Some Noteworthy Literature with Time as a Theme
(Mostly Time Travel Fiction)

This list is a little random, since I'm including only things that (a) I happen to have read, and (b) occur to me or happen to be handy at the moment.

Amis, Martin. Time's Arrow. New York: Harmony Books, 1991. Very peculiar novel in which the narrator experiences everything in reverse chronological sequence. It's an exploration of the Holocaust as much as of time, and despite or maybe because of its bizarreness, I found it moving and effective. However, virtually none of the critics appears to have agreed with me. "Eating is unattractive too. First I stack the clean plates in the dishwasher, which works OK, I guess . . . So far so good: then you select a soiled dish, collect some scraps from the garbage, and settle down for a short wait. Various items get gulped up into my mouth, and after skillful massage with tongue and teeth I transfer them to the plate for additional sculpture with knife and fork and spoon. That bit's quite therapeutic at least, unless you're having soup or something, which can be a real sentence. Next you face the laborious business of cooling, of reassembly, of storage, before the return of these foodstuffs to the Superette, where, admittedly, I am promptly and generously reimbursed for my pains. Then you tool down the aisles, with trolley or basket, returning each can and packet to its rightful place" (11).

Benford, Gregory. Timescape. Don't remember this one very well, but do remember being very impressed by it. More sophisticated about the physics than most time travel stories. A very different conception of time travel from Heinlein's.

Hoeg, Peter. Borderliners. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. (First published in Danish in 1993.) Interesting novel by the author of Smilla's Sense of Snow. The first sentence of the novel: "What is time?"

Niffenegger, Audrey. The Time Traveler's Wife. This recent novel is the most moving, literarily successful time travel novel I have read. Philosophical issues are raised glancingly in a few places, but not discussed at length. But Niffenegger gets a lot more emotional mileage out of the interesting possibilities of time travel than I've seen anyone else do.

Simak, Clifford D. Time is the Simplest Thing. Crest, 1962 (first published 1961). A great title, no? Not a great novel, and I think its conception of time is just incoherent, but I have a soft spot in my heart for it anyway. Shepherd Blaine travels to the past: "This was the past and it was the dead past; there were only corpses in it -- and perhaps not even corpses, but the shadows of those corpses. For the dead trees and the fence posts and the bridges and the buildings on the hill all would classify as shadows. There was no life here; the life was up ahead. Life must occupy but a single point in time, and as time moved forward, life moved with it.  . . . There were certain basic things, perhaps -- the very earth, itself -- which existed through every point in time, holding a sort of limited eternity to provide a solid matrix. And the dead -- the dead and fabricated -- stayed in the past as ghosts" (65). Later in the book he briefly travels to the future: "For this, he realized, was the future. It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened -- an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark; there was nothing here but emptiness.  . . . He let his breath out slowly and breathed in again -- and there was nothing to breathe in!" (128).

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughter-House Five. The Tralfamadorians hold something very similar to the "detensed" or "block universe" or "four-dimensional" view of time: "Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where each star is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millipedes -- 'with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other,' says Billy Pilgrim" (87).

Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. 1895. A classic. "'Clearly,' the Time Traveller proceeded, 'any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and -- Duration. . . . There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time." (Why the three planes of space? Three axes I could understand, but it seems that two planes is all you would need to get three dimensions.)