The 21st-Century Scop banner

scop (noun): Old English – bard, minstrel, storyteller

This Week on Mystery Theatre:
Time-Travel Recommendations

A couple of weeks ago on Prime Stage Mystery Theatre, we asked: What is your favorite time-travel story? We had already listed a dozen titles (all featured in the Mystery Theatre story “Time is Out of Joint”). You can check out our posts of March 3rd and March 8th for more information on those titles, which were also featured in our display at the New Hazelett Theatre on the opening night of Prime Stage’s A Wrinkle in Time.)

This week, we have some exciting recommendations from folks who all happen to be active in the fields of science fiction, mystery, fantasy, and horror. We’ll be featuring some of their recommendations on this week’s installment of the Prime Stage Mystery Theatre podcast, but since we received more recommendations than could be included there, this post features some additional time-travel titles as well as books written by some of the folks who recommended them.

First up is a suggestion from science fiction aficionado William Blake Hall, who recommends W. Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Here is what William has to say about that title:

This may be a rather weak and desperate candidate, since its “time travel” is owed to a paper-thin framing device at the very beginning and end, but I would go with W. Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. A man gazes up at the sky and finds his consciousness magically swept up in eons of cosmic history before he is deposited back on Earth. It is not so much “time travel,” in the sense of leaving one’s present for, say, 802,701 AD, as perhaps “time panorama” or “time cruise.” Rather than being the driving wonder, time is simply a means to something even greater: trying to grasp a concept of the universe.

Stapledon is one of those seminal science fiction writers I’ve been meaning to read, so I thank William for putting him back on my radar. You can find the complete text of the novel here (courtesy of Stony Brook University).

A few more must-read suggestions come from Steve Balshaw, who recommends the Michael Moorcock novels Behold the Man and Dancers at the End of Time.

Moorcock is one of the writers who helped science fiction come of age in the 1960s, with The Times calling him one of the best British science fiction writers of the second half of the 20th-century. So he’s definitely worth reading.

And Steve also recommends William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderlands as a companion to Stapledon’s Star Maker. In his words, Hodgson’s book delivers “a kind of hallucinogenic trip through time to the end of the universe.” You can read the entire book here (courtesy of Project Gutenberg).

And it’s worth noting that Steve is the Chief Film Programmer at the Grimmfest Film Festival. Held each fall in Manchester, UK, Grimmfest is in its 14th year of showcasing the world’s most innovative horror films, and they’re currently open for film submissions for this year’s festival, which will run October 6-9. And since Grimmfest will likely have a virtual component for folks who can’t make it to the UK, this is one film festival that cinephiles from anywhere in the world will want to check out.

I had the pleasure of attending Grimmfest in person when Nightmare Cinema had its UK premiere there in 2018, and I can’t recommend them enough. It’s a terrific festival.

Next up is a recommendation from scientist and sf writer Barton Paul Levenson. He’s the author of Another Century and the near-future suspense novel Recovering Gretel. His recommendation is Stephen King’s bestseller 11/22/63. I’m sorry to say I haven’t read it, though the book is on my shelf waiting for me to find the time to take it down.

And rounding out our suggested readings are some titles from World Fantasy Award finalist Michael Libling, who recommends the aforementioned 11/22/63 along with Danger Dinosaurs! by Richard Marsten, which was published in the 1950s by Winston Juveniles. Michael reports that DD! was one of the first science fiction books he read as a child, and it is just one of a number of titles he sent in response to our request for recommendations.

Here, in its entirety, is what Michael has to say:

Boy, choosing a favorite time travel novel isn’t easy. I’ve got too many of them. But here’s a selection, very loosely ranked:

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold. The novel covers every possible time travel paradox and has stuck in my head since the 70s. Among my all-time favorite books, period!

Up the Line by Robert Silverberg. I don’t recall much about it now, other than that it blew me away when I read it, again back in the 70s. It’s rare that Silverberg doesn’t tell a great story.

Danger Dinosaurs! by Richard Marsden (Evan Hunter) and The Feathered Serpent by Evan Hunter were Winston Juveniles published in the 1950s. I list these together since these were the first two SF books I read…taken from the school library. I was hooked on the genre from then on. While I can’t recall the plots, I do remember that they were time-travel stories. The thing that intrigued me as a kid was that one of the characters dies in the past—that is, before he was born…and thus in the future, all evidence of his existence slowly begins to vanish. It made no sense, but I loved the thought.

More recently, I enjoyed If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock. If you love baseball history, it’s a terrific read—lots of fun. I also enjoyed Elan Mastai’s 2017 novel, All Our Wrongs Today.

There are others, of course…Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, of course, though I don’t immediately think of it as a time-travel novel. Also, Matheson’s Somewhere in Time…Jack Finney’s brilliantly realized Time and Again…Dean Koontz’s thrilling Lightning…Jane Yolen’s heartbreaking The Devil’s Arithmetic…Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (though it struck me as a tad overwritten).

And it’s worth noting that Michael is the author Hollywood North, a fantasy novel with some strong mystery elements that centers on three friends who uncover some intriguing artifacts from the silent film era. It’s a terrific read. I reviewed it here when it first came out, but you don’t have to take it from me. Here’s what Locus has to say about the novel:

It’s an enthralling, nostalgically naturalistic, creepy and mordantly humorous tale that will appeal to fans of Jeff Ford’s The Shadow Year and Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s HEX. . . . In its concentration on juvenile friendships, rifts in the universe, existential angst, guilt, responsibility and mortality, Libling’s fine first novel calls to mind a recent cousin, The Book of Hidden Things by Francesco Dimitri. Along with such media vehicles as Stranger Things, Super 8 and Stand By Me, the two novels are part of a mini-trend that seeks to show us a past whose adolescent surfaces are a scrim atop writhing weirdness. Bradbury might have sketched out this mode in the darker parts of Dandelion Wine and the entirety of Something Wicked This Way Comes, but contemporary authors such as Libling are showing us refinements of sensibility and sense of wonder that the old Waukeganian never dreamed of.

So there you have it, a dozen more time-travel recommendations in addition to some titles written by the people who recommended them. In all, it should be more than enough to keep you entertained until the next episode of Mystery Theatre drops this Thursday. In that installment, we’ll find out which classic mode of time travel is best suited for disposing of a pair of anachronistic camera glasses. (Read more about those camera glasses by clicking here).

And finally, one more time-travel recommendation: If you missed Prime Stage Theatre’s production of A Wrinkle in Time, you can still catch it via video on demand. Click here for details. Enjoy the show … happy reading … and I’ll meet you at the next installment of Mystery Theatre‘s “Time is out of Joint.”


4 responses to “This Week on Mystery Theatre:
Time-Travel Recommendations

  1. Barton Paul Levenson Avatar

    It’s probably too late to mention it, but Keith Laumer’s “Dinosaur Beach” is an extremely good time travel novel.

    1. Lawrence C. Connolly Avatar
      Lawrence C. Connolly

      Thanks, Barton. I remember seeing this book when it first came out and thinking it looked interesting, but for whatever reason, I didn’t pick it up. I see there are some fine reviews on Amazon, but surprisingly—given that it’s by one of SF’s important and prolific writers—it’s out of print. I can’t even find a digital copy. I’ll have to check out the dealer’s room next time I’m at a con to see if I can track down an old paperback. Thanks so much for the recommendation!

  2. Joe Coluccio Avatar
    Joe Coluccio

    Hi Lawrence,
    Physicist Carlo Rovelli has this notion that past present and future are a construct of our consciousness, not the physical universe. I have always believed that time travel is the basis for all story. I’ve been looking for time travel in, for lack of a more interesting word, “mainstream” fiction. In his first novel, ‘The Naked and the Dead’, Norman Mailer uses a bare device which he calls the “Time Machine,” It is a segment that provides a rich story experience of character backstory, development, and mingles past and present. These segments are very much a travel in time.
    Heinlein’s ‘The Door into Summer’, sinfully not mentioned, has always been a favorite of mine, don’t forget ‘By His Bootstraps’ and ‘—All You Zombies—’ these are definitive time travel tales.) Finally, if you are in the mood, the greatest time travel novel ever, ‘In Search of Lost Time’ by Marcel Proust. It is a time machine for the author and the reader. Just let the page take you.
    Given that I believe time travel is the basis for all story, I am on the search, like the Coaster’s song “Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade got nothing, child, on me”, like Bulldog Drummond, for more overt examples.
    Joe

    1. Lawrence C. Connolly Avatar
      Lawrence C. Connolly

      Hello, Joe: I too have been giving some thought to Carlo Rovelli’s notion of block time. I’ve enjoyed his books The Order of Time and Reality is Not What it Seems, and I strongly recommend them to our Mystery Theatre listeners. Another physicist—Brian Greene of Columbia University—presents a lucid consideration of the same theory in The Fabric of the Cosmos. And I find it intriguing how accurately H. G. Wells anticipates their views in The Time Machine, in which he writes: “There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.” I’ll plan to mention these books and acknowledge your thoughts on how “time is the basis for all story” in our next Mystery Theatre episode. Thanks so much for your comment!

Leave a Reply to Joe Coluccio Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *



Latest Comments:

  1. The cinematography alone draws me in. Thanks for the heads-up on this one, Larry. And best of luck as your…

  2. Merry Christmas to you and yours, Larry. Wishing you all the best for 2024, including everything related to your current…