September 2021: Time Travel / Prehistoric / Sideways

What I had in mind was time travel mostly focused on prehistoric times - Primordial Earth by Baileigh Higgens. Then when I was working on this thread I decided to add in Sideways, which to me means something in the multiverse - Outland by Dennis E. Taylor. Also if you want to read something just prehistoric that's fine.

Other books could be:
Mammoth by John Varley
Time Spike by Eric Flint
The Crossroads of Time by Andre Norton
Quest Crosstime by Andre Norton
A Bright Shore by S. M. Anderson
Time Traders by Andre Norton
Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein
Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak
Tom by Stephen Matthews
Pangaea: Exiles by Jeff Brackett
A Door Into Time by Shawn Inmon
Primordia by Greg Beck

Please add your suggestions and I'll list them here.

Also if you have access to Amazons Kindle store you can search prehistoric time travel and it has lots of ideas.

I wasn't sure where to go with this, but I chose one from your list. I'm going to try:

- Mammoth / John Varley

Robert Silverberg, Hawksbill Station. Time travel using Cambrian Period as a "humane" penal colony.

Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity. This would be a "sideways" time travel, not prehistoric. Human history is managed by a corps of "Eternals" who travel "upward" and "downward" through time to make necessary adjustments to prevent humanitarian disasters.

Since you're allowing "just prehistoric," I think I'm going to do a reread of William Golding's The Inheritors (1955) – neanderthals and homo sapiens, his second novel, just after Lord of the Flies.

I'm also going to do a reread of Michael Davidson's Daughter of Is (1978), in which human scientists create a new, sapient, and very pacifist species on a distant planet, observing the species at its creation (which would be prehistoric) and then using relativistic effects orbiting the planet so as to move "forward" in time super-rapidly, observing the development of this species over the aeons. Don't want to say more to avoid SPOILER, but the novel was dedicated to C.S. Lewis, which could give some hint of the outcome.

It's been decades since I've read either of these.

I'm not of fan of time travel nor historic! But, I purchased a book for $.99 that I think will fit: Primordial Earth Book 1; it is prehistoric.

I decided to reread "Just One Damned Thing After Another: the Chronicles of St Marys" by Jodi Taylor. I remembered that one major 'observe and document' trips was back to the Cretaceous Period. The series is a rollicking ride through one misadventure after another.

>6 cfk: And they get back to the Cretaceous quite often - sometimes on purpose, sometimes not exactly. And yes - the moment I saw the topic, that’s the series I thought of - the whole world there is sideways after all and the constant trips up and down the timeline cover the time travel part (just do not call it that).

The Many-Colored Land by Julian May fits as does Bones of the Earth.

I pulled A Wrinkle in Time from my shelves for this theme. It's been sitting there for a while and I've never read it. This is a good excuse to finally read what seems to be a classic.

I will be reading Primordia: In Search of the Lost World by Greig Beck.

I’ll be reading The Caves of Perigord by Martin Walker (of Bruno, Chief of Police fame). My understanding is that this book alternates between the prehistoric times of the actual cave artists and modern times. I think it will fit this theme nicely.

>8 majkia: Oh I loved that book. Im vaguely remembering chronicles of Amber time traveling back then but may be wrong

Jurraisic Park might work, except we are bring the prehistoric into the future. Not sure on that one

I have begun the audiobook of The Caves of Perigord and am finding it a great listen. It actually involves 3 time periods: the present; 1943-1944; and 15,000 BCE. I’m loving this novel so far!

I have now finished The Caves of Perigord by Martin Walker, it’s a quick read. Not that it’s that short, it’s just that good. Each of the three sections mentioned in #13 held my interest, and I did not mind the shifts from one time period to another, because I was always happy to get back to whichever story he was taking up. If you are interested in the cave paintings of the Perigord region or if you have enjoyed Walker’s Bruno, Chief of Police series, I think you will like this book.

(I did wind up reading rather than listening. The narration was good, but took too long.)

I have finished Primordia: In Search of the Lost World and I really enjoyed this adventure story. Yes, it's very predictable but it had lots of action filled with dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. This is the first book in a trilogy and I will be reading the other two in the future. A good escape read.

William Golding's The Inheritors 4****, Golding's second novel immediately following his Lord of the Flies debut. Not a story of time travel but a tale of "first contact" between a small band of homo sapiens sapiens and a still smaller band of homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Our own subspecies, considerably more "advanced" than the neanderthals, has dugout logs for river travel, sails, bows-and-arrows, and an alcoholic beverage of fermented honey. The neanderthals, considerably more "primitive," nevertheless do have a form of telepathic communication with each other and a deeper connection to the natural world.

Most of the novel is narrated third-person from the point-of-view of a young neanderthal man, but the narration shifts to third-person omniscient in the penultimate chapter and then to third-person narration from the POV of sapiens sapiens in the final chapter. This sudden switch in POV demonstrates that sapiens sapiens were as frightened of the neanderthals as the much less "sophisticated" neanderthals were of sapiens sapiens.

The earlier chapters are difficult to follow because they are told from the (to us) much less familiar POV of the neanderthals who are confused by the more sophisticated technology of our own subspecies. Golding is doing this deliberately, however, to force our focus onto the difference between the two subspecies. Although I read this novel decades ago, I still found it a difficult read and I think I'm going to do a reread during our November Reader's Choice.

Next, on to Michael Davidson's Daughter of Is, another reread. This one does involve "time travel" of a sort (one direction only, into the future using relativistic effects for a fast-forward through the millennial history of a new race created by a group of human astro-scientists on an exoplanet).

I also have a couple other "new reads" I might get to if I have the time.

I completed Primordial Earth: Book 1 (The Extinction Series) by Balleigh Higgins. This was a tale of "The Shift" a cloudy, sparkling mass who took people from earth (?) to an alternate time and place which was inhabited by dinosaur like creatures in which they had to fight for survival. Rogue, an 18 year old girl who had lost her parents when the shift took her, but not them, is the antagonist of the story. This was a quick read (thankfully, because this is not my genre!) and probably written for the YA crowd. 182 pages 3 stars

As this was a time travel challenge, I thought that A Wrinkle in Time would fit the bill. There was some unorthodox travel in the story but it didn’t seem to send anyone into the past, rather it sent the travelers into different worlds. It was an interesting premise. The life that the characters traveled from was in the 1960s which makes it historic.

Michael Davidson, Daughter of Is. 3½*** because it's a clever concept with a clever twist to the ending. No more than 3½*** because it's tends a little too much toward the allegorical (if not pedantic) style of C.S. Lewis, to whom the book's dedicated. A reread of a book that I first read back around its publication in 1976.

A group of extra-planetary voyagers create intelligent life on a distant exoplanet under the leadership of a "mad scientist" and, by using peculiar orbits around the planet, manage to live a short lifespan in their ship while emerging from the orbit from time to time to effect changes over the eon-long life of the planet, from creation of life through the prehistoric history of the "humans" whom they create, through....

More would be a SPOILER.

I’ve just finished David Mitchell’s the Bone Clocks, which travels forward in time. Published in 2014, the novel’s setting ranges from 1984 to 2043. I enjoyed this novel very much and found the dystopian world presented in the last parts truly horrifying, as it is so logical an outcome of today’s global problems.

I love science fiction, but found this book unnecessarily confusing. It seemed to change scenes too rapidly and introduce or bring back too many characters. I was constantly having to turn back in the book to be reminded of who somebody was and whom he or she was related to.. I do look forward, though, to reading more of Mitchell’s work. This was my first experience with his writing.
4*

Thats not the book to start with. I finished it but didn't like it much either. Start with cloud atlas dont see the movie, it is dreadful

>21 cindydavid4: i just this afternoon bought good used copies of Cloud Atlas and The Ten Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Will read Cloud Atlas first—it’s still hard to get it from my library.

Cloud Atlas does have a trick, you'll see at the midway point. Just keep reading it will make sense!

Mammoth / John Varley
4 stars

Multi-billionaire Howard has a “thing” for elephants and mammoths. When he gets his hands on a frozen excavated mammoth, he hires elephant trainer Susan to help impregnate an elephant to create an elephant-mammoth hybrid. Also with that frozen excavated mammoth was found a Stone Age man – with a wristwatch! And a box. Howard figures the box is a time machine and he hires genius mathematician Matt to figure it out.

I really liked this. It started off fast paced, and there were plenty of other fast-paced events in the book to keep things really going. And a few surprising events. I also really liked the way the book ended. I wasn’t sure how it was going to wrap up, but I thought it was done quite well.