Time travel in sci-fi can be anything from fun paradox romps to full-on existential nightmares. I’m always hunting for the ones that actually make you pause and rethink causality, free will, or reality itself. Which time travel book (or series) completely wrecked your brain? The kind where the rules felt consistent but the implications were absolutely wild.
The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson probably my favorite time travel science fiction novel.
A future warlord sends time traveling monuments known as Chronoliths back in time to commemorate battles in a war yet to be fought. As the monuments spread across the globe commemorating victories in the future war, a computer engineer assists a government team in the search for the person who might become the future warlord known only as Kuin.
Wow, straight to the top of my pile
I hope they looked closely at people named Quinn. (Because it sounds like how "Kuin" might be pronounced.)
Robert Charles Wilson is a master of scifi. His book "Spin" has some time travel elements as well (distortion and relative speed of time passage) and is my favourite book, hands down
I loved Spin and its sequels. Adding this to my list!
Wow, how have I never heard of this? Thanks!
Wilson's descent into obscurity has been baffling to me. He had five novels nominated in a litte over a decade span and won a Hugo for Spin.
He's older, bookish and not as into the limelight as, say, Robert Sawyer. As of late, Wilson's been having trouble finishing his books. He shelved one finished novel, put out a non-fic book two years ago and been slow to publish his next. Which is fine. Dude's entitled. In 20 years, he'll be one of those "deep cuts" the kids find after realizing they love sci-fi, just like we do with Sturgeon, Simak, Clement or Vance.
Spin is sitting on my shelf in line to be read. Very excited to check him out.
His best novel, I'd say.
I completely forgot I read that until I read this. I never should have got rid of my collection. I used to remember whole books at a glance.
So, didn't the guy turn out to be full of shit, like he didn't win anything, he was just a terrorist basically pre-attacking populations. Wasn't it something like the existing chronolith launches couldn't be stopped, but Kuin gets stopped after all the launches up to that point so there are no further launches? It's been forever since I read it, so I can't remember how it actually worked out.
The main character's mentor was targeted by the Kuinists for kidnapping. If you remember in the end, she's begging the main and his mercenary buddy to be allowed to go with those Kuinists. She's the ONLY one who knows how to build those monoliths and send them back in time. Ergo, she's the only one who knows how to screw them up.
The instant the main allows her to be kidnapped, the monolith in Wyoming explodes. She succeeded in sabotaging Kuin's rise, killing the loop and messing with the causality of it all.
I vaguely remember that. Thanks you.
Yeah, the chronoliths were monuments from the future about Kuin’s victories, but the real Kuin never shows up, if he was even a real person to begin with and/or hadn't Back-to-the-Future'd himself out of existence.
One of my favorite sci-fi books.
https://www.scribd.com/document/851932386/Chiang-Ted-What-s-Expected-of-Us-Nature-7-July-2005
You can read it right now. It's only one page. By Ted Chiang from the same collection of short stories that the movie Arrival was based on. Dude is an absolute genius.
Wasn't "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" in that collection as well? Pure genius.
It was and that's another great one. In the audio book he gives commentary afterwards about why he chose that story telliing style and it was fascinating to hear his thought procesd about the initial core idea then deciding on what he called an Arabian nights style of story telliing and why he thought that was the best fit for this kind of story. And it also made me realize that as brilliant as he is as an author, that a flaw of his writing is the limited characters, but the ideas are so strong that it makes up for it. Very interesting listen.
He channeled the Arabian Nights so well, I could almost have imagined coming to the story in the collection itself.
Just read it - thank you!
I did not expect a reference to Bartleby the Scrivener in a time travel story. That was really fun. I wouldn't call it the the most mind-bending time travel story, but it was quite good.
My money is still on All You Zombies.
While I didn't read 'All You Zombies' by Heinlein, the movie that was based on that story (Predestination) turned out to be pretty surprising. Recommended. It's weird in concept but pretty cool, as it plays like a script written in 1965 that fell behind a filing cabinet for 50 years, then dusted off and made in the 2010s with almost no rewrites.
The main character turning out to be their own mother, their own father, their own kidnapper and the time-travelling terrorist that they were pursuing was quite the unexpected set of twists. Partly because of how bat-crap crazy it was. Cool movie though, if you read that and thought it sounded dumb, don't let it dissuade you.
The film adaptation manages to hew pretty close to the short story—except for the presence of the Fizzle Bomber. The Fizzle Bomber subplot was necessary to obscure that Ethan Hawke’s and Sarah Snook’s characters were the same person. That link was much easier to hide in a short story until the big reveal.
I’m the opposite, I’ve read the short story but not yet seen the movie. It is a trip for sure. Ethan Hawke in the movie iirc.
Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk goes along these lines, a man repeatedly going into the past to fuck with his own gene line. Not Sci-Fi, basically horror, but it hit hard.
I've loved the short story forever and I was worried that the film wouldn't translate, but it was faithful where it could work and made logical creative choices where it needed to. I was pleasantly surprised and really liked it.
‘-All You Zombies-‘ by Robert A Heinlein.
One of the granddaddies(or grandmommies) of this genre.
this should be closer to the top ...
(at the risk of stating the obvious ... the movie Predestination is based on this and is my fave time travel movie)
Predestination did my head in in a way that Heinlein's short didn't. So, kudos to the Spierig brothers and especially Sarah Snook, she was amazing 👏
This is my choice as well. When I first read it many years ago I thought it was the ultimate time travel short story. It had the type of ending that made me go "what?" and then "wow."
Not read but i can't not reply to a scifi time travel thread the German TV show Dark. Best time travel fiction ever. Bring a note book lol
My wife and I agreed that Dark must be what happens when you ask Germans to create a telenovela.
Literally was just thinking about recommending dark. It’s that good!
Plan a week where you're not doing anything and don't mind not sleeping. I was up until 3 or 4am every night when I watched it, it's so bingeable.
Also because if you stop for a while and forget details you'll have to go back and start again lol
Just started a rewatch and I'm only slightly less bewildered than the first time.
You don't need a notebook when you've got:
https://dark.netflix.io/en
You tell it which episode you're on and it tells you everything you need to know thus far.
Literally came here to say this.
Recursion by Blake Crouch does a really interesting take on time travel.
Second vote for recursion, that was a tough one to keep track of.
I remember reading a review where someone mentioned they preferred Dark Matter to Recursion and it appeared to be the consensus.
Here to say to anyone who has read neither that I much preferred Recursion. Dark Matter is great (and I liked the Apple TV+ show as well), but Recursion was the better read and stuck with me more.
Oh good. Recursion was cool but I also found the overall premise of the time travel a bit confusing in the second half of the book. Ordered Dark Matter a few weeks ago but haven’t read it yet.
I prefer Recursion. I feel like Dark Matter was the first pass and Recursion perfected it.
Dark Matter as well.
Dark Matter isn't time travel, but it sure gets crazy by the end.
You’re right. I misremembered it a bit there.
I guess I’d say it’s time travel adjacent.
Unless you know Chicago geography and it takes you right out of the book and TV show.
The First Fifteen lives of Harry August is one of my favorite time travel books with a twist!
Paradox Bound is very good too. Again a unique twist on time travel
Not time travel related, but Claire North who wrote The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August just released a pretty good sci-fi book Slow Gods last month. Not quite as good as Fifteen Lives or Touch, but so far it's pretty good, I'm just over halfway
Ken Macleod's Lightspeed trilogy - starting with Beyond The Hallowed Sky - firmly commits to a universe where FTL is trivially easy and special relativity holds up, so causality is out the window.
This isn't a spoiler as it happens in the first chapter or two but the novel kicks off with a character receiving a letter from them self from a place they've never been which outlines a general theory of FTL travel.
It's not the most mind-bendy of series but time travel does have important ramifications.
Alternatively, Charlie Stross' Palimpsest is a genuinely entertaining mindfuck centred around an agency responsible for trying to preserve humanity through deep-time using time travel to write and re-write histories.
I second the recommendation of the Stross story. Notable for, among many other things, the idea that there's only one timeline and it's constantly being rewritten over. Also, paradoxes are absolutely permitted. At one point cadets have to perform an exercise in which they go about five seconds back in time, materialize behind their younger self, and cut his or her throat.
The Man Who Folded Himself.
Movie, Primer
Every time primer comes up I have to mention Upstream color. No time travel in that one but it's got plenty of mind bending aspects and is very rewarding.
Nah it’s nowhere near as good as Primer
This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, obviously.
Makes me so jealous, I can hardly reread it.
I can understand it’s maybe not for everyone but I loved it.
One of my all-time favourites! It is such a journey
Came here for this.
I struggled with this one. I liked the story but just found it quite hard to connect to the characters. I can recognise the skill that went into it but not fully for me
I just couldn’t get into this one. I finished it, but reluctantly.
Bender's Big Score.
Chicken grease salt.
I'll have to throw in Book of the New Sun out of left field. The mind-bending part is when you finally realize that there is a time travel element causing you to have to go back and re-read the whole thing in a completely different light!
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
The Anubis Gates was a freaky book. It was a little dark but definitely unique and interesting.
Dark? For Powers, that was a happy ending. Love that book.
Stress of Her Regard is also amazing.
Wholeheartedly back these recommendations. I love re-reading the Willis books every few years.
Forever War is a classic
Marooned in Realtime, for the same reason.
This is my favorite time travel story.
But that's only one way travel
True, but it really hits with the time dilation as it effects our protagonists
Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” is a classic. Michael Swanwick’s short story "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur" is astonishing. It was expanded into the novel Bones of the Earth.
And the movie based on Bradbury's story is an abomination of the highest order. Rarely can you see something so bad.
I've read some good ones over the years, but one that kind of tore me apart was Connie Willis's Doomsday Book. A play on the name of the 11th c. Domesday Book, it's accidental time travel to the time of the Black Death in the 14th c., and it is devastating. Willis has done some extremely interesting things with time travel; one hilarious one is To Say Nothing of the Dog, not necessarily devastating but certainly highly diverting.
I still find it incredible how she was able to pull both of these off in the same universe and the same style: one a hilarious comedy of manners romp through Victorian England (and you remind me, I still haven’t picked up Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat that inspired it); and the other a heartrending deeply humane drama during the times of the Black Death, one of very few SF books that have made me genuinely cry. And still it had the same recognizable style, and some of these humorous moments, but never making the tragic aspects feel cheap in any way. Damn I’m tearing up just writing this and thinking back!
ETA: Blackout and All Clear are also highly recommended, same universe and set during the Blitz in WW2.
Ooh -- highly recommend JKJ/3 Men. Esp once you're familiar with TSNotD!
My mom and I traded a battered paperback copy of Doomsday Book for literal decades; we had a (mild) argument once about which of us loved it more and therefore deserved to keep it. She kept it, so I guess she won. I inherited it, and I wish she still had it, know what I mean?
Oof. Sorry for your loss, yes I know what you mean… At least there is a distinctive memory of your mom attached to it now.
Alfred Bester’s short story ”The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” is fun and quite unlike any other time travel story I’ve read when it comes to the logic behind it. Also I love his extremely energetic literary style so if that’s something you like as well, look it up!
This Is the Way You Lose the Time War
Palimpsest by Charlie Stross.
That was the one I was looking to see, pretty much wrecks every other time travel story.
It's kind of explicitly "Let's wreck 'The End of Eternity'". :)
Replay by Ken Grimwood.
A guy in his mid 40s dies suddenly and wakes up in his 18 year old self’s body. He lives his life again, leveraging what he remembers from the future and becomes wealthy. Upon reaching the same age as when he died the first time, he dies a second time. Wakes up again in his younger body. Repeat over and over agin. But he realizes each jump back is getting closer and closer to his death date. So by the end he’s jumping back weeks, days, hours, even minutes.
Read this as a kid and absolutely loved it, but I also have this irrational fear now that I’ll wake up like he did one day in my younger body and I’ll have to do this all over again LOL
Fantastic book. In fact, the whole ‘fantasy masterworks’ and sci-fi masterworks’ collections are chock full of absolute classics (not at all all time travel related but absolutely fantastic books anyway!)
A friend gave me this book in 1987. I’ve reread it many times since. There’s a moment in the middle that jolts you. Love that!
What I feel is underrepresented in these threads is the TV series version of 12 Monkeys (2015-2018). This starts out similarly ambiguous to Gilliam’s movie (1995), but then drastically diverges to clear and obvious time travel reality. At first, as an old Gilliam fanboy, I was quite taken aback at this, but it grew on me quickly. It really needs to be evaluated on its own, not in comparison to the movie (let alone La Jetée (1962)).
There is also a period in the middle where it feels like they were just going through all the permutations of who’s the bad one now betraying everyone else, but once I got over that, it gets to a very satisfying wrap-up.
Also I haven’t seen Dark (2017-2020) mentioned this time around, though that one certainly isn’t really underrepresented. It needs to be listed for mind-bending time travel though.
The Dragonriders of Pern series. Not your typical time travel story this is more of a medieval fantasy story with a twist. Dragons share a psychic link with their rider and bond with them but have the unique ability to teleport. Only one day a rider accidentally teleports through time with their Dragon discovering that Dragons can time travel. Eventually this leads to the twist that they discover that the people of Pern are actually the descendants of people from Earth who traveled there via spaceship. Over generations and thousands of years they lose most of their technology and revert to a medieval society.
The Hyperion series deals with time travel in a really unique and cool way.
I am inordinately fond of The Door Into Summer.
I remember this story as i watch my cat go door to door meowing to be let out, then turns around disappointed its winter.
The Japanese film adaptation is excellent.
11/22/1963 (Stephen King) was very good. Probably not mind-bending (but maybe).
The 7 1/2 deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was a crazy premise with jumping back in time as part of a mystery. I enjoyed it.
I found 11/22/1963 really interesting until the end, which seemed sci-fi trope lame, as if even King, who is a grandmaster wordsmith, couldn't quite land the concept.
I remember one story I read a long time ago where the protagonist is working for a time traveler from a world ruled by Constantinople. They're sharing a house, but the boss (and the time machine) are always in the house "tomorrow" with respect to the narrator, so they almost never see each other. "I was okay with that as long as I didn't think about it too much."
One of my favorite SF lines ever. I cannot remember anything else about that story, other than that I think it was a short story.
I’d recommend Tau Zero by Poul Anderson: A classic where a spaceship's constant acceleration causes time dilation, making millennia pass in the outside universe while only years pass for the crew.
Up the Line by Robert Silverberg. Lots of Byzantine history.
Also Hawksbill Station and my favorite, The Masks of Time. Silverberg is one of my favorite authors.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.
It’s kinda a time travel novel. There are people in the world that when they die they are reborn at the same year they were originally born and in the same place to the same mother. They then start their lives over again with all the memories of the past lives.
John Scalzi has a new novella: 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years. It's about time travel tourism where you can stay for 3 days, or 9 months, or 27 years. It's a part of a new collection, The Time Traveler's Passport. I haven't read the other 5 in the collection, but I enjoyed this one. They are available for "free" with an Amazon Prime subscription.
One of the best ones I can think of is an automatic spoiler just by naming it, because the time travel in it is only loosely hinted at until the very end.
Fallen Dragon by Peter F Hamilton
I didn't enjoy Fallen Dragon on first read, but it grew on me a couple of reads later. It's also interesting how the author uses a similar TT aspect in another novel for utilitarian purposes, where settlers on a devastated planet are sent via a wormhole that takes twenty years (IIRC) in our universe to traverse, but no time for them. During those decades, the planet is remediated, so they don't emerge into a wasteland.
The Jaunt by Stephen King. No spoilers; it’s the absolute worst thing that can happen to someone.
Heinlein: By His Bootstraps.
The Gone World was a pretty good mindfuck.
This is a great book. I highly recommend it.
This should be higher up on the list.
That book got pretty crazy. An enjoyable read no doubt! I’m not sure it’s the “most mind-bending time travel story” but it is a fun ride and gets very trippy at the end.
"The time travelers wife" ... it's a weird love story of sorts and I guess more of a "girls" book ... a bit on the mushy side, but the concept is very intriguing. Here, "accidental and uncontrollable" time travel is a physical illness.
I don't know about mind bending, but... Pyramids and After the Fact, by Fred Saberhagen, Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, by Simmons, and my favorite, End of Eternity, by Asimov.
Movies: Primer or Timecrimes
“All You Zombies…” by Robert Heinlein. It’s only a few pages long, and in my opinion, the absolute pinnacle of the time travel genre.
Two recommendations:
Replay by Ken Grimwood. A 43-year-old man dies of a heart attack, but wakes up on his 18th birthday with all his previous memories intact. The cycle continues, but in each "replay" he wakes up a little older.
Timeline by Michael Crichton. It's not that mind-bending per se, but it's a great story, IMO.
Connie Willis! Her Oxford Historians time travel books range from fun shenaniganery (To Say Nothing of the Dog) to the silly but also heavy (Doomsday Book, All Clear). The plots are full of nuance and at least one of them won a Hugo award (I forget which). They leave you thinking. She's easily one of my top 5 science fiction favorite authors.
The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter. A strange and wonderful authorised sequel to the Time Machine by HG Wells.
It's epic.
The Steins;Gate anime
Kindred by Octavia Butler
“Kindred explores the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery from the sensibility of a late 20th-century Black woman who is aware of its legacy in contemporary American society.
The novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues, and speculates on the prospects of future egalitarianism.
The book is the first-person account of a young African-American writer, Dana, who is repeatedly transported in time from her Los Angeles home in 1976 with her white husband to an early 19th-century Maryland plantation outside Easton. “
Loved it.
A children's book: The Green Futures of Tycho.
Mine is also a children's/teens book. Out of Time written by John Marsden.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Nifenegger was a fun read, but for me the odder and more compelling story is "The Man Who Walked Home" by Alice Sheldon (writing as James Tiptree Jr).
One of the best, most thoughtful versions is "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang
Everyone mentioned Robert Heinlein's By His Bootstraps, which is a short story collected in these anthologies
Everyone also mentioned Heinlein's All You Zombies, which is a short story collected in these anthologies
KINDRED - Octavia Butler
Up the line by Robert Silverberg is the best time travel novel I've ever read. It concerns time travel tourism and it quite subversive and darkly funny with a main character who is quite the unreliable narrator.
The eyre Affair by jasper Fforde
All of an Instant
one of the most original and exciting stories about time travel I've read is Split Second by Douglas E. Richard's
Don’t know about existential nightmares, but there were a couple of book series I ended up really enjoying.
“The Time Bubble” by Jason Ayres starts out simple enough to introduce us to a natural phenomenon. As you progress through the books there are many attempts and consequences to control that had some successes and a lot of horrible failures. I enjoyed the journey.
Another book series is “In Times Like These” by Nathan Van Coops. A similar starting situation that introduces the protagonist to a whole other time-based ecosphere. I liked how the series also progressed from simple concept to getting complicated.
Also a shoutout to “Schrödinger’s Dog” by Allan Brewer.
Robert Heinlein’s All You Zombies is hard to beat in terms of its bonkers conceit. The film Predestination is based on it.
I like time travel stories where the laws of causality are not violated and there’s no splitting off into another universe. (Btw, implying that free will doesn’t exist).
The Time Traveler’s Wife does this well. I know it’s been attempted twice into film or tv adaptations that kinda failed. But the novel is very good.
Wolfgang Jeschke - Der letzte tage der schöpfung (The last day of Creation) - american soldiers travel back in time, to get the oil supplies from the arabs.
Harry Harrison - The Technicolor Time Machine - Movie producers want to make a realistic film about Vikings discover America.
Orson Scott Card - Pastwatch - What if native americans discover Europe first?
Backward, Turn Backward by James Tiptree Jr. is a trip.
Time And Again
I dont know about if it was fanfiction or an official book. There was a text story where Bruce Wayne got transported to the origin, in Crime Alley, and realized he had to shoot Thomas and Martha or the Earth-2 would collapse.
David Gerrold's the Man Who Folded Himself was great. Got bumped for the Hugo by The Gods Themselves. DG is still annoyed with Asimov for the way he shilled himself to the voters that year.
The Man Who Folded Himself - without a doubt. An excellent internally consistent mind blowing book.
All you zombies - Heinlein
The Man Who Folded Himself by Gerrold.
Behold the Man - Michael Morecock
Much of the Hyperion Cantos takes the cake, especially the story in which a man’s daughter ages in reverse after an encounter in the Time Tombs.
Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile and Intervention and the Galactic Milieu trilogy.
You have to read the Saga first. I can't tell you why.
They are great stories.
I own them all and second this.
I like Blake Crouch’s Recursion. The idea of using memory as a form of time travel is a unique concept.
The Man Who Folded Himself
TENET by Chris Nolan comes to mind.
This is my answer
I was so excited about this coming out then never watched it with life in the way… you have reminded me too. So, it’s worth it?
Yes for sure, but you have to accept that you will only get a feel for what's going on during your first watch. It's an incredible experience nonetheless.
Lord of Light by Zelazny - While not TECHNICALLY a "Time Travel" story, you don't experience the story in a time-linear format.
To Sail Beyond the Sunset - by R. A. Heinlein has some trippy sequences in it, even discounting that this book is in his "World As Myth" arc.
A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury - Do NOT step off the path!
Light of other days by bob shaw.
Greg Egan's Permutation City, subjective time manipulation, artificial time acceleration, and causality loops inside simulated realities. Fun for all. 😄
The animorph stories with the scenario rips.
I dont read much but they were mind bending.
Flight to Forever by Poul Anderson
Fantastic story about time travel. After traveling into the near future, the main characters realize that they are having a hard time returning and ultimately realize it is impossible to return to their starting point as it would take infinite energy. They then decide to go forward in time, in the hopes of getting help with the problem.
I reread it every few years.
Star Trek wise I'm currently reading Coda and it's good
The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman. Relistened it a bunch of times.
“Grad-school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when, while measuring subtle quantum forces that relate to time changes in gravity and electromagnetic force, his calibrator turns into a time machine. With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who has left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose taking a time machine trip himself-or so he thinks.” Edit. Not sure if it fits the ask of mind-bending, but it’s a solid book.
Singularity sky. I still don't understand what the hell went down during the whole war.
Seemed like the fleet used ftl to fast travel thousands of years into the future and traveled back in time to the start of the war, just to ambush the enemy. Kind of an over kill for an ambush, if you asked me.
They even recovered some Intel and personal mails from a capsule far into the future, left by their government shortly after they left, that just floated in space for like 4 thousand years. Whole thing was a royal brain fuck.
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card
The midnight frequency series by Vicki Regan. You want an existential crisis from time lines it’s all there! and more. Non stop action.
All you zombies gotta be the one. It just keeps on piling on.
11/22/63 by Steven King is a fantastic time travel story about the Kennedy assassination.
Your Life Does Not Exist by Robert Pagano is a pretty crazy semi-time travel story involving DMT.
Dark Primer Triangle
The Days of Solomon Gursky
Basically it’s a novella or short story cut into 7. Starts with a guy biking some mountains, goes through futuristic war, to various ages to the end of the universe. And back to the start. It’s basically a meditation on love at its heart, and it includes some pretty interesting sci-fi concepts
Predestination
The one that actually happened to me but was erased due to a paradox. That's my guess.
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.
For me that is the short story ‘Up by his shoestrings’. I’m not sure who the author is. I thought it was Keith Laumer. Great story about a man that keeps running into himself and sees the same events from a different perspective several times. This story was the start of my fascination for time in general and time travel specific.
I think you mean "By His Bootstraps" by Robert Heinlein
Millennium by John Varley
Lest Darkness Fall. L Sprague DeCamp.
The History of Time Travel. Mock documentary from 2014, documenting the guy who created time travel at the beginning and by the end the discussion is about how time travel is impossible.
I think the idea is that we don't have time travel because every time it is invented, someone will go back in time and screw things up enough to prevent time travel from being invented.
Martian time-slip
No one has mentioned The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, which I adored and have written a dozen fan fiction stories about. I thought so hard about all the implications that they just fell out of my brain.
Bearing an Hourglass Piers Anthony.
It’s not your typical time travel story.
Julian May’s “Pliocene Exile” series
Yes movie - I presume there was a book? - Predestination - has always been a head fuck!
Predestination by Heinlein. "If you shoot me, you'll become me. You get it? That's how it happens. If you want to break the chain, you have to not kill me, but try to love me again."
It’s by Orson Scott Card so you should get it second hand but his Pathfinder series is pretty great, the end starts to falter a little but all the way throughout it plays with multiple different methods of time travel splicing together to produce really intriguing outcomes.
I’ve also got to recommend the audiodrama Ars Paradoxica, which is free through any podcast player. If you wanna see a fairly long form story that really plays hard with the rules of time travel and gains more depth on a repeat it’s kinda incredible. A scientist from some year 20XX accidentally creates a machine that sends her back in time to world war 2, into an experiment running parallel to the Manhattan Project.
El principio y final de "12 monos"...
Check out The Tourist by Robert Dickinson... It should be a cult classic... You absolutely have to read it at least twice because it is written so cleverly, the first read through makes almost no sense, because you don't know what you don't know... On the second read OMG!!! It becomes a completely different book!!!
If we're talking movies, I have to mention the Spanish low-budget movie Timecrimes. Insanely good. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0480669/
One that hasn't been mentioned "The Light Brigade" by Kameron Hurley.
In-world the military has some sort of "teleportation" technology by way of disintegration and reconstruction on the other side, but the protagonist has a condition that whenever they jump they end up at a different reconstruction time. So the narrative structure is completely non-linear, and both the MC and the reader start very confused and slowly piece things together.
David Gerrold's "The Man Who Folded Himself" It examines the question of what would an ordinary slob do with the ability to travel in time?
"Fugue State" John M Ford. I still don't know what the fuck happened.
Palimpset - Stross. I have no fucking idea what happened.
"Cowl" -Asher. I know what happened! In the future, humanity is split into 2 different factions or post-humans. Badasses, and super-badasses. Basically fighting a war using time-travel, but - Cowl, leader of the rebels, has the Vorpal beast - fucking time travelling eating machine, that he's using to ensure his future is the winning one. Tack is an enhanced human "MiB" thug, Polly is a teen hooker, both are forced to travel back in time jumps to the moment life arises on Earth. One of his better books.
"Rise and Fall of DODO", Stephanson and Galland. Military project to use time travel. Powered by witches.
The invention of photography killed magic, researcher comes up with a loophole. They find the "last" witch, convince her to work with them. Missions to Constantinople, 15th century London, early American colony. Renegade time-travelling Vikings! (seriously, the Epic of Walmart is fucking hilarious. Poor Gunnar's encounter with "cockgnasher or the hundred silver teeth", a zipper, is worth the whole book".
Benefits as the co-author is a woman with a serious theater fetish, meaning the female characters are good.
Behold the Man is pretty full on.
The Psychology of Time Travel, by Kate Mascarenhas. Involves fixed-chronology time-travel — no changing the past, no parallel universes — and takes that concept to its logical conclusion, with e.g. people knowingly walking into accidents that will injure or kill them, because the outcome is already known and inescapable. Sexual relationships with past or future versions of oneself are common, and iirc newbie time travellers have an initiation ritual where they tell some poor random ordinary person the date and circumstances of their death, or possibly of the death of someone close to them.
The short story 'If at First' by Peter F. Hamilton uses a unique method of time travel.
The Company series by Kage Baker. A mysteriously all-powerful corporation in the near future discovers both immortality and time travel, and combines them to take over and manipulate the entire human past.
The catch is, you can only manipulate recorded history. The event shadows of the past are cover for immortal agents trying to outmaneuver their future masters.
It's a wide, wild, lavish, and fascinating series that branches out everywhere but still resolves into that one moment that begins known history.
The Forever War comes to mind
AI post
« The Anubis Gates » (Powers) squeezes every little bit of drama and surprise that I think anyone could attain with the time travel trope. « The Fall of Chronopolis » has some interesting ideas about limiting the scope of paradoxes and a time war between different eras.
I didn't read this one. A movie: "Tim Travers and the Time Travelers Paradox". Clever title, isn't it? Hilarious and deranged.
Cowl by Neal Asher, his solution to the time travel paradox is amazing!
"All You Zombies" - Heinlein
"The Skull" - PKD
The Bugle Call - manga
Set in the year 1294 a proxy time war is being fought in the middle ages by competing alternate future timelines.
primer
VALIS by Philip K Dick
There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson is fantastic and grounded
Hyperion Cantos
All You Zombies by Heinlein.