Books with timejumps?

[Zero Hunter]

I know this is a weird thing but I like it when books use this device. When they either skip years in a book itself or when they start the next book in a series years latter. Sort of like how 16 years or so had passed between Robin Hobbs Assassin trilogy and the start of the Fools trilogy. I just wondered if anyone had some good suggestions for books or series that use this device.

[T Hedge Coke]

The first that leap out at me are Wuthering Heights, Pussy: King of the Pirates, Finnegans Wake, and Moorcock's Blood Trilogy.

Wuthering Heights starts out way after the bulk of the story, then goes back to the main characters' childhood, before jumping again to a time when they're young adults.

Pussy features what are either flashbacks and time jumps that may or may not be time travel, due to self-inflicted memory problems.

Finnegans Wake covers human history and future, so there's large portions of history that get skipped. This is bound to happen in a novel about a mountain trying to set up the first, or at least best, bar in Ireland, and his wife's bad handwriting.

And, Moorcock, in the Blood trilogy (Blood, Fabulous Harbors, and The War Amongst the Angels) features many distinct locales and time periods, many not flowing directly scene to scene, but via just jumping straight to the time time and/or place.

A lot of Moorcock does this, come to think. The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius is a novel in stories, and readable in sequence of individually, but not only does Jerry not particularly age in the thirty plus years of in-story time (with large jumps of many years, between some stories and later ones), but the world also ends and completely re-cycles around to the latter date at least twice, meaning what appears to be a skipping ahead of only a few years is actually a billions-of-years jump.

[Roquefort Raider]

Dumas' musketeers series jumps twenty years between The three musketeers and the aptly titled Twenty years after, then again ten years for The vicomte of Bragelonne. How time flies when you're having fun!

Frank Herbert's Dune also jumps ahead in time, sometimes by thousands of years. It allows readers to see how civilization progressed and how characters from the first book became mythical figures later on. Very good use of the time jumping device, here.

[Expletive Deleted]

I can think of a few fantasy series that can jump backwards and forwards by hundreds or thousands of years between installments, with often minimal connections beyond the setting. The Drenai series by David Gemmell, the Recluce series by L.E. Modesitt, the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, etc.

More along the lines of the one you're describing, there's a time jump between the first five of Roger Zelazny's Amber books and the last five.

[Johnny P. Sartre]

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
Almost anything by William Burroughs
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Terra Nostra and The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
Distant Star and By Night In Chile by Roberto Bolano

[Roquefort Raider]

The time machine, by H. G. Wells!!!

[berk]

It's such a common device it's hard to narrow down the suggestions within science fiction alone, but one example that immediately springs to mind is Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and its sequel Starmaker.

[The Black Guardian]

Prince Caspian skips ahead thousands of years in Narnia, but not that long for the Pevensies.

Ender's Game-- several thousand years between it and its sequel.

ACClarke's Space Odyssey series: 2001, 2010, 2050, 3001.

[Roquefort Raider]

ACClarke's Space Odyssey series: 2001, 2010, 2050, 3001.

My dear Guardian, 3001 does not exist. It is a figment of our collective imagination, a nightmare that lurks in a corner of our consciousness, a horror so hideous that I refuse to acknowledge the possibility of ever having read it. Even its existence would be a sin against literature.

No. It never happened. I never read that book. No.

*whimper*

[Castel]

You may be interested by Anne McCaffrey's Pern books.

Centuries between some books. The first one, in order of writing, is Dragonflight. Check it out, see if it interest you.

Definitely worth the read.

[berk]

My dear Guardian, 3001 does not exist. It is a figment of our collective imagination, a nightmare that lurks in a corner of our consciousness, a horror so hideous that I refuse to acknowledge the possibility of ever having read it. Even its existence would be a sin against literature.

No. It never happened. I never read that book. No.

*whimper*

Does that mean that the other sequels, 2010 & 2050, are worth reading? Because I've always avoided those as well.

Just thought of another obvious SF example: Asimov's Foundation trilogy. But there really are too many to mention in SF alone.

[Roquefort Raider]

Does that mean that the other sequels, 2010 & 2050, are worth reading? Because I've always avoided those as well.

2010 was actually pretty good; it's not as mysterious as the movie 2001, but is on par with the novel. The ending is particularly spectacular.

2061 is a bit bland, although its epilogue certainly promised something awesome for an eventual sequel... but the actual sequel we got was the dismal 3001, a sophomoric blend of Independence Day, Jurassic Park and The Jetsons. Awful.

[BigJeff]

Replay by Ken Grimwood. An excellent read.

[Castel]

What a weird spam.

But anyway, you also have planet of the apes by Pierre Boule.

There is something like that around the end. (as we all know)