What Are The Best Time-Travel Novels of the 23rd Century?

Originally posted on rec.arts.sf.written 6/25/05, in reply to a thread-starting post with the above title:

Padwal Unclaunt's The Left-Handed Murderer is generally considered the masterpiece in that area. (Though some people, including me, prefer his later novel Wings That Have Shadowed Me, which isn't as strongly plotted but features an unforgettable central character in Mariner Weld and has the best writing of his career.)

Padwal's son Cunningham wrote a series of sequels to Left-Handed Murderer (starting with The Red-Headed Murderer), but those should be avoided.

Naked Mind for Love has its devotees, too, but I never really could believe in any of Latin Rokoski's preposterous books. And his choice of time-travel device in this book utterly broke my willing suspension of disbelief.

Other works to look for:

Life More Desperate Than Dear by Jared Levertoff (try not to get an early-24th century edition, as those are all horribly expurgated; you'll never figure out who impregnated Gillian reading it that way).

A Gilded Shell by Lee Hamalian (a personal favorite, though it's mostly forgotten these days)

One Hundred Million Screens by G.B.H. Hornswoggler (though note that the attribution of this pseudonym to Nobel prize-winner Gwentelion Osamue has recently been called into question; it's possible that we'll never know who "Hornswoggler" really was).

"Sharp to the Windowpane" isn't a great piece of fiction itself, but it's amazingly prescient in its description of the Lystander Process (so much so that the Cottle Chivers Literary Trust has been most active in licensing the story and derivative works to the Lystander Institute). [1]

There Is No Loneliness should be mentioned for completeness. It was the bestselling work of fiction of the mid-century, of course, and dramatized at least fifteen times in different media before the Adjunct Supremacy outlawed it in 2286, but it's a horrible book and nearly unreadable now. Elinor Dunn wasn't a professional writer to begin with, of course, and her book was beloved for its portrait of anti-President Ramasambrumanian rather than for its story, so even students of the period need to read it with several reference books at hand.

Tiny On That Distant Stage is, on the other hand, still well worth reading, even though Lilalia Menasshe died while re-writing it (so we'll never be sure when Stievers was going after the Requisite Offering).

Finally, you'll want to look up Professor Hargetay Takibano's The Farthest Shore: Images of Time and Translocation in the Literature of the Umber Era (University of Nova Brasilia, 2406) for a full list of works of interest, but I must warn you about Takibano. She's a horrible prude (so 24th century), and the sound of her axes grinding often overwhelm all else. But she's always very entertaining - she's one of those writers at her best when she's attacking someone else - and her scholarship is quite good. (And the reading list can't be beat.)


[1] Of course, anyone who called the Lystander Process "time travel" would be laughed out of polite company, but the mere fact of paradox engineering inevitably brings up the comparison.