Another Top Five List

[nevanna]

sandoz_iscariot asked for my Top Five Time Travel Stories. In no particular order...

1. "Blink" (Doctor Who). A lot of stories on this show involve time travel, but far fewer are actually about it, in the sense that time travel actually drives the plot instead of placing the characters in the circumstances that create the plot. "Blink" uses non-linear events very intelligently, while still telling a suspenseful, affecting, entertaining story. It's not my favorite Who episode, or even my favorite thing that Steven Moffat has written, but it's still extremely well done.

2. "Captain Jack Harkness" (Torchwood). One of the best episodes of an often uneven first season, for reasons that include but are certainly not limited to the two Captain Jacks. *g* This episode lets the events of the 1940s and the 2000s impact each other; contains emotional continuity; includes a really eerie villain; and gives Toshiko Sato a chance to truly shine.

3. "Days of Future Past" (X-Men comics). A true classic, and one of my favorite X-Men stories in any version of canon. I don't need to explain to Sandoz why it's amazing, but the rest of you should check it out if you haven't, especially if you're fans of dystopian settings.

4. Three Lives to Live by Anne Lindbergh. I adored this book when I was a kid. Thirteen-year-old Garet, who has so far lived an uneventful life with her grandmother, has to deal with an unexpected new "sister" who appears to have literally dropped into their lives from fifty years in the past. It's a story about family, sibling rivalry, and identity, and, since the book takes the form of Garet's autobiography that she's writing for class, there's a lot of delightful humor about books and writing.

5. The Green Futures of Tycho by William Sleator. A young boy finds a time-travel device in his backyard and uses it first to play tricks on his family, then to travel into the far future to see what they, and he, will become. He's horrified at what he sees, and immediately tries to go back and fix it... without making circumstances worse in the process. Like a lot of Sleator's work, Green Futures is spectacularly imaginative, well-characterized, consistent in its use of speculative fiction concepts, and often very scary.

Honorable Mentions: Redshirts by John Scalzi (a really fun book despite my liking the story better before the time-travel happened) and "Human Nature/The Family of Blood", which actually is my favorite Doctor Who story. While time travel is not quite as central to the plot as it is to "Blink," the episode makes excellent use of the pre-WWI-England setting, and wasn't afraid to risk viewers' engagement with sympathetic characters by having them behave in era-appropriate ways.