The Time Traveller's Almanac

I have at last read all the way through this long book, and my reaction is disappointment. The stories are all readable, and I hated none of them; but I loved none of them. I've been reading science fiction for a long time, and I know that there have been many good stories about time travel—but none of them appear here. It's a collection of more-or-less amiable mediocrities, quite often well written in terms of writing style, occasionally becoming mildly memorable, but with no classics, none that I could add to my favourites.

I'm fond of Eric Frank Russell's story “The Waitabits” (1955), but I first read it long ago, I wasn't introduced to it by this collection. It's included in this collection, but it doesn't belong here, because there's no time travel in it!

I've been shocked to discover how many writers featured here seem to have no idea what a story is. The job of a story is to provide a plot that needs resolving, and an ending that resolves it somehow. But some of these ‘stories' either have little plot, or else they provide some plot but fail to resolve it, ending abruptly without any conclusion. For me, this is not a real story; it's either a non-story or an unfinished story, and shouldn't be sold to the public in such a state.

Of the unfinished stories, “The Time Telephone” (Adam Roberts, 2002) disgusted me the most. It's not a particularly good story anyway, but it sets up a sort of cliff-hanger situation in which you wonder what will happen next—and then it just stops, leaving the situation hanging in the air. What good does that do anyone? I could blame the author for submitting an unfinished story, but I blame the editor more for accepting it.