Why am I passionate about this?
I’m a British author with a lifetime’s love of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I have a particular love for stories that explore both sides of the fantastical abilities they introduce us to, where the heroes battle with their own personal demons alongside the actual bad guys, and where the invented science is so plausible that I can lose myself in the strange world and not be popped out of the story thinking “well, that couldn’t work, because…” The potential for disastrous consequences is ever-present in time travel stories, one of the main reasons they hold such fascination for me.
John's book list on time travel stories that stand the test of time
Why did John love this book?
Perhaps more of a “portal” story than strictly time travel, May’s Saga of the Exiles spurred my imagination from the very start, and was at least partly responsible for inspiring my own work. The scale is vast, and I found the mental (“metapsychic”) powers the Exiles develop cleverly categorized and utilized in the stories, both here and in the following Galactic Milieu trilogy. I was so wrapped up in these stories that, perhaps more than any other series I’ve read, I was sorry to leave them behind and have returned to reread them many times.
The time-travel aspect of the story – the Pliocene Gateway – is given an interesting set of temporal and geographical limitations which I found refreshingly realistic when compared with other tales of time travel.
1 author picked The Many-Colored Land as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In the year 2034, Theo Quderian, a French physicist, made an amusing but impractical discovery: the means to use a one-way, fixed-focus time warp that opened into a place in the Rhone River valley during the idyllic Pliocene Epoch, six million years ago. But, as time went on, a certain usefulness developed. The misfits and mavericks of the future—many of them brilliant people—began to seek this exit door to a mysterious past. In 2110, a particularly strange and interesting group was preparing to make the journey—a starship captain, a girl athlete, a paleontologist, a woman priest, and others who had…