I'm not a writer, but I am interested in time-travel and science. I picked this up for fun. It was hard work. I did 'read' every word, but a writer who was an English major would probably have to study this the way they did science textbooks when they were in school. But I finished it because, every so often, I would understand something and actually find it interesting.

The most interesting bit was from About Time" in [a:Arthur C. Clarke|7779|Arthur C. Clarke|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1357191481p2/7779.jpg]'s [b:Profiles Of The Future|169258|Profiles Of The Future|Arthur C. Clarke|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1172363833s/169258.jpg|163451], that maybe "Time is a spiral; though we may not be able to move (in TT fashion) along it, we can perhaps hop from coil to coil to coil, visiting so many millions of years apart that there is no danger of embarrassing collisions between cultures." And of course that's Clarke writing, not Nahin.

So, yeah, pretty much not clearly written. I won't, however, rate it as negatively as I'm tempted to do, because I may not have been in the right frame of mind. And I didn't discover the glossary until the end - which would have been very helpful. The index, too, would probably benefit those readers who want to actually study & use the book, rather than just read it as I tried to do.

Also at the end is a list of short story collections from which the stories Nahin admires for being logical & plausible come. Unfortunately, which story is in which collection is not noted, and many of the collections probably contain 'bad' TT stories, too. So, we readers would be wise to take notes (or use bookdarts) to mark stories of interest, and then just reference www.isfd.com for that source info.

You'll just have to judge for yourself. And if you are a writer, please do try to do so, so that your TT makes sense.

I'll use the comment section to record all the story and book suggestions I gleaned."

A reissue of Nahin's 1997 book also with the title _Time Travel_ (which at first I thought I had read, but it was actually his 1993 _Time Machines_ that I had earlier read). Ostensibly it's a manual for science-fiction authors writing stories involving time travel; e.g., Nahin repeatedly urges such authors to avoid the mistake of positing that the past could be *changed* by time travelers. But really it's a good, fascinating, popular-level account of time-travel-related physics (which, it has to be said, is the subject of some more recent and up-to-date books by others).

Third of four volumes in Writers Digest's Science Fiction Writing Series. Author Nahin approaches the science behind theoretical methods of time travel from a literary perspective by highlighting popular time travel methods used in classic novels and stories to date. He then explores a wide variety of scientific theories about time travel, with concrete examples of how to incorporate these into your own speculative fiction. Interesting chapters include "Time as the Fourth Dimension", "When General Relativity Made Time Travel Honest", "Time Machines That Physicists Have Already 'Invented'", "Quantum Gravity, Splitting Universes, and Time Machines" and "Reading the Physics Literature for Story Ideas." As with earlier volumes in this series, there is a helpful glossary of terms and concepts, and an extensive bibliography of additional reading on the topic. Of the four volumes in this series, I found this one to be the most technical, dealing as it is with theoretical physics. Still, a useful tool for writers of science fiction.

Originally reviewed for my local library's website: http://www.lincolnlibraries.org/depts/bookguide/srec/staffrec09-11.htm ( )