The 15 Best Time Travel travel guide rock n roll london Stories Of All Time Pop Crunch Top 10 - Lists and more lists. TV - The good, the bad, the ugly. Movies - Popcorn & a little artform Hot Photos travel guide rock n roll london - Lots of hot pics More Hip-Hop - R&B, urban and rap Style - Fashion travel guide rock n roll london news for style junkies The Show - Sarah East crunches the celebrities Today's Hot Links 15 Deadliest Human Caused Disasters 19 Old Bands That Need To Break Up 20 Amazing Facts You Probably Didn't Know Home The Best People Pics The 15 Best Time Travel Stories Of All Time 84530 61 http%3A%2F%2Fwww.popcrunch.com%2Fthe-15-best-time-travel-stories-of-all-time%2F The+15+Best+Time+Travel+Stories+Of+All+Time 2009-12-16+20%3A50%3A35 Tim http%3A%2F%2Fwww.popcrunch.com%2F%3Fp%3D84530
Ever since man first got drunk at a work Christmas travel guide rock n roll london party, and accidentally told his boss how to fix what s wrong with this company , people have dreamed of time travel. The ability to shift through the firmament of time, as though it were water. To fix the problems of the past, and hit on aliens in the future. Time travel really hit its stride in the late 19th and the 20th centuries, and became a standard fixture of novels, short stories, and eventually television. Even though the concept has been used frequently (and often badly) there are still interesting ways to play with the idea. Here are 15 of the finest time travel stories ever put on paper. 15. Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur s Court by Mark Twain
A pre-20th century choice, Connecticut Yankee has the distinct travel guide rock n roll london pleasure of having being adapted into a number of absolutely travel guide rock n roll london horrific films, each using a different and equally stupid take on the tale (see A Kid in King Arthur s Court, A Knight in Camelot, and Black Knight). For some reason, this story seems to draw shitty, family friendly remakes like Twilight fans to a glitter travel guide rock n roll london sale. It s horribly travel guide rock n roll london ethnocentric (temporacentric?), travel guide rock n roll london but functioned as a biting criticism of the over-romanticisation of the past. Twain was always at his best with satire, and making travel guide rock n roll london fun of 6th Century England travel guide rock n roll london is perhaps an easy target. Yet reading Connecticut travel guide rock n roll london Yankee in this day and age also serves travel guide rock n roll london as an interesting view on how people in the late 19th Century travel guide rock n roll london viewed themselves compared to their antecedents. 14. Saga of Pliocene Exile by Julian May
Spread across four novels (and a few followups):The Many Coloured Land; The Golden Torc; The Non-Born King; and The Adversary, travel guide rock n roll london the Pliocene Exile saga wins major points for its innovative central concept. 21st Century minor criminals, misfits and ne er-do-wells are offered travel guide rock n roll london the opportunity to escape the rigors and overcrowding of the present, by taking a one-way trip back to the Pliocene (circa 5.3-2.8 travel guide rock n roll london million years ago), with the view that they ll be in a wild paradise. Instead, they arrive to find the past inhabited by a dimorphic race of alien religious extremists, who enslave humans as soon as they get there. The books do run long—as is often the case with SF and Fantasy—but manage to keep things fresh, and provide interesting nods to the prehistory of our planet. 13. Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy
travel guide rock n roll london Looking backward was written travel guide rock n roll london in 1888, and once perfectly described one of the few books ever published that created almost travel guide rock n roll london immediately on its appearance a political mass movement. The time travel, and even plot, of Looking Backward are superfluous, and only present as a way of delivering Bellamy s Socialist message (actually Socialist, not teabagger Socialist). It s the tale of a young man who slips into a coma, and wakes in the far future, where the United States is a Socialist paradise, everyone works for the good of all, and the quality of life is unparalleled. Bellamy s work was an overnight sensation, inspiring clubs devoted to his ideals, utopian communities, and a political movement. It was extremely influential, and remarkably prescient on a number of issues. 12. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett is a fantastical and hilarious author, and the Discworld series has more fans than any 40-odd long series of books has a right to. They re consistently funny, and brim-filled with ideas and wit. Night Watch is part of the City Watch cluster of books, and deals with erstwhile leader of the Watch, Sam Vimes, being dragged back in time, and assuming travel guide rock n roll london the identity of his own mentor while coping travel guide rock n roll london with his younger self, and trying to control a revolution, which for him has already happened. The wonderful, and repeated, scenes travel guide rock n roll london of Present Vimes teaching Young Vimes the lessons he remembers from what he thought was his mentor are particular favorites, and Night Watch is some of Pratchett at his best. 11. The Dancers At The End Of Time by Michael Moorecock
If you ve not encountered Moorecock before, you re doing yourself a disservice, as his writing completely changed the face of British literature in the 60s and 70s an managed to spawn unutterably bad copycats in all directions. The Dancers At The End of Time is a series of books focussed on the decedent and immortal inhabitants of a time period where entropy is causing the universe to collapse. They are utterly without morals, which they see as passé, and flit about the timestream on whims, searching for diversions. Moorecock s writing is utterly languid and sublime, a sexual acid trip in a period when free love actually meant something, and was taken to its utter extreme. Dancers never achieved as much recognition as some of his other work, and is a more surreal, introspective and less violent, and revels in its debauchery. 10. Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card
OSC is very easy to paint as a homophobic misogynist, and a man full of hate, because, well, he is. He s also an excellent writer, as anyone who ever read Ender s Game will tell you. Pastwatch is one of the few novels he managed to write with a female character who wasn t just there as mother or lover. He created a nuanced tale of future scientists watching Colombus travel guide rock n roll london westward exploration, and its everlasting effect on our own society. They eventually realise that he was sent westward by a similar group of scientists, from an alternate travel guide rock n roll london timeline, travel guide rock n roll london attempting to prevent an even worse fate for the planet. The scientists in our own timeline then send back three of their own to various junctures in history, to try again to create a better outcome than the eventual genocide of Native Americans. The book really hits its stride in the final third, when it deals with the trio in the past, trying to right the potential wrongs of the future, while knowing they ll never see the result. 9. The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
Once, there was a very shitty science fiction book called Timeline, by Michael Crichton, which used quantum travel guide rock n roll london foam as a way of sending college students travel guide rock n roll london to the medieval era for hijinks. Then, around a year later, came a truly excellent novel by Clarke and Baxter, also focusing on the theoretical possibilities of quantum foam—but for time viewing instead of time travel. Through wormholes, people became able to watch any point in the history of humanity. The Light of Other Days is a brilliant sociological analysis of a culture where privacy becomes completely non-existent. When someone can look at any event ever (including the present), Governments grind to a halt, and modesty becomes a relic —apart from a small group dedicated travel guide rock n roll london to attempting to avoid being watched. It s Clarke and Baxter at their bests, with a deep philosophical view on the possible implications of this technique. Though the ending comes completely travel guide rock n roll london out of left field, and makes little sense. 8. The Time Quartet by Madeline L Engle
One of the finest young adult series to be had, the first volume—A Wrinkle in Time—deservedly won the Newbery Award. Young adult literature functions travel guide rock n roll london best when it actually bothers to treat its readers as intelligent human beings, and L Engle does this with aplomb. The quartet deals with morality, belief, and good and evil, while taking place across the a universe of time, space and scale. While some find L Engle s religion off putting—either for being too Christian, or not enough—within the context of the novels, it s seen as part of a larger universal force for good. 7. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
Another multi-volume choice, but the four part Book of the New Sun flows continuously from one novel to the next, reading a single unit. The reason it s included on this list isn t that the story involved time travel, but that the book itself is an artifact from another time. The tale is based on a journal from the future, flung into the recesses of the past. The story told in the Book of the New Sun is one of the clearest examples of science fiction as literature as you can find, and one of the few SF stories that s actually travel guide rock n roll london had an entire book devoted to its analysis published. Any budding linguists out there will do well to read it, as Wolfe s approach to the language of the future is masterful, crafting argot from similar roots to modern English, so they sound familiar, but still unrecognized. 6. The Time Traveler s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Yes, I know I completely lose any guy cred for choosing this. I totally don t care. It s a beautiful love story about a man with a genetic condition that causes him to randomly pop around the timeline, the woman who loves him, and their desperate struggle to have a relationship. It s saccharine and cliché, but it s a love story, it s meant to be. How each of the main characters meets the other for the first time, at various points in their lives, are particularly well done, and the ending of the story is particularly heart-wrenching, though telegraphed. The story s pace is perfect, and while it won t mentally tax you the way some of the other stories travel guide rock n roll london on this list will, it makes a perfect lazy read. 5. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
If you haven t read the Hitchhiker s Guide Trilogy travel guide rock n roll london yet, then you are a horrible, horrible person. You probab
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