The ten best time travelers

At the Guardian, Tom Lamont came up the ten best time travelers. Most are from the big and small screens, but the list includes a couple of figures with prominent literary pedigrees, including:

Billy Pilgrim

“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Kurt Vonnegut’s hero in Slaughterhouse-Five lived a luckless, meandering life and became a luckless, meandering time traveller. “[He] has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun… he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” Now a bullied private in the second world war, now a widowed optometrist, now a sex slave on an alien planet, Pilgrim ultimately found spiritual peace. Having seen “his birth and death many times”, he learned that “it is just an illusion we have on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string”.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five also made Melissa Albert's list of six favorite fictional book nerds, Jon Ronson's five top list of books on madness, Charlie Yu's top ten list of time travel books, John Mullan's list of ten of the best aliens in science fiction, Charlie Jane Anders and Michael Ann Dobbs's list of twelve great stories to help you to cope with mortality, Sebastian Beaumont's top 10 list of books about psychological journeys, and Tiffany Murray's top ten list of black comedies.

Also see: Top ten time travel books and Linda Buckley-Archer's's top ten time-travelling stories.

--Marshal Zeringue