Damian Dibben's top 10 time travel books
Who doesn't love the idea of escaping to another place in time? Imagine if you could travel back to watch the gladiators in ancient Rome, or the pyramids being built in pharaohs' Egypt or see young Mozart play live or catch the first ever performance of Romeo and Juliet in the time of Elizabeth I?
And what about the future? If you could travel forward a hundred or a thousand years, what would you see? What advancements will have been made? I believe by then we will no longer be stranded on the earth, a single planet in a nondescript corner of the galaxy, we will have found a way to voyage into deeper space. After all, more than anything, human beings are pioneers.
It is this fascination with realms beyond our own - the great empires of the past with their multitude of heroes, explorers, inventors, rulers, despots and villains; along with the vast unknown dominions of the future - that have inspired novelists for centuries to write about time travel.
In all these books, the devices that enable the characters to move in time are crucial to the story. In some they may step through a magic door, or "slip" into the past or future in a way that's beyond their control. In others, they have machines that they calibrate to take them exactly where they desire. In my books, The History Keepers, the characters always voyage to the past by ship. The journeys are truly exhilarating, but often storm-tossed and dangerous.
In my list below I have been imaginative with the term "time-travel." For example, some of the books, though set in the present, have elements from the past brought into the modern day. There are others in which people from the present travel to different, fantastical realms as if they were travelling in time. Where would you go? And which device would you chose to get there?
1. The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe by CS Lewis
Is this really a time travel adventure you might ask? I think definitely so: it has all the hallmarks of the genre and Narnia – the land to which our heroes escape - is clearly a realm of another, distant time, a land of mythical creatures and ancient prophecies.
The scene at the beginning where, in a grey, war-torn Britain, Lucy feels her way through the coats at the back of a wardrobe and arrives in a snowy forest in a kingdom of witches and talking animals is pure magic. She returns with her siblings and an epic adventure ensues. This is the original book in C S Lewis's spellbinding Narnia series and the first novel I remember reading when I was young. I fell in love with it immediately and still go back to it often for inspiration.
2. Minority Reportby Philip K Dick
Philip K Dick is my favourite science fiction writer. Although he spent most of his life penniless, his novels and short stories were the basis of some of the most famous movies of the last thirty years, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, The Adjustment Bureau and the film of Minority Report staring Tom Cruise.
This mind bending story, set in a future society, is about a police force who use clairvoyants, or precogs, that can see forward into time, to catch murderers before they commit their crimes. The story becomes especially interesting when the chief of police, John Anderton, intercepts a precognition that he himself is about to murder a man he has never met! He must set off on his own quest to unravel the mystery. Will what he discovers force him to fulfill the prophecy? Even just writing about it, gives me a thrill.
3. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
This is a fantastic, magical novella by Charles Dickens. It's a short, easy read but packs a real punch. Published in 1843, it's one of the first stories ever to feature an element of time travel. It tells the tale of an unfriendly old miser called Ebenezer Scrooge who's visited on a freezing Christmas Eve by the ghosts of the past, present and future. These spirits transport him through space and time to visit both his younger, kinder self and the monstrous, unloved person he'll become when he's old. The next morning, Christmas Day, he wakes completely transformed, full of joy and vows to change people's lives for the better. I always shed a tear.
4. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
Crichton's huge bestseller takes place in the present, but the characters are, in essence, travelling back to the time of the dinosaurs. The beasts are cloned from fossilized DNA, brought to life and placed in a theme park on a desert island. During a testing phase, disaster strikes when some of the deadliest animals escape their enclosure.
Interestingly, the book was partly inspired by novels written a century ago, in particular The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, (who penned Sherlock Holmes) a story about explorers who discover a secret land in South America populated by dangerous, prehistoric animals. Steven Spielberg (again! He has great taste) who directed the Jurassic Park movies, even borrowed Conan Doyle's title for his sequel.
5. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
Written by the famous American author Mark Twain (who later penned The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, two of the best novels of all time!) this is a story about an ordinary engineer from Connecticut, Hank Morgan, who is struck on the head and accidentally transported back to England in the early middle ages, to the court of King Arthur. He tries to introduce knowledge from the future, but can't prevent the death of the King. With its "fish out of water" scenario, the book is brilliantly funny in places, but it's also an intriguing satire about romantic notions of the past and the importance of education and science. Filmmakers in Hollywood have copied the premise a dozen times over!
6. A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle
A young girl and her brother find out that their father, a government scientist, has gone missing after working on a mysterious project called a tesseract. The tesseract, the wrinkle in time, is a wormhole, a portal from one part of the universe to another. They set off with their friend Calvin on an epic galactic quest to find him, ultimately discovering that true strength comes from within. To makes things more intriguing still, there is a trio of amusing and mysterious guardian angels, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Witch. An unexpected fantasy that's full of warmth and humour.
7. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban by JK Rowling
We all have our favourite Harry Potter book and this, the third installment, is mine. (For what it's worth, the film is also the one I go back to most frequently). In this novel, the characters have grown up and the danger in Harry's world has become much more real. Obviously only part of the book is concerned with time travel, but it's a vital strand. Hermione is given a time turner, a device that resembles an hourglass, to help with her huge workload. Ultimately she, Harry and Ron use it to save Sirius Black and Hagrid's pet Hippogriff, Buckbeat. In general, time travel is considered highly dangerous at Hogwarts and the longest time anyone is allowed to travel back is five hours.
8. The Time Machine by H G Wells
The 1890s, when H G Wells wrote The Time Machine, was a fascinating decade: the world was becoming very industrial, the original skyscrapers were going up in America and people genuinely believed, due to the appearance of canals on the planet Mars, that there were civilizations beyond our own.
Wells was influenced by all this when he wrote his story about an inventor from Surrey – whose name we never learn – who uses a machine to leap six thousand years into the future. Here he discovers a two-tiered society, the Eloi who inhabit a paradise above ground and the brutish Morlocks who exist below. We think at first the Eloi have the upper hand, but it turns out the reverse is true. Like all great books about time travel, it makes you think profoundly about the present world we live in now. With the book's title, it was Wells who coined the term Time Machine.
9. Tom's Midnight Garden by Phillippa Pearce
Even as an adult, I still find this an enchanting read. When it's feared that Tom Long may be infections with measles, he's sent away to live with his aunt and uncle and becomes more and more lonely when he's not allowed out to play. However when a grandfather clock strikes thirteen, he discovers a back door that leads to a secret garden from Victorian times. He meets a girl there, Hatty, but over the course of his stay she ages much faster than he. All this leads to an incredible twist at the end, which I won't give away.
In another famous book, George Orwell's 1984, written a few years before, a clock also strikes thirteen, but this is an introduction to an imagined future world of paranoia and oppression, a far cry from the mystical romance of Tom's garden.
10. Percy Jackson And The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan
I consider this a time-travel book as elements of a mythic past come crashing into the modern day America. I have always been a fan of the Percy Jackson books – the mix of adventure, myth and humour is absolutely perfect – but this is my top choice. In this fifth installment, Percy, the demi-god son of Poseidon, has turned sixteen and the fate of the world is upon him. (That's what it feels like when you're sixteen!) Ultimately he and his friends must put up a final stand to protect Mount Olympus, the home of the gods. Threaded through sequences of non-stop action, there are many twists and mysteries, along with a triumphant and very emotional conclusion. What's not to like?
The History Keepers series follow the adventures of 14-year-old Jake Djones, who discovers that his parents are missing somewhere in history. He must join a secret service of extraordinary time travelling agents to track them down. His life will never be the same again.