Philip K. Dick, Counter-Clock World1967 / Audiobook / 160 pages / USA
**
Like Red Dwarf's backwards universe, the internal logic and consistency of this world where you eat through your arse is way off, and even annoying if you're the sort of person who gets hung up on things like that. Not as annoying as the rambling theology and tedious misogyny of the main story though. The short story it's based on was probably a lot more tolerable.
1973 / Audiobook / 148 pages / USA
****
There's no improving on Heinlein's concise closed circuit, but this Star Trek writer's looser take on self-perpetuating time jaunts is significant for different reasons as he voyages where no man has gone before. No doubt a few paperbacks were thrown at the bin half-way through by science fiction fans whose imaginations turned out to have quite narrow horizons after all.
1997 / Ebook / 176 pages / USA
****
Quitting the sciences at the earliest educational opportunity, I'm permanently stuck in the beginner's pop science tier. This factual comic for smart kids starts out patronisingly pimpsy, but doesn't take long to get reality-warping. When Gödel and Möbius twists show up, it gets incomprehensible.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas2004 / Audiobook / 544 pages / UK
*****
The brilliance of this novel is in the structure. What might otherwise have been a bizarre fix-up anthology contrasting historical pastiches and farce with earnest sci-fi instead becomes a compelling chain letter across time with thoughtful parallels and multiple climaxes. I didn't love all the parts, but I loved the whole. Give me a playful structure and I'm anyone's.
Richard McGuire, Here2014 / Ebook / 304 pages / USA
*****
Like H. G. Wells' time traveller, if his machine glitched, sit comfortably and observe the same patch of ground fourth-dimensionally at various points from 3,000,500,000 BCE to 22,175 CE (with disproportionate stops in the 20th and early 21st centuries, as is often the way with random time travel). Marvel at the coincidences and contrasts and wonder what it could all mean, or just flip through to enjoy the colours.
