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arundelo comments on Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber - Less Wrong
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I really liked William Sleator's YA novel Singularity, which is about teenage identical twins who find a time anomaly with a similar speedup factor.
I enjoyed that book when I was a teenager as well. It's kind of absurd because it starts out in the kids-discover-a-mysterious-artifact/phenomenon genre, and then suddenly turns into a irefvba bs Zl Fvqr Bs Gur Zbhagnva jurer gur xvq whfg fvgf va n furq sbe n lrne. V'z yvxr, "Ubj qvq gur nhgube xabj V'q rawbl ernqvat gung?"
I see that it's on libgen.info, so I'll give it a look.
It's not a super deep book*, but it is very gripping, and more character-oriented than you might expect given the premise. The viewpoint character is a convincing 16-year-old. For me, the book is one of the most memorable fictional depictions of grit I've seen, right up there with Gattaca and The Shawshank Redemption**. (Disclaimer: I've read the book several times, but the most recent time was five or ten years ago.)
* But much deeper than Dragon Ball Z from what I've seen. :-)
Edit: Here's Orson Scott Card giving a glowing review to Singularity and some other Sleator books. This contains a spoiler for Singularity! -- although vg'f n cybg cbvag lbh pbhyq cebonoyl thrff tvira gung jr'ir nyernql gnyxrq nobhg gur gjva cnenqbk.
** Edit 2: The Count of Monte Cristo deserves a place on this list too.
I just finished it. The Count of Monte Cristo came to my mind too during the 'prison' sequence, which was fairly good.
As far as the HTC scenario goes, it illustrates both the upside and downside: the ability to focus on something for a long interval, but also the massive reduction in quality of life. (It also mentions in passing the aging problem: the uncle is 40 but 'looks 60' and dies early, in the middle of his research - which he might have been able to finish if he had spent more time in realtime so he could await future replies from researchers & new textbooks or results.)
I guess it is a short book, but man! You don't kid around.
As shown in the book, the aging thing can in very narrow circumstances be a feature not a bug, but when I daydream about using a secret HTC to amaze everyone with my productivity and learning speed, the daydream includes some means of not aging faster than everyone else. (This makes me think of some sort of SF Dorian Gray.)
Gwern probably has a better version of the HTC that allows you to spend 365 hours to each hour of realtime.
That sounds like an interesting book, thanks for the recommendation. It's going on my to-read list.