List: themes:time-travel

A Time to Reap by Elizabeth Bear was a very solid time travel story, probably even better for people from the US. Extremely strong atmosphere – I remembered both the characters and the atmosphere mostly by way of the plot.

There's nothing left to be said about Harry Potter books. This was the first one that felt like Harry was changing, growing up, getting some agency. The whole book felt like autumn, with the smell of wet leaves clinging to everything. Naturally I liked the whole "finding a new home" arc. And, equally naturally, I felt very seen in the plot arc that introduces time travel for the primary purpose of reading more books and learning more things. This might be my favourite part of the series (either this one or the first).

This book as good as advertised – even better than that, because part of it is targeted at people who had their heart broken by Gaudy Night, which I just had two weeks ago. I'm very happy I didn't accidentally read this one before Gaudy Night, that would've ruined the reading experience.

Johnny, after fixing video games and dead people, now gets to travel back in time with his friends and experience the Blitz. To be honest, I found this less memorable but at least as fun as the other Johnny Maxwell books.

I found 11/22/63 a good time travel story (Would you give five years of your life to stop the JFK assassination, given the chance?). Stephen King, as always, excells at the depiction of real, gritty human life with all its ups and downs. I really think he can write about anything, natural or supernatural, as long as it has at least a tenuous connection to Maine. The story had internal consistency, a bit of character development (with a not all that clever protagonist, which I appreciated – not all protagonists need to be the cleverererest), and a satisfying conclusion. Readers of It will appreciate the tie-ins, and I caught whiffs of the Dark Tower aesthetic and resonating themes. The quality of writing is, as always with King, good: believable characters, mostly even with more than one dimension, tight writing, the usual brilliant use of foreshadowing and -telling.

Time travel comfort food! This book starts out as adult time travel Hogwarts: masking as an institute, St Mary dabbles in non-invasive time travel. Sorry, investigates major historical events in contemporary time. Our protagonist, a woman of distinctly urban fantasy heroine characteristics, is a historian and has to go through some harsh training (yay for training sequences) to join the small team retrieving information from the past.

We Who Will Destroy the Future is a nice little time travel short story, available online. Good story, good setting, very good narrator voice.

Hard to rate – I know that I enjoyed reading this book, but then, I am easy to lure in with Groundhog Day variations. However, as I'm writing this review a year later to the day, I find myself remembering nearly nothing of the book – only bits and pieces of the personal lives of Harry, after thinking about it for a bit. But the villain remains blurry, except for my annoyance with the old, tired "anybody with ambition and a will to change the status quo is clearly evil" trope. Authors ought to do better – "keep everything ever the same" is a rather meh lesson for a time travel story to offer. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

I'm very much not impressed by this bood.

I don't really know what to think about this book, because I'm not sure how much of it is serious, and how much is tongue-in-cheek. It takes place in a future where the state is run by Soc(iologists), Psyc(hologists), and the Church (led by a mechanical pope, a huge computer in a monstrous church building). People have their life and careers regulated by their family status, with the state assigning partners and keeping tabs. Also, there are starships that are only used to bring prisoners to the planet Hell. Apparently their history diverged from ours when Jesus didn't die young, but instead marched on Rome, successfully. (The divergance is tiny for a change like that, but hey.)

Time-travel military sci-fi that would've been better if it hadn't gone full-throttle on the ideology. Also of course has to go with the time-travelling storytelling where everything is neatly wrapped up by time travel, which makes the whole thing uncomfortably predictable.

Okay look. Dragonriders? A whole social group structured around dragons?!! A whole society slowly losing their belief in the ancient threat that made them support and accept the dragon riders? It sounds so, so good. But. The book, first part in the intimidatingly long Pern series, was a decent read, but shows its age in some meh ways and in some other actively uncomfortable ways. I know the 60s were a different time, but also, Babel-17 was published two years before this book, so I'm not inclined to be too understanding. The gender roles are beyond lazy and verge into terrible (I kept expecting subversion because this could not possibly be serious). All the women kinda suck, including the protagonist, and I don't even want to go into the way sex is handled. Yikes. Y i k e s. The worldbuilding is great and fun, and I want more. The harpers? The ancient traditions showing that spacefaring humans came to Pern and engineered dragons to protect against the extraterrestrial treat? All that slaps. But then there's the plot. It's a bit all over the place, I believe because the book was made up from different stories, which is fine. But why, why the time travel? I'm not sure I'm willing to suspend my disbelief about the arbitrary rules of time travel for 23 more books. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Sadly disappointing: Only the second book in a series that is currently up to eleven books and countless novellas, and it already feels like the series is out of ideas and just mushing things together. There are regular excursions (Jack the Ripper as weird monster hybrid in need of getting shot repeatedly), there are the enemies-in-time, there is the protagonist being temporarily Director of the institute in the future for a bit (!!), there is YET ANOTHER giant huge misunderstanding with her partner due to them not talking about things properly, going to absolutely ridiculous and uncalled-for lengths, then a Dodo hunt, and a bunch more side plots in case you were not feeling sufficiently entertained.

Interesting at first – not as good as some, but a decent read. Then suddenly offline for publishing reasons, and could absolutely not be bothered to go back or pay for it. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Ongoing series, but this is when I read all of it (and I've kept up to date since then). It's well-written for an online series, but that's naturally not saying much. It has all the hallmarks of the genre: long-winded, self-insert, overly dramatic. But the thing that leads me to rate it this low despite its general okayness (and my continued reading) is how some parts of it don't just belong in therapy, or are, uhhh, ersatz-therapy, some parts feel like actively psychoactively bad. Put another way: if you do or ever have struggled with an eating disorder, give this one a wide berth. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Trashy Dan-Brown-wannabe. Came recommended by a thread on good German fiction, never again.

I only barely finished this book. I picked it up on a whim – Twain sounded like fun, time travel into old England sounded like it could be hilarious. Which it really wasn't.