I was seven when our headmaster told us about Stone-Age people using stone tools and living in caves. This seemed so unlikely that I checked with my Dad before believing it, but after that, I loved history. I adored the idea of time machines: a day trip to Ancient Rome! A selfie with a saber-tooth! Writing allowed me to time-travel to whenever I liked and to use what I learned about how people lit and warmed their homes, cooked their food, and worshipped their gods. It was inevitable that I would write a time travel book, and it’s a real pleasure to revisit some books that inspired me.
I read this as a teenager and learned that history and science-fiction could be knock-about, silly and hilarious.
A failing film studio gets hold of a time machine and uses it to make a typical Hollywood movie about the Viking colonization of America, complete with gorgeous romantic leads, cast for their looks. It’s shot on location in the 10th Century, with real Viking extras.
But real Vikings aren’t cooperative. They don’t wantto sail across the Atlantic.
The ingenious plot makes great use of Time. What if you return before you left and meet yourself? With a script needed in a rush, the writer is sent to the Pre-Cambrian, before life left the oceans, where there are no distractions. “The eyes,” he mutters. “The eyes in the sea.”
Why pay for costumes, scenery, props or actors when the most brilliant drama of all time is unfolding before your very eyes, in vivid color--in 1000 A.D.?
The head of ailing Climactic Studios has given producer Barney Hendrickson five days to get a major movie in the can--and Climactic out of it.
Impossible?
Not with Professor Hewett's miraculous time machine, the answer to a Hollywood producer's prayer.
Skipping back to AD 1,000 with a whole film crew and two glam stars, Barney sets out to prove that the Vikings discovered America five hundred years before Columbus--and to film the event…
Recommended to me by a good friend, proving what a good friend she is.
It’s set in a future where history students take field trips into the past. Kivrin persuades Professor Dunworthy to risk sending her back further than anyone’s gone before: to the 14th Century.
No sooner has she left than the techie operating the Time-Net falls seriously ill with influenza. The authorities, fearing that the disease has been brought back from the past, close the Time Net, trapping Kivrin in the 1300s.
Her plight worsens when the Black Death reaches her village and all the people she’s befriended start dying…
"Ambitious, finely detailed and compulsively readable" - Locus
"It is a book that feels fundamentally true; it is a book to live in" - Washington Post
For Kivrin Engle, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing a bullet-proof backstory. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.
Is this book about Time-Travel or Dimension-Jumping? Or about someone who’s freakishly aware of their rebirth into numerous lives? I don’t know— but I do know that it’s a breathtakingly audacious, witty, intelligent, brilliantbook.
It recounts the life of Ursula Todd, born in 1910. She then lives, well, Life After Life. Some are very short: she is still-born or drowns as a child. Others, as she seems to cycle through almost every life it is possible for her to have lived, involve considerable suffering. She becomes dimly aware of these numerous lives and learns, to an extent, to manipulate them. As she passes through one of her German lives in the 1930s, can she use this awareness to assassinate Hitler?
What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
I read this classic sci-fi way back when I was a teenager and I think, over the years, it has been a quiet, persistent influence on my own writing.
Two groups of time-travellers go back and forth along ‘the corridors of Time,’ fighting to influence history their way. The protagonist is taken from a prison cell to join one group and has to catch up with what’s going on as he’s taken to the future, the seventeenth century, and the Bronze Age.
What stayed with me most vividly was Anderson’s recreation of the Danish Bronze Age and the fact that the main character chooses to give up his own time in order to remain in the Bronze Age with the people he has come to love.
A young man from the twentieth century is recruited to fight in a war that rages throughout time in this classic science fiction adventure from a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning master.
College student, ex-marine, and martial artist Malcolm Lockridge is in prison awaiting his trial for murder when he receives an unexpected visit from an extraordinarily beautiful woman named Storm. Claiming to be a representative of the Wardens, a political faction from two thousand years in the future, Storm offers the astonished young man a proposition: freedom in return for his assistance in recovering an unspecified lost treasure. But…
I love Pratchett’s Discworld books. They’re compassionate, insightful, serious, angry— and hilarious.
Pratchett merrily mixes accurate history and free-wheeling fantasy without giving a damn. And, in mocking fairy tales and fantasy tropes, he makes scathing comments on our time.
In Night Watch, Commander Vimes pursues a murderer across the rooves of Unseen University, a place that throbs with magic, during a thunderstorm. A lightning strike causes ‘a temporal shattering.’ Vimes wakes to find himself in his own past, being arrested by his younger self.
Until he can return to his own time, Vimes poses as his own mentor. Which means that young Sam Vimes was taught to be an exceptional police officer by— Sam Vimes.
As we Pratchett fans say: Night Watch is the best Discworld book of them all. Until you read the next one.
A beautiful new hardback edition of the classic Discworld novel.
Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch had it all.
But now he's back in his own rough, tough past without even the clothes he was standing up in when the lightning struck...
Living in the past is hard. Dying in the past is incredibly easy. But he must survive, because he has a job to do. He must track down a murderer, teach his younger self how to be a good copper and change the outcome of a bloody rebellion.
The ruthless FUP Corporation intends to use a time machine to strip the past of fossil fuel. They go back 500 years to the border between England and Scotland and dismiss the local Sterkarm family as ‘peasants armed with sticks.’ Big mistake. The Sterkarms are a smart and war-like clan, armed with longbows and eight-foot lances. Superb light cavalry, they acknowledge no rule but their own and defend their land against all comers.
FUP embeds their researcher, Andrea Mitchell, with the Sterkarms and she falls in love with Per, the chief’s handsome son. As misunderstanding grows between the Sterkarms and the 21st Century ‘Elves’, Andrea struggles to keep the peace. But when the two centuries go to war, she is forced to pick a side…
My book is fantastical historical fiction about two characters who're wrestling with the monstrosity of their grief.
It takes you into London high society, where Ambrose tries to forget about how much he misses Bennett and how much he dreads becoming as cold as their Grandfather. It takes you to the family's country manor house, where Mattie isolates and old ghosts start to come out of the woodwork.
It's a story about loss and depression; it's a story about friends who don't let you walk through the valley of death alone.
Ambrose Bancroft returns to London society with his younger sister, hoping they'll leave ghosts of memory behind. They have only each other left. While Ambrose attempts to draw Mattie out, dragging her to balls and threatening to seek suitors for her, his sister recoils from his meddling. Finally, when Ambrose compels her to attend art class before she's ready, Mattie paints something horrific enough to banish them from society in public disgrace.
At Linwood Manor, Mattie and Ambrose aren't as alone as they think. Taking advantage of Mattie's desperate need to find freedom, a vanishing room lures Ambrose's sister into…
