The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century: Stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Finney, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Larry Niven, Theodore Stu

by Jack Dann, Nancy Kress, Martin H. Greenberg

Book Overview

LEAP INTO THE FUTURE, AND SHOOT BACK TO THE PAST H. G. Wells's seminal short story "The Time Machine," published in 1895, provided the springboard for modern science fiction's time travel explosion.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345460944
• ISBN13: 9780345460943
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Random House Worlds
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Excellent variety of time travel stories, with few weak spots

When I read a collection of short stories, I generally start not at the beginning, but with the shortest stories first. If those first few "really short" stories whet my appetite, I'll move up to the longer stories. This collection grabbed me from story #1. Just about every one of them held my attention and my imagination. Granted, some of them read like episodes of "The Twilight Zone" or "Outer Limits" (in fact, several were adapted for TV). This only adds to their appeal, in my opinion, especially if you've seen the episodes - you get to see just how much was left out (even from a short story). Perhaps the weakest (or most incoherent) story was "Timetipping", but it is overloaded with great stories. I think the best thing about this collection is that it spans the range of *ways* of time traveling: machine, magic, aliens, future visitors, and even just leaving it mysterious about what is happening or why. There's even suggestions in the forward for other yet-to-be-written stories. In other words, it's not all "Back to the Future" "butterfly effect" stories, and that makes it fun.

Timeless

If you're a sucker for good science fiction then this is the book for you. With inclusions by such notables as Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury this is a book that doesn't disappoint (though admittedly "Sailing to Byzantium" is probably the weakest of the entries). While it's true that modern science tells us that actual time travel is beyond our means, it's also true that in this book of dreams you get to consider the ever fascinating what if of if it could actually occur.

Great Book

I loved this book, it's filled with some of the premier writers of the 20th century. The short fiction by Silverberg and Haldeman is worth the price of the book alone. If you have never read "SAILING TO BYZANTIUM" you are in for a religious experience. Read this book and discover some new authors that may get you hooked on a new style of writing. HIGHLY recommended.

An Excellent Curator Put This Together

The stories in this volume are themselves great, and I'm admittedly biased because he very first story happens to be my favorite time travel story ever. But the best part, in my opinion, are the wonderful introductions to each story, where teach author's work, style, and contributions to the sci-fi genre are explained in caring and specific detail. I read the book for the stories, but I bought the book because of the intros, which offer a good set of suggestions for reading follow up, and gave me a really good justification for who I should by this, considering I had ready some of the stories before.

Forwardback to Yestermorrow

A compilation such as this proves that a genre can be difficult to define, and that talented writers can explore what appears to be a simple theme in myriad unexpected fashions. That's what makes this compendium of classic time travel stories such fun to read. Most of the short stories here, spanning from the 1940s to the 1990s, examine the personal or social ramifications of traveling through time and messing things up, and this strong focus can be attributed to editors Turtledove and Greenburg. The archetypal masterpiece about how even slightly altering the past can screw up the present, Ray Bradbury's awesome "A Sound of Thunder," is included here. That's the story from which most modern time travel literature springs, and it's also the source of the celebrated butterfly effect, though Bradbury didn't use that exact term. Other influential early classics such as "Time's Arrow" by Arthur C. Clarke and "A Gun for Dinosaur" by L. Sprague de Camp are also included. For the later stories, there are a few missteps, like the Vietnam obsession of Joe Haldeman's "Anniversary Project," and the heavy-handed gender politics of Ursula K. Leguin's "Another Story or The Fisherman of the Inland Sea." But most of the rest of the collection is perfectly enjoyable, with winners like Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early," which illustrates how a modern American would be both unbearably obnoxious and pathetically helpless in medieval times, and R.A. Lafferty's "Rainbird" in which an inventor can't stop going back in time to set his younger self on a different path, with outlandish results. Remember - if you ever travel through time, don't change anything! [~doomsdayer520~]