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The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells (1895)

"I’ve had a most amazing time..." Original far-future time travel story absolutely loaded with inconspicuously incisive socialist commentary. A time traveler with a proto-steampunk contraption trips over 800,000 years into the future. There he finds that the desperately carnivorous proletarian Morlocks have little time for the uselessly parasitic Eloi. Unchecked capitalism is the big loser.

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Planet of the Apes (aka Monkey Planet)
by Pierre Boulle (1963)

"I am confiding this manuscript to space, not with the intention of saving myself, but to help, perhaps, to avert the appalling scourge that is menacing the human race." A couple of interstellar tourists find a story floating in a bottle. It tells of three French astronauts who find an Earth-like planet where apes dominate human beings. In this simian world, civilization is turned upside down.

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Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1969)

Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Pilgrim is deeply affected by his WWII experiences during the fire-bombing of Dresden. His odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in fear.

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Time and Again
by Jack Finney (1970)

A passionate tale of a young man enlisted in a secret government experiment. Transported from the mid-twentieth century to New York City in the year 1882, Si Morley solves a 20th-century mystery by discovering its 19th-century roots. Falling in love with a beautiful young woman, he ultimately finds himself forced to choose between his lives in the present and the past.

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Time Enough for Love
by Robert A. Heinlein (1973)

Heinlein's longest and most ambitious work, this book is the story of a man so in love with Life that he refused to stop living it. The sequel to 1941's 'Methuselah's Children' follows Lazarus Long through a vast and magnificent timescape of centuries and worlds. It culminates in a trip through time where he controversially consummates his attraction to his own mother.

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Woman on the Edge of Time
by Marge Piercy (1976)

After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie Ramos is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a utopian future of sexual and racial equality and environmental harmony. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome... a dystopian society of grotesque exploitation. One will become our world. Connie may strike the decisive blow.

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Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler (1979)

Butler was the first black woman to write science fiction. Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, an African-American woman is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning white boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life.

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The Many-Coloured Land [S1]
by Julian May (1981)

May writes in the time-honoured tradition of pure pulp and does it well. The first instalment of the Saga of the Pliocene Exile finds a host of misfits and mavericks from the next century passing through time doors to the distant past in search of happiness. Of course, they get much more than they bargained for. Combines fantasy elements and "…a liberal dash of hard science fiction".

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The Fall of Hyperion [S2]
by Dan Simmons (1990)

Following the destruction of Earth, the conclusion of Dan Simmons’ riveting 'Hyperion Cantos' finds humans establishing themselves on more than 150 worlds interconnected by 'the Web' - an instantaneous travel network run by AI computers. As war breaks out with a branch of humanity known as the Ousters, the Time Tombs of Hyperion and their secrets come under threat.

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Doomsday Book
by Connie Willis (1992)

Doomsday Book is an eloquent tale of a mid-21st century history student who is mistakenly transported back to a medieval English village on the eve of Black Plague in 1348. Dark and sombre at times, Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit.