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Post by CharlesX on Oct 10, 2023 17:00:36 GMT
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is well-written but on the short side, and a bit ideological and surface-level. I like works where the protaganist goes into suspended animation and awakens lifetimes later. When The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells is good, and The Man Who Awoke by Lawrence Manning is very good pulp fiction (each part of the book has the Sleeper waking up to another few hundred years later, with the world in some ways more developed but sometimes more flawed). Falcon gamebooks are well-written but I personally didn't go for them. CYOA have quite a few Time Travel gamebooks but they vary in quality. So, I haven't read that many 'proper' fiction about time travel, have you?
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Post by scouserob on Oct 10, 2023 17:48:18 GMT
I bought Michael Crichton’s Timeline when it first came out.
Enjoyed it so much that I powered through it in one evening/night.
I loved George R R Martin’s short story Unsound Variations (time travel, chess and revenge).
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Post by CharlesX on Oct 10, 2023 18:32:41 GMT
I bought Michael Crichton’s Timeline when it first came out. Enjoyed it so much that I powered through it in one evening/night. I loved George R R Martin’s short story Unsound Variations (time travel, chess and revenge). I read A Sound Of Thunder. It was definitely well-written and seminal but also had plot-holes the size of an adult T-rex. I preferred his Farenheit 451. While the big film of A Sound Of Thunder was a failure for all sorts of reasons, the Ray Bradbury Theater adaptation of A Sound Of Thunder isn't bad if you want to see it on Youtube.
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kieran
Baron
Posts: 2,527
Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy
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Post by kieran on Oct 10, 2023 19:45:56 GMT
I haven't read many at all but my favourite Philip K Dick book is the time-travely Now Wait For Last Year
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Post by paperexplorer on Oct 12, 2023 1:22:35 GMT
One of the best I've read is 'Doomsday Book' by Connie Willis, where the traveler goes back to the days of the bubonic plague.
'The Anubis Gates' by Tim Powers is well worth checking out but heavy on the fantasy
I've read 'Behold the Man' by Michael Moorcock as well but wasn't a fan (man goes back to find Jesus)
Stephen Baxter wrote a sequel to The Time Machine called 'The Time Ships' which goes to some odd places but I didn't like his new take on the morlocks
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Post by pip on Oct 12, 2023 12:55:02 GMT
"The Skull" by Philip K Dick is classic short story involving time travel. You can read it for free on the Project Gutenberg website, or if you want a real book it's available in some PKD's short story compilations.
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kieran
Baron
Posts: 2,527
Favourite Gamebook Series: Fighting Fantasy
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Post by kieran on Oct 12, 2023 13:38:54 GMT
"The Skull" by Philip K Dick is classic short story involving time travel. You can read it for free on the Project Gutenberg website, or if you want a real book it's available in some PKD's short story compilations. Having flicked through my Dick collection (ooh, Matron!), turns out I do actually have that one but don't recall ever reading it. To the pile it goes! |
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Post by schlendrian on Oct 12, 2023 17:28:46 GMT
Time Travel fiction is always a difficult undertaking, because as a writer, you have to be very careful about your basic assumptions concerning time travel or there's bound to be contradictions in your story. If the story is fun enough, I might look over this, but generally I don't know much in this genre that I would recommend. Haven't read "Time Ships" but Baxter's Xeelee-Cycle handels time travel quite well, imo. "Timelike Infinity" is a great read about religious fanatics (upholding a belief system based on the Many Worlds Interpretation) traveling back in time to basically delete their future. I know, that has been done before, but he has a really cool spin to it.
Where do we stand on SF using Time Dilation to go to the future, like (though unintentionally) in "The Forever War"? Does that count as Time Travel Fiction? |
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Post by CharlesX on Oct 12, 2023 17:36:47 GMT
Time Travel fiction is always a difficult undertaking, because as a writer, you have to be very careful about your basic assumptions concerning time travel or there's bound to be contradictions in your story. If the story is fun enough, I might look over this, but generally I don't know much in this genre that I would recommend. Haven't read "Time Ships" but Baxter's Xeelee-Cycle handels time travel quite well, imo. "Timelike Infinity" is a great read about religious fanatics (upholding a belief system based on the Many Worlds Interpretation) traveling back in time to basically delete their future. I know, that has been done before, but he has a really cool spin to it.
Where do we stand on SF using Time Dilation to go to the future, like (though unintentionally) in "The Forever War"? Does that count as Time Travel Fiction? I've mentioned suspended animation as a form of time travel fiction, but of course it isn't, it's (technically or otherwise) not even illegitimate so far as the genre is concerned. The same applies to say "To The Stars" by L. Ron Hubbard (unread by me) which deals with the effects of a returning astronaut experiencing a shorter passage of time than those from his own home. But if I have a point here, I don't see why Time Dilation (to travel to the future, that is) or the others I've mentioned shouldn't count as such, because you don't need to be Stephen Hawking to know 'pure' time travel is as unreal as magic, and an impossible standard, and especially for human beings. |
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roidhun
Wanderer
Ironic, self-deprecating nerd and geek extraordinnaire.
Posts: 78 
Favourite Gamebook Series: The Legends of Skyfall (Yes, really!)
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Post by roidhun on Nov 15, 2023 4:21:24 GMT
Stephen Baxter wrote a sequel to The Time Machine called 'The Time Ships' which goes to some odd places but I didn't like his new take on the morlocks I thought his alternate-history, much worse version of World War I that was still going on in 1944 was downright scary. Let it drag on much longer and you can almost imagine the mutated descendants of the two warring sides turning into the Thals and the Kaleds from the classic Doctor Who story "Genesis Of The Daleks", can't you? I wonder if that was actually what he intended us to think! And the sinister, motorized-chair-bound, cyborg eugenicist Garry Uvarov from the Xeelee Sequence novel Ring was a blatant homage to Davros! Edit: I loved the bit about the dystopian war-traumatized alternate-history Britain of 1938 having an alternate version of Desperate Dan appearing in patriotic war propaganda cartoons! Makes you wonder if maybe the psyche of the alternate-history version of his creator Dudley Watkins was as distorted from that of his counterpart in our own history by the fact of his having to live in that nightmare world as those of its versions of Barnes Wallis and Kurt Godel were! |
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Post by linflas on Nov 15, 2023 13:26:28 GMT
A time travel mini-gamebook I've illustrated is "Prisme", written by Pierre Sensfelder. It's french only but I can tell you the plot/mechanics/ideas. You don't really travel into time, but play different characters at different times. Inside each of the 50 text sections you have up to 3 different font blocks. First you play a 2022 young adult woman in Paris with special psycho-powers, trying to escape from unknown killers. For her, you read the 'normal' font blocks and must skip others. When you find you way to some important event, you restart at section 1 but you are able to play another woman in the future, who can interfere with 2022 time. You are now authorized to read the second type of text blocks. And so on..
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Post by CharlesX on Nov 15, 2023 13:59:17 GMT
A time travel mini-gamebook I've illustrated is "Prisme", written by Pierre Sensfelder. It's french only but I can tell you the plot/mechanics/ideas. You don't really travel into time, but play different characters at different times. Inside each of the 50 text sections you have up to 3 different font blocks. First you play a 2022 young adult woman in Paris with special psycho-powers, trying to escape from unknown killers. For her, you read the 'normal' font blocks and must skip others. When you find you way to some important event, you restart at section 1 but you are able to play another woman in the future, who can interfere with 2022 time. You are now authorized to read the second type of text blocks. And so on.. That does sound really cool, but something i haven't mentioned before in this thread or ever is time travel doesn't always turn out to be as good as the premise and the effort the author and leads put into it (bit like sci-fi FF)*, what's more I can only imagine a very small frame such as 50 sections making it even more tough, though short films can work such as the French one which inspired Twelve Monkeys (I forget the title). So, is Prisme a professional title and would you recommend it? I believe in the Falcon thread I mentioned I wasn't hugely a fan of Falcon, it definitely isn't for everyone so that's all right, but I apologise for suggesting the series could be linear on the basis of the one or two titles I'd read as Greenspine remarked.
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Post by linflas on Nov 15, 2023 20:22:38 GMT
Yes, "Prisme" is part of a 3 sci-fi mini-adventures pro gamebook : "Alterférences", published by Alkonost. Other adventures are: "Disruption" (you play a de-frozen Emmanuel Macron in 2080 with robots everywhere trying to continue his president tasks) and "Exalie" (you play a special girl in an apocalyptic time where remaining humans are under lockdown in a huge tower, fighting against outside mutated beings). These two have about 150/200 sections. Of course, I recommend it as the illustrator  but also as a gamebook reader. The french experimental movie is "La Jetée" (1962). |
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but also as a gamebook reader.