hope. I remember reading the Lost Regiment series and being appalled at the carnage; he made S.M. Stirling look weak by comparison.

  25. Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol was a nice change of pace from the more comic-book-like time travel stories that preceded it. I think his focus on the time aspect as the major element rather than as a setup to adventure may have helped later writers who were called on to put time travel elements into various entertainment media.

    It wasn’t much on the physics, but dealt much better with the what-if stuff than previous folks did.

  26. I always go back and forth as to which is the ultimate time-travel story between Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” and Mack Reynolds’s “Compounded Interest”.

  27. Two of the best Time Travel novels there are: “The Anubis Gates” and “Three Days to Never”, both by Tim Powers.

    Absolutely wonderful.

  29. WoW – this fits nicely into a blog I am building – linking

    This raises so many questions…. I assume the Institute for Creation Research looks on these books with favor? Or maybe not…

  30. Speaking of De Camp, there’s always A Gun For Dinosaur.
    And Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, which mixes time travel (one way via some mysterious event in a WWII Danish Resistance gunfight with the Nazis, the other way via sorcery performed by Morgan Le Fay from the Arthurian cycle) with the Chanson de Roland cycle, with the protagonist being Holger the Dane. Anderson was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

  34. yep, and the scenes of “eating” became increasingly graphic. Maybe it was starting to wear on Forstchen and he decided to move on. Or maybe there just isn’t any money in a tenth installment.

  35. I enjoy a well crafted time travel tale, like the Nagasaki Vector or To Say Nothing of the Dog. I abhor the mindless time paradox stories exemplified by the abysmal Star Trek Voyager. (Oh, look! Let’s go over there and explore an explosion we haven’t caused yet!)

    If there are parallel universes, they are finite in number. The idea that for each of the millions of decisions made every day by billions of people, that a fully formed, alternate universe of matter and energy springs up ex nihilo every time someone chooses corn flakes over Cheerios or glazed doughnuts over maple bars is preposterous.

  39. Analog, as I remember. But it was reprinted in one of his collections — “Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon”. Nor was that Robinson’s only foray into time travel in that particular venue. I recall at least three such segments, and then it became part of the storyline.

  40. A. Bertram Chandler wrote about time travel and inter-dimensional travel. The trans-dimensional hops were a recurring theme in his “Commodore Grimes” series, with time travel implied, culminating in a trip back to ancient Earth in “The Way Back”.

    Then he wrote “Kelly Country”, a novel about an alternate universe where Australia was a major world power lead by a dictator directly descended from Ned Kelly…….

    James P. Hogan wasn’t my favorite author of all time, but he wrote some really good stuff. “The Proteus Operation” wasn’t his best, but solid, and merged time travel with alternate realities quite well.

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