Stephen Baxter
The keeper of British SF's cosmological flame: the bridge from Wells, Stapledon and Clarke to the modern field, and the standard for fiction in which the universe's full history is the stage.
Time Travel
Fiction of paradox and consequence, from Wells's traveller to time-war and timeslip romance.
The authors (5)
Octavia E. Butler
The writer who put race, gender and the body at the centre of American SF and made the field reckon with slavery as its own subject matter.
Fritz Leiber
The bridge between Howard and modern fantasy, the founder of urban supernatural horror, and sword and sorcery's official christener.
Kurt Vonnegut
The writer who smuggled SF's ideas into the literary mainstream and the counterculture's bloodstream.
Connie Willis
The most decorated writer in the field's history and the modern master of time travel as humanist fiction: Doomsday Book and Blackout/All Clear are the genre's definitive statements that history's true texture is ordinary…
Essential books, oldest first (12)
The Time Machine
Effectively invented time travel as a fictional device and the far-future vision as a literary mode.
The Big Time
Hugo winner (1958).
Behold the Man
Nebula winner and the New Wave's most notorious provocation: time-travel paradox as theology, handled with a seriousness that outlasted the scandal.
Slaughterhouse-Five
One of the defining American novels of the twentieth century, a permanent fixture of curricula and banned-book lists alike, and the genre's strongest claim on the literary canon.
Houston, Houston, Do You Read?
Hugo and Nebula winner; the sharpest of the 1970s' single-sex-world thought experiments and a permanent reference point in feminist SF.
Kindred
The most-taught novel in the SF canon and the genre's definitive engagement with American slavery; adapted as a graphic novel and a 2022 television series.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
A cult classic twice adapted for television, and the bridge between comic SF and the holistic-detective strain of urban fantasy; its time-loop plotting is quietly among the genre's best.
Doomsday Book
Hugo and Nebula winner, regularly cited among the greatest time-travel novels ever written; its pandemic chapters acquired a second life in 2020 for obvious reasons.
The Time Ships
Winner of the BSFA, Philip K.
To Say Nothing of the Dog
Hugo and Locus winner: the proof that a time-travel comedy of manners could stand beside the genre's tragedies — and the gateway through which countless non-SF readers entered the field.
Night Watch
Generally acclaimed the finest Discworld novel and one of the great fantasy novels of its decade in any register: the annual 'wearing the lilac' tributes among readers each 25th of May are their…
Blackout / All Clear
The two-volume novel swept the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards (2011); the culminating statement of Willis's argument that history is held together by unrecorded decency.