Please welcome Patti Hultstrand, Publisher/CEO of Az Publishing Services, LLC. Take it away, Patti.The top 8 time-travel books according to About.com Guide.
Washington Irving - Rip Van Winkle
H. G. Wells - The Time Machine
Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Madeleine L'Engle - Time-travel collection features A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters.
C.S. Lewis - The Complete Chronicles of Narnia
Edwin Abbott and Ian Steward - The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many DimensionsNow, I have to admit that there are several in this list I have not read, but there are a few I wouldn't have even put in this catagory of time-travel. Alice really didn't fall into a rabbit hole into another time, but rather she fell into an altered space. Of course, there is always a question on whether she simply dreampt the whole fanciful thing or was she pulled into that space through the looking glass?
On the list is also C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" in which again, the characters walk through the wardrobe and into an altered space, but not necessarily in time. The only real time altering here is when they come back through the wardrobe and are suddenly children again. Had they really just lived many years in that altered space or had it been a very long vision in that space and time, but they had not really been anywhere but in the wardrobe?
As I Googled time-travel books here are some of the names I got:
Michael D'Ambrosio - The Fractured Time series (Published now thru Az Publishing Services)Philip E. Baruth - The X President
Darryl Brock - If I Never Get Back
Octavia Butler - Kindred
Charles Dickinson - A Shortcut in Time
Daphne du Maurier - The House on the Strand
Jack Finney - Time and Again
Diana Gabaldon - Outlander Series (Also a local Arizona author)
Ken Grimwood - Replay
Robert A. Heinlein - Time for the Stars, The Door into Summer, By His Bootstraps
Richard Matheson - Somewhere in Time
Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler’s Wife
Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time
John Varley - Millennium
Connie Willis - Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog
Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths
Neal Asher's Cowl and Richard Garfinkle - All of an Instant
Tim Powers - The Anubis Gates
Jasper FFord - The Eyre Affair and the rest of the series
Tom Holt - The Portable Hole
Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time trilogy
Edward Page Mitchell - The Clock that Went Backward
David Gerrold - The Man Who Folded Himself
Harlen Ellison - The City of the Edge of Forever
Robert J Sawyer - Flash Forward
Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity
Poul Anderson - Time Patrol
Lester Del Rey - Tunnel Through Time
H.G. Wells - The Chronic Argonauts
Ray Bradbury - A Sound of Thunder
I think you get the point! There are literally hundreds of books and short stories published about time-travel and parallel universes.
The origins of the time-travel story dates back into Hindu mythology in 700s BCE to 300s CE with "Mahabharata" and the Japanese tales in the 200s to 400s CE with "Talmud" and in 720 CE with "Urashima TarÅ". After that these types of stories jumps to the year 1733 with Samuel Madden’s "Memoirs of the Twentieth Century" which I think we would find very interesting now that we can see if Samuel had been correct. But then it may be hard considering Samuel used an angel to bring documents from the future.
In the genre of romance, time-travel had found a diverse new home with the following possible story arcs among others not listed here:
Timeless trysts:
Anthology
The High Seas
Middle Ages - 18th Century
England
Scotland
19th Century
America
American West
England
Scotland
20th Century
The Hero or Heroine come to present day
Half in the present / Half in the past
Other
I guess my time-travel romance series would be slotted under "OTHER" because "Time Conquers All" and "Rescue In Time" are based in the late 1500's India region first. But, the story starts with a vision of the far future for the main character who is not only from the 1500's, but a warrior princess in this ficticious country of Laie. Some bookstores would try to put this into the Historical section while others would same the time-travel element would make it a science-fiction/fantasy.
It is quite clear that we humans have been interested in the possibility of time-travel for quite some time. Why? I would like to believe it is our need to believe in something beyond ourselves and a hope of the future. For me it is my fascination of the physics theories and my desire to know my son and his sons have a future. One of the most questions asked of me since I write time-travel is, where or when would I go in time and why? One of my answers is that I would go hundreds of years into the future to be certain we all have one.
The other questions people ask me regarding time is, if I had the chance to change something that went wrong for humankind, would I do it? Now, that is a harder question because if you fix something, how do you know it will really be fixed and even more importantly, you do not know that what you supposedly fixed wouldn't have led our civilization into an even deeper hole or the lack of a future at all.
These questions are I think the true reason we as readers are interested in time-travel: We are interested in the possibilities.
