Science Fiction Reads

When the Time Traveller courageously stepped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the year 802,700--and everything has changed. In another, more utopian age, creatures seemed to dwell together in perfect harmony. The Time Traveller thought he could study these marvelous beings--unearth their secret and then retum to his own time--until he discovered that his invention, his only avenue of escape, had been stolen. H.G. Well's famous novel of one man's astonishing journey beyond the conventional limits of the imagination first appeared in 1895. It won him immediate recognition, and has been regarded ever since as one of the great masterpieces in the literature of science fiction.

For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone.

For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.

But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin -- barely of age herself -- finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him.

Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

This classic work of science fiction is widely considered to be the ultimate time-travel novel.

When Daniel Eakins inherits a time machine, he soon realizes that he has enormous power to shape the course of history. He can foil terrorists, prevent assassinations, or just make some fast money at the racetrack. And if he doesn't like the results of the change, he can simply go back in time and talk himself out of making it!

But Dan soon finds that there are limits to his powers and forces beyond his control.

Andrew Harlan is an Eternal, a member of the elite of the future. One of the few who live in Eternity, a location outside of place and time, Harlan's job is to create carefully controlled and enacted Reality Changes. These Changes are small, exactingly calculated shifts in the course of history, made for the benefit of humankind.

Though each Change has been made for the greater good, there are also always costs.

During one of his assignments, Harlan meets and falls in love with Noÿs Lambent, a woman who lives in real time and space. Then Harlan learns that Noÿs will cease to exist after the next Change, and he risks everything to sneak her into Eternity. Unfortunately, they are caught. Harlan's punishment? His next assignment: Kill the woman he loves before the paradox they have created results in the destruction of Eternity.

Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL's family--and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can't share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship U.S.S. Libra--a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand the mental trauma of time-travel and believes the SEAL's experience with the future has triggered this violence.

Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. To her horror, the future reveals that it's not only the fate of a family that hinges on her work, for what she witnesses rising over time's horizon and hurtling toward the present is the Terminus: the terrifying and cataclysmic end of humanity itself.

Behind the seemingly innocuous facade of St. Mary's Institute of Historical Research, a different kind of academic work is taking place. Just don't call it "time travel"--these historians "investigate major historical events in contemporary time." And they aren't your harmless eccentrics either; a more accurate description, as they ricochet around history, might be unintentional disaster-magnets.

The first thing you learn on the job at St. Mary's is that one wrong move and history will fight back--sometimes in particularly nasty ways. But, as new recruit Madeleine Maxwell soon discovers, it's not only history they're often fighting.

Here is a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on our understanding of time itself.

The story begins at the turn of the previous century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book and an international sensation: The Time Machine.

James Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea that becomes part of contemporary culture--from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Jorge Luis Borges to Woody Allen. He investigates the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Finally, he delves into a temporal shift that is unsettling our own moment: the instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.

It's the mid-80's, and Marty McFly is your average 17-year-old slacker who happens to be friends with an inventor, Doc Brown. Doc's latest invention is a time machine, that ends up transporting Marty back to 1955 where he must bring his parents together so that he will exist when he gets back to his own time.

Starring: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover, & Thomas F. Wilson.

H. G. Wells invented a time machine--and used it to chase Jack the Ripper through time--to present-day San Francisco.

Starring: Malcolm McDowell, David Warner, & Mary Steenburgen.

Branded as fugitives by the Federation they swore to protect, the crew dutifully returns to Earth to face charges for crimes committed in the course of rescuing a resurrected Spock, but while en route, they learn that Earth is being ravaged by a strange alien probe demanding a response from a life form that no longer exists.

Screwball comedy about two high school students who face a difficult history exam. With the help of a time-traveling messenger they round up some historical heavyweights for their class project! (Proof that time-travel doesn't always result in world-ending paradoxes.) Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, & George Carlin.