Wanted: Time travel short story recommendations

[steuard]

I'm teaching a First Year Seminar class this fall entitled "Time Travel in Science and Literature", and I'm looking for suggestions on the "Literature" part. I honestly don't know how much reading is reasonable to assign in this context, so my main request here is for short story suggestions. (I'm also considering a couple of short-ish books:

Comments

[jon_leonard]

My initial list includes The Time Machine, though I think you're right that it's better to refer to it than assign it as such. Pretty much all subsequent time travel stories react to it somehow. I'd also point to Bester's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed", Heinlein's "-All You Zombies-" and "By His Bootstraps", Niven's "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violations" (not the physics paper with the same name).

For longer form, Power's "The Anubis Gates" is one of my favorites; I'm also fond of Stross's "Palimpsest". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_travel_science_fiction#Time_travel_in_novels_and_short_stories is helpful)

In film, the original Terminator stands out.

There are really a lot of choices; are there any particular aspects of time travel stories you want to emphasize or be sure to mention?

[beth_leonard]

I remember reading "The Time Machine" for fun in a a fairly short period of time -- on my electronic device waiting in line at Costco over the course of about a month. It couldn't have taken more than a few hours altogether

[beth_leonard]

Just re-read and still love that story. If you read the comments you can find this one from the author as well, which does a pretty good job of explaining things about time travel stories I thought:

Thanks, all

[steuard]

Fun story! I think Robbbbb suggested that one, too. It would be easy to throw into the mix. :)

[robbbbbb]

I did. That's a fun story. There are quite a few shorts on the Tor website that are worth reading.

[steuard]

As I just mentioned to ricevermicelli, I'm converging on the anthology The Time Traveler's Almanac for the class. Evidently the editors made a deliberate choice to leave out some well-known harder-science short stories (including the four in your first paragraph, which is a disappointment: they've been recommended by others as well), but it does include Palimpsest, and a bunch of other stories that people have recommended to me. (It only has an excerpt from The Time Machine, but I'm still leaning away from assigning the whole book anyway.)

Thanks for the suggestions!

[madmanatw]

This hits everything I would have tried to hit with the exception of Asimov's "The End of Eternity"- not one of his best, but still Asimov, and quite short as novels go.

For films, there's always Primer if you want no one to understand wtf just happened without a detailed chart.

[steuard]

I'm told that "Palimpsest" is to some extent Stross's revision of "The End of Eternity" (which I enjoyed and still think about occasionally, but yeah, it isn't one of Asimov's best). I'm looking forward to reading it.

I haven't seen Primer yet, but I assume that I can refer to the xkcd chart if I'm ever confused. :)

[jon_leonard]

Having thought about it some more, some other favorites:

Rumiko Takahashi's "Fire Tripper", either the comic or the cartoon.
Mark Clifton's "Star, Bright".
The Hob sequence from the Dresden Codak webcomic.

I get the feeling I'm now searching for stuff I like that's unusable for your class, but oh well.

[kirinn]

Oh yeah, I like those comic suggestions. And they'd be relatively quick reads, the question is just how you could distribute them. Hob could be read online, though, so that could potentially work. And it doesn't really require any prior knowledge of the setting, you can jump in where the storyline starts.