The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

While it’s hard to dismiss 12 Monkeys on a list of fiction where there are not machines creating the passage for time travel (even though it was never a novel), I have to say Jack London’s The Jacket does a better job at being subtle. The novel was adapted into a film in 2005 and follows a main character who experiences a time slip at the point of a near-death experience when he is in confined situations (i.e., when they think he’s dead and put him in a casket or when they need to subdue him in a straitjacket.) These… show more.

Here is an alternate reality novel before the term even existed. It is a prison break tale, of a strange sort, and as you would expect of London it has lots of action. But it is philosophical as well. “The spirit is the reality that endures.” Scientific also, with explanations that were state of the art at the time. If you are into social justice, read his case against society and the brutality of the prisons of the day.