Novels
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Appel wrote a half-dozen genre novels, but all six went unpublished. He finally scored with Time After Time, published in 1985 by Carroll & Graf. The story follows New School history professor Alex Balfour as he is tossed back and forth between present-day New York City and the Russian Revolution of 1917. While seeking an explanation for his unusual situation, Alex attempts to save Czar Nicholas and his family. In the course of the novel, he encounters Ivan Pavlov, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Grigory Rasputin.
Along with favorable reviews, the novel received recognition from the American Library Association as one of the Best Young Adult Novels of the Year. The novel gained more readers in a Dell Laurel Edition with cover art by renowned illustrator Fred Marcellino, and it was reprinted again as a Dell mass-market paperback in 1990.
Time After Time is the first of what became known as the Alex Balfour series, although the author usually refers to it as the "Pastmaster" series. The appearance of real-life historical figures became an expected device in the series. Mark Twain and George Armstrong Custer are featured prominently in Twice Upon a Time (1988), an American Library Association nominee in the Best Young Adult Novels of the Year category. Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth and Franklin D. Roosevelt are characters in Till the End of Time (1990), another ALA nominee. In Time of War (2003) takes place during the American Civil War, and Ambrose Bierce is a major character. Sea of Time, set aboard the Titanic, was written in 1987 but never published.
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Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“I have just opened Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning” for the first time, which I read with great delight. It is more like what Scott’s novels were than anything.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)