Hey. I'm very in the mood for time travel fiction, so I'd like to read anything that makes my brain think, a book that I can puzzle back together as I go along with the plot that heavily involves time travel.
Some touchstones from non-book media.
What I AM looking for and why:
* Primer: Classic example of just an airtight time travel movie with mechanics and causality being played with. There's lots of attempts to piece together everything that happened online, and you can think with the film.
* The entire River Song story arc in Modern Doctor Who: The concept of two time travelers traveling differently through time and the way they play with that in a lot of ways is the bit that I'm interested in specifically
* Groundhog Day-style movies: Less for the time loop itself, and more for the protagonist learning as they jump back. If you have any time loop suggestions, I'd lean into something like this.
* Dark, Bodies, to a lesser extent, Assassin's Creed games: These media tell stories about parallel timelines with some influences by each people in those timelines that lead forward. Although Assassin's Creed is not strictly a time travel media, and thus wouldn't fit my criteria, the storytelling involves searching past memories of ancestors to solve present-day problems, and if a time travel book contains parallel storylines of diff eras with a bit more push and pull on all sides, that's more what I want.
What I am NOT looking for:
* Books where the entire time travel bit is just "I went back in time" and the main plot of the movie doesn't really push more beyond that (Something like Avengers Endgame)
* Books where there IS causality caused by time travel, but it's mostly just "changing the past changes the future" and doesn't really get played with as much in the movie (think Back to the Future, where most of the danger is just Marty erasing himself)
* Similarly to the Back to the Future bit above, books where the time travel bit only serves to change the future into an alternate history where we mostly spend the plot exploring or trying to stop. I'm fine with alt history suggestions though if it's something like changing history and the future back and forth due to causality in one entire story.
I hope this was able to narrow down your suggestions. One more thing. I'm happy to read any older books, but I wanna see if there are any hidden gems from after 2010 or so too, which is just a preference. If the book that's perfect from me comes from the 1800s, I won't complain.
Thank you in advance for any suggestions!
by PlatFleece