Top Five Time Travel Novels or Stories

You know, it’s kind of funny. I’ve seen plenty of top  lists over just the past few months and some inspired me to do my own. A lot of the top five lists end up top ten or more. I try to stick to my top five.

The themes are always similar, that is why this particular theme is a little different. I have not seen anyone do such a topic. It doesn’t mean that there are none out there - I just haven’t seen them show up in my news feed.

This week I will discuss my favorite time-travel books. There are quite a few available, and the most recent and probably famous is Outlander, as it has also been turned into a series for TV. I have never read that book, so I can’t really make an opinion on it. Hell it is, from what I can tell, a romance set in the middle ages. Not the sort of book I would enjoy.

Time travel has always been a touchy and difficult to write genre. There are just so many rules that could apply. If you change something in the past, will it have any impact in your future, or would it just cause the timeline to split and create a whole new universe?

See, it’s that sort of thing which would make writing Time travel tricky. Some writers have been able to pull it off, others… not so much. There have also been a lot of great movies based upon books and stories.

Although they did not make the list, such as Somewhere in Time and The Time Machine. Oh, and yes, I still consider The Terminator to be a movie about Time travel. =)

For once, the list is in the order that I enjoyed the books the most.

1. Lightning – This is a great novel by Dean Koontz. A young woman has encounters with what amounts to a guardian angel for nearly her entire life, starting out as a child. As the book progresses she ends up discovering this is no angel, but a man who travels the time-streams in order to prevent horrible events from altering her life. There are forces that are out to stop him and the novel ends with a climatic confrontation. I will not give away any spoilers, but this novel turned out to be my favorite from Dean Koontz. Really worth your time to pick up and read.
2. 11/22/63 ­ -  Stephen King’s foray into Time Travel. A man discovers that his back door is really a time portal and it allows him to travel back in time. Whenever he uses the door, no matter how much time he spends in the past, only a few minutes pass in his current time. He goes back and begins to experiment to see if he can alter the past. He quickly discovers that the past does not want to be altered and events conspire to stop him. It starts out as something as simple as a tree blocking the road when he is racing to stop a tragic accident. His main goal is to see if he can prevent Kennedy from being assassinated. This is one of the few King novels I found the ending to be satisfying. A very good read!
3. Axis of Time - This is not a standalone novel but instead is a trilogy. The series deals with the question of ‘what if?’. What if a high-tech task force is sent back to WWII due to a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong?  The men and women of this taskforce find they have the power and the means to radically alter the time-stream and alter the outcome of the second world war. The longer they are involved however, subtle changes begin occurring around them. Once totally predictable events, such as the weather, begin altering. And their presence in the past also has greater ramifications than anyone could have imagined. Sure, it would seem with the technology at their fingertips it would be a simple exercise to finish Hitler. Things never are simple as they find out and the war quickly spirals out of hand.
4. A Sound of Thunder – This was originally a short story by the venerable Ray Bradbury. It was all about allowing people to go back in time and hunt dinosaurs, specifically those who were about to die already, as the slightest mishap could have serious ramifications so far into the future. The story was remade as an episode of one of the anthology series the Ray Bradbury Theater back in 1989. It was also a movie made in 2005. Overall, it was a great story and I have to admit that I did enjoy the movie, which expanded upon the original story – except instead of a fascist government being in control, humanity never existed when they returned to their own time.
5. Outlanders: Talon and Fang – Mark Ellis covered a lot of ground in his series. There was super-science, Aliens, Dimensional travel, and all manner of goodness. One of his best stories dealt with time travel. The future of the main characters was incredibly bleak and Kane in particular had to go through absolute hell to set everything right and ensure the future he currently inhabited never came to be. I have to say this was pretty much my favorite of all the books he wrote for the series.