October the First Is Too Late

by Fred Hoyle

Dick, a composer, and his boyhood friend John, now an eminent scientist, find themselves in a patchwork world of different times from classical Greece to a far future that humanity barely survives.

My favorable impression is no doubt reflective of the time when I read it (the summer of 1970, nearly 13, while moving from Washington State to Alabama). Perhaps the fiction doesn’t hold up as well decades later up, but the issues of time that it brings up still interest me and it was my first exposure to the idea of a geographic timeslip. And, similar to Asimov, Hoyle served to cultivate my interest in the natural sciences.

— Michael Main

To the Reader: The “science” in this book is mostly scaffolding for the story, story-telling in the traditional sense. However, the discussions of the significance of time and the meaning of consciousness are intended to be quite serious, as also are the contents of chapter fourteen. —from Hoyle’s preface

October the First Is Too Late by Fred Hoyle (William Heinemann, 1966).

Sailing to Byzantium

by Robert Silverberg

Charles Phillips is a 20th-century New Yorker in a future world of immortal leisurites who reconstruct cities from the past.

— Michael Main

He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew. He knew that his name was Charles Phillips and that before he had come to live among these people he had lived in the year 1984, when there had been such things as computers and television sets and baseball and jet planes, and the world was full of cities, not merely five but thousands of them, New York and London and Johannesburg and Parks and Liverpool and Bangkok and San Francisco and Buenos Ares and a multitude of others, all at the same time.

“Sailing to Byzantium” by Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1985.

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey

by Geoff Chapple, Kely Lyons, and Vincent Ward, directed by Vincent Ward

To ward off the Black Death, young Griffin, local hero Connor, and others from their village plan to dig a hole through the Earth where they’ll give an offering to the powers that be, but instead, they end up digging a tunnel to a marvelous twentieth-century city.

— Michael Main

Think how much power you’d need for all that!

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey by Geoff Chapple, Kely Lyons, and Vincent Ward, directed by Vincent Ward (Toronto International Film Festival, 16 September 1988).

A Time Odyssey 1

Time’s Eye

by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter

And she was continually amazed at how easily everyone else accepted their situation, the blunt, apparently undeniable reality of the time slips, across a hundred and fifty years in her case, perhaps a million years or more for the wretched pithecine and her infant in their net cage.

Time’s Eye by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter (Del Rey, January 2004).