Science Fiction Time Travel

Space travel has been abandoned in the 22nd century. It is deemed too dangerous, expensive, and inconvenient - and now the all-powerful Fishhook company holds the monopoly on interstellar exploration for commercial gain. Their secret is the use of "parries", human beings with the remarkable telepathic ability to expand their minds throughout the universe.

No time to read? Get the main key ideas from this summary of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library in 23 minutes or less. In the fictional story The Midnight Library (2020), Nora Seed, a woman in her mid 30s, experiences all the alternate paths which she had left behind in favor of others. What if she had never given up swimming? Would she have liked her life better as a professional swimmer? What if she had been a glaciologist instead of a student of philosophy? What if she had stayed with her ex-fiancé?

While chaperoning a high school trip to the Scottish Highlands, Amy MacDougall descends into Inverlochy Castle dungeon. Deep in the crumbling ruins, she touches a magical rock and travels through time to 1307. Infiltrating the castle, Highlander Craig Cambel imprisons Amy. A MacDougall, she’s his clan’s sworn enemy. But when he’s forced to marry the fierce beauty, he surrenders to desire. Amy needs to return to the 21st century, but her feelings for Craig are growing stronger every day. Will the pull of centuries divide them, or can destiny bind them across the ages?

Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather’s overstuffed mansion - a veritable cabinet of curiosities - once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley has stormed back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals (and vegetables).

There I was, surrounded by beautiful college girls and tribeswomen, enjoying the fruits of my labor and the occasional consensual spanking, when a volcano threatened a different kind of eruption. A more dangerous one. Needless to say, it's up to me, the professor with an armful of gingers, to keep everybody safe. Because if we don't get off this island, it'll be an extinction-level event. That's it. Those are all the spoilers you're getting.

With the defeat of the Overtakers behind them, the five teenagers known as the Kingdom Keepers should be celebrating. By all accounts they saved Disneyland from certain destruction. Why then did their mentor leave one last puzzle for them to decipher? The Keepers must solve a puzzle of the past, or be crushed under an evil that makes the Overtakers seem like gentle souls.

Penguin Classics presents H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, adapted for audio and now available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by the actor Brian Cox. 'Great shapes like big machines rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glare'.

In a futuristic world where women are scarce and only the wealthy can afford a wife, Melissa Alexander is trapped in a prison rehabilitation center with no memory of who she is. The unborn child growing inside her is all that keeps them from making her pay for the sins she's committed - sins she cannot recall. But when five sexy strangers, claiming to be her husbands, kidnap her and bring her to safety, Melissa fears she can't trust them.

Eve and Patrick Gantly are living a normal life in 2019 New York, preparing to celebrate the Christmas season. To their delight, Eve is three months pregnant. Despite their happiness, Eve is having premonitions that something dreadful is about to occur. Concerned about the future and the safety of their child, she insists that they destroy the time-travel lantern.

Tal has found a doorway to an ancient pocket dimension in the woods, but the discovery has cost him dearly. Spellbook is lost somewhere inside, held by an unknown magical force. Should his bond to the book fade, Tal fears he will lose all awareness of the time loop he’s trapped in and any chance of escaping it. He must get Spellbook back before this happens, but the enchantments protecting the pocket dimension are formidable.

The most popular alternate-history series of all continues. When a cosmic disturbance hurls your town from 20th-century West Virginia back to 17th-century Europe - and into the middle of the Thirty Years' War - you have to adapt to survive. And the natives of that time period, faced with American technology and politics, need to be equally adaptable. Here's a generous helping of more stories of Grantville, the American town lost in time, and its impact on the people and societies of a tumultuous age.

A cosmic accident sets the modern West Virginia town of Grantville down in war-torn 17th-century Europe. It will take all the gumption of the resourceful, freedom-loving up-timers to find a way to flourish in the mad and bloody birth of the Renaissance. Are they up for it? You bet they are.

At the height of the air war in Europe, Captain Joe Farley and the baseball-loving, wisecracking crew of the B-17 Flying Fortress Fata Morgana are in the middle of a harrowing bombing mission over eastern Germany when everything goes sideways. The bombs are still falling and flak is still exploding all around the 20-ton bomber as it is knocked like a bathtub duck into another world.

Since Grandpa died, Dally’s days are dull and restricted. She’s eleven and a half years old, and her exacting single mother is already preparing her to take over the family business. Starved for adventure and release, Dally rescues a mysterious envelope from her mother’s clutches, an envelope Grandpa had earmarked for her. The map she finds inside leads straight to an ancient vault, a library of secrets where each book is a portal to a precise moment in time. As Dally “checks out” adventure after adventure she begins to dive deep into her family’s hidden history.

September 11, 2001. Padma Mahajan mourns the loss of her newlywed husband, Major Kyle Mason, killed while defeating terrorists from crashing American 11 into the World Trade Center. As she watches harrowing videos on TV of American 11 missing the North Tower by mere feet, a mysterious visitor enters her apartment, possessing stunning knowledge about the future. Leveraging this information, Padma becomes the world’s wealthiest person and de facto "Empress of America" until a new authoritarian challenges her rule and forces her and the visitor from the future to escape into the past.

Who controls reality? And how? Ask the timedivers who ride the paths of time, manipulate cultures, lift and cast down civilizations in their corner of the galaxy. They are the Temporal Guard at Quest, the single city of the Immortals of Query, that hidden planet circling a very ordinary yellow sun in a very ordinary galaxy. This is the story of the timediver Loki, and of the unending war for control of reality in that galaxy.

On a clear December morning in 1937, at the famous gold clock in Grand Central Terminal, Joe Reynolds, a hardworking railroad man from Queens, meets a vibrant young woman who seems mysteriously out of place. Nora Lansing is a Manhattan socialite and an aspiring artist whose flapper clothing, pearl earrings, and talk of the Roaring Twenties don’t seem to match the bleak mood of Depression-era New York. Captivated by Nora from her first electric touch, Joe despairs when he tries to walk her home and she disappears. Finding her again will become the focus of his love and his life.

It's Christmas Eve at St Mary's. And all through the house. Nothing is stirring.... Except for Max, Peterson, and Markham, sneaking out at midnight for an assignment that is very definitely off the books. It was ten years ago tonight that senior historians Bashford and Grey went missing in 12th century Jerusalem. So how did they end up in AD 60 Roman Colchester? Max has a theory. Peterson has a plan. Markham has bacon sandwiches. Colchester has Boudicca and her bloodthirsty Iceni hordes.

When a spontaneous time leap sends Nickolas Flux back to the Salem, Massachusetts, during the height of the witch trials, what's a teenage history buff to do? Try to avoid being tried for witchcraft, of course! From meeting accused witches to running from angry mobs, Nick must survive one of the most frightening moments in American history.

Elizabeth Hartwell presents the conclusion to the Guardians of the Fae series.