100 books like A Traveller in Time

Edward Eager’s books were my inspiration when I started writing the President and Me series. I picked The Time Garden here because it specifically deals with the concept of time, but most of Eager’s books would fit the bill, including Half Magic. Eager’s books, published in the 1950s and ‘60s, feature kids who have magic adventures, often through time travel but are also grounded in their own present-day reality, with issues they have to cope with in between their escapades.

I remember really enjoying this book as a kid. Jason and his talking cat, Gareth, embark on a series of time travel adventures, from Ancient Egypt to the Revolutionary War. Alexander was probably best known for his Chronicles of Prydain fantasy series, but Time Cat is less a fantasy story than a series of time travel episodes. I’ve always been more interested in stories that involve time travel back to the past rather than into a hypothetical future, probably because I love history.

When I was a child, I was captivated by this 1958 English novel. It’s every bit as good forty years later. 

Tom, a bored boy spending the summer with his aunt and uncle, finds a rambling Victorian garden in the backyard of the house… but the garden is only there at night, gone during the day.

It’s a gripping time-travel story, one that celebrates the garden as a place where a child can stretch both limbs and mind. And through Tom’s friendship with a Victorian girl named Hatty, the novel touches beautifully upon the ache that comes from seeing your friends grow up before you do. 

The novel’s fantastical elements are handled (and, ultimately, explained) in a totally satisfying way. It’s an enchanting read.

I must have re-read this wonderful book half a dozen times in my youth. I first read it when I was in middle school. Though I had discovered science fiction and fantasy books a few years earlier, most of them had been heavy on action and light on ideas.

This was one of the first books I read that really made me think about how strange and wonderful the universe might really be and see how that might provide a context for telling profoundly moving human stories. It filled my young mind with awe and wonder, as well as a desire to tell my own stories.

I fell in love with this author’s exploration into the hypothesis of drug-induced time travel written by one of our great English authors, skillfully weaving psychology with science and historical fiction. In it, Dick Young is persuaded by a friend to try a new drug. Dick likes where it takes him, and each time takes more and more. A classic case of addition but the story awakened in me a passion for asking what if… that later turned into a greater passion for the unexplained and paranormal in all its forms, in turn leading me to question whether re-incarnation, deja-vu, ghostly visitations or time travel were possible, and if so, how.

Like with my first recommendation, I feel that this book appeals to a desire for adventure that we all had as kids. Who didn’t dream of Time Travel adventures as a kid? And again, as an adult, I have of course come to realize that I’d not last a day if I were to fall into this sort of adventure – and although time travel is supposedly possible, albeit only as a one-way journey due to the nature of time-dilation, the undertaking of such a journey, and the physical aspects of what is involved, I’d never want to do it now. Of course, in Playing Beatie Bow, Abigail’s time travel method is very simple (and impossible), but the trouble she gets into in the past is complicated, complex, and dangerous. The book’s dual settings might not appeal to young readers of today, but its lessons about learning to live… show more.

In The Sterkarm Handshake, the device for time travel is simply a tube; not magical, but scientific, down which modern ruthless developers travel back to 16th century Scotland. Here they meet with equally ruthless highlanders. The scientists are planning to plunder Scotland’s resources (the 16th-century locals have been plundering roundabout for years), and of course, the modern developers run into problems. As in all books of this genre, the characters who travel through time may want to fit in or may choose to reject what the past has to offer. 

The heroine, like similar time-travellers, falls in love with a long-dead character and here, there’s also the possibility of the 16th century Scots coming up the tube to 20th century England – a good twist. There are also some very satisfying links between past and present, moments where you smile and think, Ah, how clever!

I find H.Rider Haggard's famous tales of adventure (e.g. King Solomon's Mines) pretty disgusting: bunch of white guys in southern Africa, where they can slaughter and loot at will, far from the constraints of “civilised” society.

But “She” is one of a kind. A perilous wilderness, where the people who put pots on the heads of strangers have a very sinister outlook on life (these are cooking pots, and this is a stranded population, desperate for protein). Their immortal goddess (originally Ancient Greek?) lives in a tomb, doesn't seem to eat or drink; talks like a spoilt, entitled Victorian debutante, and fascinates our hero.

I imagine the author, a humble civil servant when not dreaming of glorious gory derring-do, met young ladies of her kind socially, and was snubbed a few times. She pays... and I won't spoil the horror of it for you, but it's pretty bad! A guilty… show more.

George MacDonald was a Scottish preacher who turned to fantasy fiction, and became a sort of Victorian superstar: “Queen Victoria gave copies of Robert Falconer to her grandchildren. Everybody read his books—Lewis Carroll, John Ruskin, H.G. Wells, Charles Dickens, Edna Lyall, Mark Twain . . . as well as the queen herself.”

I don't think I can explain the attraction to modern reader, you'll get it or you won't: I first met his novel-length “romances” (Phantastes and Lilith) when I was eight, suffering after a horrible trip to the dentist, and found the stories very weird and comforting. Whereas most “fairy tales” are quite brutal, if you're paying attention.

R.Murray Gilchrist was a Derbyshire man from a good Derbyshire family, liked or loved by the local people he met and helped, but a loner, a total oddity in the wild English Peak District of a hundred years ago: who wanted to be an artist of all things.

His stories are grotesque, sad, touching, and strange; all at once. He doesn't seem to set out to frighten the reader, not at all, but there's a sense of eerie, rather dreadful, longing that will haunt you. As Ellis Reed says (read the article), this was Lovecraft before Lovecraft, but with no cute tentacled monsters to lighten things up. Don't read them all at once.