Time Travel

ITT, time travel books. >ones you like >are they dogshit?

https://zerophilosophy.substack.com/p/the-puzzle-house-scraps-336 Blog of weird Lovecraftian short fiction involving nonlinear time

>watching time travel episode or movie >they say "back to the present" Are books better than this?

Anything that involves so-called "butterfly effect" is in fact, pure garbage speculation. You can "travel" time forward ok through suspended animation or even at near-lightspeeds, and supposedly backward, not in your own "timeline" anyways, e.g. there is no "butterfly effect" or slowly disappearing from existence when your momma goes to prom with Biff Tannen instead of your dad, a supposed successful back time traveler will just end up in one of the myriad possible diversions of our(?) universe where altering family tree of own in relative past bears no consequences on oneself. In fact, just postponing a mating time of two people by few minutes can significantly alter the birth outcome since it will be completely another batch of spermatozoa impregnating the ova, so most of those "fixing past" plots are very thin. Basically, one kind of time travel fiction is the only true one, but also deemed the trashiest compared to conventional "sophisticated" "wow so deep" time-travel fiction that often relies on some sort of butterfly effect. It's called alternative history/accidental time travel, попаданцы, 異世界, and occupies the niche of teen-oriented dime pulp fiction. No "high brow" Christopher Nolan stuff happens here, but at least it remains logically sound.

>>6449 I'm afraid not; they suck equally as much.

>>6447 >all you zombies not a book but a short story with a very good movie adaptation. the MC is the only character that matters, and he got himself stuck in a loop with himself

I haven't read this yet, but it has decent reviews and isn't too long.

>>6450 >Anything that involves so-called "butterfly effect" is in fact, pure garbage speculation I don't think you know what the butterfly effect is. >slowly disappearing from existence when your momma goes to prom with Biff Tannen instead of your dad This is not an example of the butterfly effect. >In fact, just postponing a mating time of two people by few minutes can significantly alter the birth outcome since it will be completely another batch of spermatozoa impregnating the ova This is an example of the butterfly effect. >>6447 Not a time travel book, but a book which involves an interesting treatment of time travel: Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. It's actually a minor plot element, but basically a fleet of warships makes a maneuver at relativistic speeds that is supposed to have them arrive to confront an enemy fleet immediately after they left, but they fuarrrked it up and went back in time slightly, which caused a bunch of problems.

>>6478 Not OP, but isn't the butterfly effect like 'weather prediction is impossible because a butterfly doing soykaf means storms in Tokyo' or something related? >>6477 This looks like an amazing read.

>>6482 >isn't the butterfly effect like ... Yeah, it is. In the context of speculative fiction involving time travel, it's usually tied to the idea that your presence in the past can change the future in completely unpredictable ways. This is closely related to the mathematical notion of chaotic dynamics.

Terry Pratchett's "Night Watch" is pretty good.

>>6477 Chuck Tingle is a madman and hero.

Time travel is a big concept, but I'm particularly found of Temporal Loops scenario. If anyone has any book recs regarding that I'd be glad, because most I know are movies

It's only a short story but The Small Stones Of Tu Fu by Brian W. Aldiss. I can't think of any full length books unless it's something like Hitchhiker.

Ones from the past 6mo: Time Spike, Eric Flint, Marilyn Kosmatka Paradox Bound, Peter Clines

Philip K. Dick - Now Wait for Last Year I read it many years ago, and don't remember much, maybe it wasn't that great. Basically people take a drug, and can travel forward, backward, or sideways in time, it's different for everybody. Plot spoiler: example: an important politician dies so they travel sideways to get the same person from a different timeline to fill his shoes.

>>6482 >Not OP, but isn't the butterfly effect like 'weather prediction is impossible because a butterfly doing soykaf means storms in Tokyo' or something related? that's the popsci explanation. The "butterfly effect" is a way to explain how, in chaotic systems like weather, tiny changes to the input can lead to massive changes in the output, given enough time. The butterfly is not "causing" a storm in Tokyo any more than the billions of other factors that go in to the formation of a storm.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. It really holds up a lot better than most early sci-fi books.

>>6493 >sideways in time What would this be, different timelines?

i recommend it also on a different board but need to write it also here: the whole trilogy The three body problem

The Technicolor Time Machine, by Harry Harrison The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells Farnham's Freehold, by Robert A. Heinlein Dead Morn, by Piers Anthony and Roberto Fuentes A Sound of Thunder, by Ray Bradbury Frankenstein Unbound, by Brian Aldiss The Man Who Came Early, by Poul Anderson The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World, by Harry Harrison The Shadow Out of Time, by H. P. Lovecraft

>>7008 I should add: Vintage Season, by C. L. Moore A Toy for Juliette, by Robert Bloch And its sequel, "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World", by Harlan Ellison

Is slaughterhouse-five any good or is it just a meme?

I'm surprised to see no one has added this particular to the list yet. It's an innovative story, as it focuses less on the mechanics of time travel (which are often arbitrary anyways) and instead exposes the difficult logistics of having a relationship that spans different timespans. It's also interesting that one of the protagonist who travels through time can't control when he travels or where. The book is The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

>>6447 All you zombies (technically a short story)

>>7247 It was my mothers favorite book for many years

>>6488 See >>7249 Would forever war be considered a time travel book? while technically there is no back and forth, the story is about how lightspeed causes troops to miss basically everything on earth while they are fighting wars, and when they come back after a deployment the entire world they are fighting for is in the future. It is also supposed to capture the feeling of troops returning from vietnam to a radically changed america that they left.

>>7248 Isn't this the one where the MC goes back in time and has glitterboy sex with himself?

>>7247 I couldnt get far at all, the style didnt work at all for me. Seems to be so popular that there must be something to it though

>>6447 Try "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" and by Ted Chiang.

I'm disappointed. Ccru's writings. General lemurian time sorcery, numograms, psuedo-demonic numerical symbolism.

I love Einstein's Dreams, I think it is the definition of a good collection of thought experiments. >>7008 I'll second your Bradbury and Harry Harrison, but Heinlein is a children's author. Williamson's Freehold is a much more mature interpretation of similar ideas, if not a little extremist at times.

>>6447 I like the Jule Verne books. >But there is a finite quantity of coal in the ground, what will happen to our industry once we burnt it all? >Artificial island of vegetation at the center of the Pacific because everything that float congregate at the same place. It's not what you were asking for, but it make me travel in time.

>>7359 MC is a troon but not by choice. He/she has both genitalia (a true hermaphrodite)

>>7446 The CCRU were based, their abstract dynamics posts are amazing

>>6447 Time travel is cringe because it almost always presumes linear causality. There is no one unified "time" or "timeline". It's a manifold.

>>6489 > The Small Stones Of Tu Fu by Brian W. Aldiss Very glad to see this here. Almost all of his stories deal with time as a main theme but the others are usually about our inability to overcome its effects in some way. This one is different and I thought was maybe connected to this guy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_Fu

>>8804 There is a unique "maximally timelike" zero-acceleration curve through each point. Such curves cannot cross unless they are identical. In this sense, timelines are unique. That's basic pseudo-riemannian geometry. The situation gets more complicated when you allow for non-equilibrium metrics, however.

The Door Into Summer by Heinlein

Hi, I've been watching Dark again, and it really tickles my brain in the right spots. Particularly trying to keep track of where things are, their trajectory across time, such as with the "Apparat", the time machine, that goes back and forth in time and changes hands. The whole series is presented as a sort of puzzle for the viewer. I wonder if there is any book like this, where the threads of different objects and people travelling through time are so entangled, yet they have a coherent continuity. Please, if anyone knows one such book it would be highly appreciated .

Steins Gate is pretty good because they actually come up with a theory for how the time travel is supposed to work so its not just some magic machine that ends up a convenient plot device.

Does back to the future have any books?