Reply #39: I have LOTS of favorites.

[SheilaT]

Currently I'm quite fond of the novels by Robert Charles Wilson and Robert J. Sawyer. Both are Canadian and seem to me to be much more imaginative than the current American authors. Sawyer wrote Flashforward, which was made into a pretty decent TV series. He also has a trilogy about humans from our world connecting to an alternate universe in which Homo Sapiens never evolved, and Neanderthals are the dominant Hominid. Really good.

Wilson has written some of my all time favorites, including A Bridge of Years. A man buys an abandoned home in the Pacific Northwest sometime in the early 1990's, as I recall, and discovers a tunnel from his basement to 1964 New York City.

I especially like time travel and alternate universe stories, so I like Connie Willis a lot.

One all time favorite is Time and Again by Jack Finney, as well as the sequel, From Time to Time. Love them both.

Others have already mentioned Harry Turtledove, and I want to recommend a novel of his I rarely see mentioned. A World of Difference is about an alternate universe in which our planet Mars is much larger, just about the size of Earth, and therefore kept its atmosphere and surface water, and intelligent life evolved there.

Another favorite AU novel is Alternaties by Michael Kube-McDowell. An earth not our own, discovers portals to alternate earths and a very repressive government controls those portals, and the trade between worlds. Complications ensue.

Another time travel novel I love is Time on My Hands by Peter delaCorte. A young man, while visiting a museum in Paris, falls into conversation with another American who provides him with a time machine and asks that he use it to go back and ensure that Ronald Reagan never become president.