axler.upenn@UDel-Relay (12/14/82)
From: David Axler <axler.upenn@UDel-Relay>
(RE: Request from Rene Steiner for favorites on this topic.)
There are just too many time travel books to pick one favorite easily.
Silverberg's "Up the Line" and Laumer's "The Great Time Machine Hoax" are the
funniest, while Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero" is probably the most hard-scientific,
as the time travel occurs solely as the result of near-light velocity.
,but deals nicely with some of the paradoxes that others have avoided. One
of my all-time favorites, though, is still Fritz Leiber's "The Big Time," plus
his other stories of the Change War.
Open question: Should alternate/parallel universe stories be considered
as a sub-genre of time-machine stories, since so many of them are based on the
[cliched] notion of the "effects" of changing one (just one...) event in the
past? If so, then we'd have to count books like Dick's "The Man in the High
Castle", and Len Deighton's "SS-GB".
The latter, by the way, is actually quite well done alternate-history sf.
Its basic premise is that the Allies lost WWII, and its main character is an
inspector at Scotland Yard under the new regime. He's British to the core, but
the Yard is now under the control of the British branch of the SS [whence the
title..].