If I had to recommend one Time Travel anthology, Time Traveler’s Almanac would be my choice. This massive 948-page volume includes a wide range of Time Travel stories. The classics are well represented, but there are plenty of unfamiliar stories to discover. And the VanderMeers aren’t afraid to include multiple stories by a single writer (like Kage Baker for example)–a rarity in anthologies like this. If you check out the Table of Contents you’ll see some stories you instantly recognize, but plenty you don’t. That’s the fun of a huge collection like this: discovering new writers and new stories. If you’re a fan of Time Travel, you’ll love Time Traveler’s Almanac!
STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR:
“Young Zaphod Plays It Safe” by Douglas Adams
“Terminós” by Dean Francis Alfar
“What If?” by Isaac Asimov
“Noble Mold” by Kage Baker
“A Night on the Barbary Coast” by Kage Baker
“Life Trap” by Barrington J. Bayley
“This Tragic Glass” by Elizabeth Bear
“Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties” by Max Beerbohm
“The Most Important Thing in the World” by Steve Bein
“In The Tube” by E. F. Benson
“The Mask of the Rex” by Richard Bowes
“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury
“Bad Timing” by Molly Brown
“The Gulf of the Years” by George-Olivier Châteaureynaud
“The Threads of Time” by C. J. Cherryh
“Thirty Seconds From Now” by John Chu
“Palindromic” by Peter Crowther
“Domine” by Rjurik Davidson
“The Lost Continent” by Greg Egan
“The Gernsback Continuum” by William Gibson
“3 RMS, Good View” by Karen Haber
“Message in a Bottle” by Nalo Hopkinson
“The Great Clock” by Langdon Jones
“Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim
“On the Watchtower at Plataea” by Garry Kilworth
“Time Gypsies” by Ellen Klages
“Vintage Season” by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore
“At Dorado” by Geoffrey A. Landis
“Ripples in the Dirac Sea” by Geoffrey Landis
“The Final Days” by David Langford
“Fish Night” by Joe Lansdale
“As Time Goes By” by Tanith Lee
“Another Story” by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Loob” by Bob Leman
“Alexia and Graham Bell” by Rosaleen Love
“Traveller’s Rest” by David I. Masson
“Death Ship” by Richard Matheson
“Under Siege” by George R. R. Martin
“The Clock That Went Backwards” by Edward Page Mitchell
“Pale Rose” by Michael Moorcock
“The House that Made the Sixteen Loops of Time” by Tamsyn Muir
“Is There Anybody There?” by Kim Newman
“Come-From-Aways” by Tony Pi
“The Time Telephone” by Adam Roberts
“Red Letter Day” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“The Waitabits” by Eric Frank Russell
“If Ever I Should Leave You” by Pamela Sargent
“How the Future Got Better” by Eric Schaller
“Needle in a Timestack” by Robert Silverberg
“Delhi” by Vandana Singh
“Himself in Anachron” by Cordwainer Smith
“The Weed of Time” by Norman Spinrad
“Palimpsest” by Charlie Stross
“Yesterday Was Monday” by Theodore Sturgeon
“Triceratops Summer” by Michael Swanwick
“The Mouse Ran Down” by Adrian Tchaikovsky
“Augusta Prima” by Karin Tidbeck
“Twenty-One and Counting Up” by Harry Turtledove
“Forty, Counting Down” by Harry Turtledove
“Where or When” by Steven Utley
“Swing Time” by Carrie Vaughn
excerpt from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
“Fire Watch” by Connie Willis
“Against the Lafayette Escadrille” by Gene Wolfe
“The Lost Pilgrim” by Gene Wolfe
Non-Fiction[edit]
“Introduction” by Rian Johnson
“Music for Time Travelers” by Jason Heller
“Time Travel in Theory and Practice” by Stan Love
“Trousseau: Fashion for Time Travelers” by Genevieve Valentine
“Top Ten Tips for Time Travelers” by Charles Yu
I’ve read a few of those stories but not anywhere near all of them. That book is probably so heavy that I couldn’t even hold it.
Bill, TIME TRAVELER’S ALMANAC is surprisingly compact. And, you can buy it for a pittance online!
Wow, that is one huge book! I’ve only read a handful of them so will probably need to look for it. I did recently read Moore’s “Vintage Season” and Silverberg’s followup connected story, “In Another Country.”
Jeff, the range of Time Travel stories in the TIME TRAVELER’S ALMANAC is mind-boggling! Just about every type of Time Travel story imaginable is here!
And, George, note a small typo on “Vintage Season”‘s citation in your list. One I was reminded of was Steven Utley’s “The Mouse Ran Up the Clock”…but that’s pretty forgotten…nice to see a bug crusher you can love!
Todd, oops! Thanks for pointing out that typo. It’s fixed now.
I’ve read somewhere between a third and a half. I have a limited tolerance for time travel stories, so this would be one I’d have to pick up for a story and then put aside until I was in the mood for another. Still, looks good.
Rick, you get a lot of value for your money with TIME TRAVELER’S ALMANAC.
I bought this one as soon as it came out. It’s a thick heavy book, though, as someone pointed out, with small print and really awkward to read in bed. I also did not care for the first story, “Death Ship” by Richard Matheson. There are hints that time travel are going on, but nothig more than that. I didn’t find the ending very clear, but it seemed more like a Flying Dutchman story in space, not time travel at all. Matheson is a good writer, but I was very disappointed with this one. I put the book down and have never gotten back to it.
I’m often puzzled by the choices that editors make in choosing the first stories in their anthologies. I recently read a Best of the Year SF and Fantasy anthology and the first story read like an unexplained snippet from a longer series and was neither SF nor Fantasy, as far as I could tell. Bleh!
Steve, I usually hop around in an anthology. Sometimes I start with the last story and read forward. I think editors try a little too hard to pick off-beat stories. Richard Matheson has written plenty of great stories and the VanderMeers could have gone with one of them.
Steve, I often wonder about that too. Conventional wisdom has it the first story should pull in the reader, but it doesn’t always occur.i always consider it a weakness on the part of the editor.
I don’t always read anthologies front to back. Sometimes I will read favorite authors – or at least the ones I know – first. Sometimes if I am pressed for time I will look for one of the shorter stories.
Jeff, with an anthology like TIME TRAVELER’S ALMANAC with 72 stories, it almost invites the reader to read more randomly.
I’m a front-to-back man,myself.
I also used to have a look at the first page of a book – if that wasn’t interesting …
late of course (when I had started collecting) I’d buy any book from the authors that I had listed – sometimes with a surprise:
It turned out that I had bought the same book in a US edition with a different title from the British edition!
The trouble with anthologies is
– usually only half of the stories are interesting
– when you’ve bought and read many books you’ll find that you know half or more of the stories already …
But for people who haven’t yet read too much this might be a good intro into the SF world with its diverse ideas!
PS re “heavy books”:
I had to cut several books by GRR Martin into smaller pieces for my wife to read – she just couldn’t hold them, the Hungarian translations are even longer than the English ones. So she was very happy when her son bought her a kindle as a Xmas present – with lots of SF uploaded (don’t ask me about the sources …).
Just found this list of “The ten weirdest SF novels” – amongst them several time travel stories like The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders by Isidore Haiblum (which I proudly own, like most on that list):
http://io9.com/5888835/10-weirdest-science-fiction-novels-that-youve-never-read
The discussion following the article is also fascinating with a lot of hints to other unknown but maybe interesting SF!