CONVERSATION: Time Travel Questions
Sirius had some questions for us—and you—about time travel stories. This discussion will run in two parts, with today’s focusing on the questions below and Monday’s reserved for discussing Outlander and for our book recommendations. -Janine
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1. Do you enjoy time travel as a trope in a book? If you do, when do you consider such a plot twist successfully executed?
2. There are usually several different means of time travel in the books. The character may get into another time by accidentally or deliberately walking into the place which is a connection between our time and the other time, the character may use some time travel device, the character may be forced to time travel by another character. Do you have a favorite one? If you do, which one and why do you prefer it?
3. Do you actually care if the time travel consequences make sense? I am talking about the idea that many authors use and some don’t that the time traveler may influence the events of their present time by appearing in the past. I am not even talking about radical influences (killing Hitler kind of thing), but simply suggesting to somebody that doing something is not a good idea).
Do you Enjoy Reading about Time Travel?
Layla: I do like time travel in general, in both sci-fi and in romance. I don’t think there are many great romance books in romance that employ time travel (at least I haven’t read any), although I wish there were more. My favorite is when a 20th or 21st century woman goes back in time to medieval or regency England. I haven’t read any that go back to the Victorian era, or Georgian or Edwardian.
Janine: I do enjoy time travel in books and movies. As with all tropes it depends on execution and sometimes I like it better than others.
Since you mention your early experiences with time travel, Sirius—one of my earliest was a book called Can I Get There by Candlelight? by Jean Slaughter Doty. It was sold out of a Scholastic catalog at school, does anyone remember those?
Jayne: Yes, I remember Scholastic books! I used to love to peruse the catalog in school.
Janine: Can I Get There by Candlelight? was about a girl with a horse named Candlelight who took her to an earlier time (19th century, I’d guess) where she met another girl. The ending was bittersweet but the way she discovered time travel felt magical (in the figurative sense). I remember being entranced and I read the book more than once.
Kaetrin: I love time travel books but I think I’m finicky about them. I do look for internal consistency.
Successful Execution
Jayne: Going back and reading one of my TT reviews I found I’d written this which encapsulates my view on them – “When I read time travel books, I’m always crossing my fingers; will it make sense and play by its own rules or will the edifice end up collapsing by the close of the story?”
I remember when I got back into reading romances in the late 90s and early 2000s, TT was a fairly popular part of the SFF subgenre. At first, it was interesting to me and I read quite a few – though I’d struggle to remember titles now. At this honeymoon stage, I didn’t really notice how well the TT was done but later I became more discerning especially if the time difference was in the hundreds or thousands of years. If the author didn’t include reasons why no one would notice the out-of-time time traveler (if the character was supposed to blend in) then it started to irritate me. I’d be thinking “why does no one notice this 20th C person’s strange speech in 16th C England or this 12th C person’s gobsmacked reaction to modern tech?” If the TT character wasn’t supposed to blend, I worried they’d end up in a mental asylum or arrested.
Janine: That’s a great point, Jayne, about how the time travelers are treated by the characters in the other time period. I don’t think anyone from the present could successfully impersonate someone from 1800 or the Middle Ages, but I want some nod to the fact that they have to think about how to pull it off and make an effort.
For me successful execution depends on multiple factors. Is the way the main character feels about the period they’ve traveled to believable? Does it take them time to adjust? Do they miss the comforts and technologies of the 21st century in the past, or see our twenty-first century society and technologies as primitive if they are from the future? Do they miss their relatives and friends back home? Is the time travel utilized in the plotting in ways that are interesting and fresh? Are there surprising obstacles in the character’s path how does the fact that they are from the future or the past play into overcoming those obstacles?
Sirius: I consider time travel itself to be well executed when the writer actually does not give us too many details about it.
Jayne: I agree with Sirius about the depth of detail in books regarding time travel. Deliberately vague is fine for me. What irritates me is when the author starts with detailed descriptions and rules and then later hand waves away their own rules.
Means of Time Travel
Janine: I don’t know if I have a favorite means of time travel, it all depends on execution, but accidental time travel and being forced to time travel are both more interesting to me than using a device on purpose because they suggest some kind of conflict. It’s more important to me that it be surprising and compelling than what it is, though.
Sirius: I think time travel machine built by future scientists is one of my favorite means to time travel. I don’t know why but somehow it always *legitimizes * time travel in my head or so to speak. If device can be built so there is a justification for it to work (never mind that such justification is completely made up).
Janine: I like it when the means of time travel is one I would never expect. To give an example of something similar, when Lucy travels to Narnia through a wardrobe, you don’t expect that. She is hiding so she heads toward the back of the wardrobe through the coats in the dark and then the coats slowly give way to trees and snow. That’s not time travel, but that’s the kind of thing I mean. In “Dr. Who”, the TARDIS can look like a phone booth on the outside and is a lot bigger than that on the inside. That was also surprising when I first saw it.
Quite possibly my favorite execution of time travel is in Audrey Niffenegger’s literary SF novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. The method of time travel was really fresh and different. Henry travels through time involuntarily because he has a health condition that displaces him in time. He can usually only travel to time periods within his own lifetime, and he never travels to a time that is more than forty-three years past his birthdate, so you as the reader don’t know if that means that he will be cured in the future or if it means that he will die. The event Henry travels to most often is the scene of his mother’s death, a car accident that took place when he was a little boy (and a passenger in the same car). He arrives there as a child, a teenager, an adult, even though he doesn’t want to.
When Henry time travels, he always arrives naked and has to steal clothes and money or get someone to give them to him and to survive in the cold and escape being arrested for his nudity in public. Through reading that book I realized how much I like it when time travel presents real difficulties for the traveler and when it haunts the reader.
Sirius: In that movie I mentioned, “Guest from the Future” (and the series of kids’ books by Soviet writer Kir Bulychev), the main character is a girl from the future something like a hundred years ahead from the 1970s-1980s. She often gets to travel to the past for whatever various reasons (in time travel machine). In the movie though before Alisa ends up in “our time” the boy from “our time” ends up in the future. Why you say? His mom sends him on an errand. On the way he runs in the school mate who is observing a strange woman always disappearing into the old building. Of course the twelve-year-old boys have to investigate the mystery and it turns out that the woman is a time traveler who avoids them just in time to go back to her future. Our hero though sees a machine which could not / would not / didn’t have to be properly secured and goes to check it out because of course he would! And then all the mayhem and adventures both in past and present to follow.
I guess the time travel in this made so much sense to me because I just didn’t see how a twelve-year-old boy would be able to avoid a temptation.
Layla: I don’t care if the time travel makes sense, and I prefer it when the time travel happens accidentally. What I enjoy most is the fish out of water element like I said earlier–I like when a modern heroine has to navigate in a space that is unfamiliar. I think there is lots of room for humour and comedy and also that there is a fantastical element–dressing in beautiful clothes, being an aristocrat, and most of all, meeting or falling in love with a handsome chivalrous guy. There is an element of chivalry and romance and also courtship that can unfold in a historical setting that isn’t present in the same way in a contemporary context.
Consequences
Jayne: There was one book, A Stitch in Time by Amanda James, where the travel was deliberate and meant to change things – but change them back to the things that needed to have happened but which had somehow got messed up. But beyond a neat premise, everything about it was wobbly including all the rules the author invented. It’s been years since I read it but I still remember this annoyed me.
Janine: In one of the most excellent books I’ve read in recent years, a science fiction thriller called The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch, the heroine has to travel to the future to find out more about an event that will annihilate all human life, her own included. She can only go to possible futures, not to the actual future, because by visiting them and bringing back information to the present, she causes the future to alter. She has to be on guard from other people in the future because if they figure out that she is a time traveler they may capture her to keep their timeline intact. All that was innovative and really well-executed.
Sirius: I do not like when time traveler meets themselves in the past, when a time travel paradox is involved so I would like for that not to happen BUT after reading so many stories I think I became convinced / conditioned that if one time travels close enough in time they are very likely to meet themselves / influence themselves / change the timeline and it is just too risky as far as I am concerned.
Janine: I have mixed feelings about the trope about changing the past to change the future. It can be really engaging if but it’s also an eye roller. Your parents might not meet if you change things, and then you wouldn’t exist. Is the main character really that selfless? It takes some suspension of disbelief, so I need a strong motive.
One of the things I loved about The Time Traveler’s Wife is how it deals with the paradoxes of time travel. Henry can encounter himself and he uses that in useful ways, for example, his adult self trains his child self in pickpocketing so that he’ll be able to survive as a kid. He remembers the incident from both perspectives. It happens in Chicago’s Natural History Museum, which the child Henry loved, and at first it was really magical for him. When he realized what he was actually there to happen and that there was no solution to his involuntary time travel, little Henry was disillusioned. Adult Henry remembers this experience well even as he is disillusioning Henry the boy by teaching him these skills.
Time in the book functions like a mobius strip. Henry can buy a winning lottery ticket or Microsoft stock because his future self tipped him and told him that his profiting from these things will happen, but he can’t prevent anything if it is already a fact in any portion of the timeline, even if it lies ahead. The rules are entirely consistent.
Sirius: I recently read an LGBT YA story, Spin Me Right Around by David Valdes, which has its main character traveling to the past and which pays homage to the movie “Back to the Future”. When I picked up the story I was actually very afraid that it would be almost a fan fiction of “Back to the Future”, but I was pleased with how that aspect was handled. The main character does travel to his parents’ school years and his being there influences his parents somewhat, but I really liked that main character being such a fan of time traveling and thinking about different ways in which this could happen and did happen was incorporated to the story. I liked how changing the timeline was incorporated in the story. Basically the author decided that the time traveler would only influence people closest to him not the whole world, which was fine by me BUT I thought the decision itself was totally random that’s why I would rather avoid it altogether if possible.
See above, I don’t want for time traveler to influence anybody if they travel to the past.
We’d love to hear from you on these topics. Do you like to read about time travel and what makes it successful for you? What is your favorite means of time travel in books? How important to you is it that the rules be consistent and the consequences make sense?
As a kid and young adult I read tons of time-travel books. But then I disliked Outlander and stopped, until years later I picked up and was entranced as I read The Time Traveler’s Wife. I hated its ending so much that I haven’t read another time travel novel since.
And oh, do I remember Scholastic Books! Among the best memories of my childhood.
@LML: I did not grew up with Scholastic Books. Harry Potter was my first introduction to them :). I was not a fun of The time Traveler’s Wife ending myself .
@LML: @Sirius: I’ve heard enough people say negative things about TTTW that I’ve never been interested in reading it.
I’ve never been much of a fan of time-travel (whether romance or straight-up SF). Oddly enough, about the only time-travel romance that ever worked for me (and, coincidentally, about the only one of her books that ever worked for me) was a very early Lisa Kleypas book, GIVE ME TONIGHT. It’s set in Depression-era Texas where the heroine lives with her older aunt, who often talks about a big family tragedy that happened about 50 years before. Somehow, the heroine is transported back to a big ranch in 1880s Texas, where she inhabits the body of her great-aunt. She is there to help avert the tragedy, and she falls in love with the ranch foreman in the process. I liked everything about the book, but I’m not sure Kleypas even acknowledges it anymore. It’s certainly never been available as an ebook.
Time travel is not one of my favorite tropes. In other words, I don’t seek out time travel books for the trope, but will pick them up for other reasons or if I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from trusted sources. And, yes, I want the consequences and internal logic to make sense or at least be executed in a way that I can suspend belief.
I do remember those Scholastic book catalogues and looked forward to ordering from them when I was a youngster. One of my favorite children’s classics with time travel is Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. It’s a great book for all ages!
@DiscoDollyDeb: After you mentioned the Kleypas book before, I went to Amazon and saw they only had paperback copies for more than I wanted to pay.
@Jayne: I tried reading it and couldn’t stand Henry so I never joined the fan club !!
I do love time travel and in a total aside, because of this post and discussion I started watching the outlander series and omg it’s so good!!!! The costumes and the castles!
Also— I enjoy the shock when time travelers encounter others who are but who are integrated or hiding it. I remember the shock of that revelation in Outlander. Usually, in romance at least, the heroine goes back alone and it’s a very singular and mysterious process. I enjoy that too of course
I was a big fan of books featuring time travel and similar tropes and read many of them when I was younger. I still read them from …pun intended… time to time. Most recently I’ve read The Gone World (mentioned above) and Yesterday Is History by Kosoko Jackson.
I don’t have a favorite means of time travel. I enjoyed Jack Finney’s Time and Again where the characters dress in clothes of the day and surround themselves with things of that time and basically think themselves back in time. I’ve also enjoyed books where the characters use equipment to travel in time such as (inadvertently in) Shay Savage’s Transcendence or (deliberately in) the Out of Time series by C.B. Lewis. I’ve also enjoyed books that use magic as a means of time travel such as the Lost in Time series by A.L. Lester. If the author writes a good book, I’m happy to read it!
I look forward to the next post!
@Kareni: Thanks for reminding me about Out of time series. Must go check what I liked and what not, because I remember mostly nothing right now :)
@Jayne: To be sure I mostly disliked the ending. Thought the book okay otherwise.
I wish that I still liked time travel stories, but I’ve learned through painful experience that they are usually dark/poignant/bittersweet/dystopian/horror or illogical, so that I cannot enjoy them.
That said, I’m enough of a sff aficionado to be able to know that Outlander began as a Doctor Who fan-fic (on the 2nd Doctor’s “Companion”, Jamie), and that the storyline of River Song in Doctor Who was blatantly based on tTTWife.
Will I pick up a time travel book again? It would need to be extraordinary.
Thanks for the conversation!
P.S. – IIRC, Jude Deveraux wrote a time travel romance. Did anyone else read it?
I’m fine with time travel and don’t think too hard about whether it makes sense or not, but I really haven’t read that many and it’s not something I seek out. A few I have liked are: Linda Howard’s Son of the Morning (have not read in a really long time), Susannah Kearsley’s The Rose Garden, and Kelley Armstrong has recently written A Stitch in Time and A Twist of Fate that I thought were fine, but I like some of her other writing a lot better.
I love time travel books – I like the what if? theme. What would it really be like to go back in time? I loved Son of the Morning and The Rose Garden. TT Wife not so much – I really disliked the ending.
One thing I’m not fond of is having lots of connected people going backwards and forwards to the same place, so that the past becomes almost a cosy commonplace destination. I think it was Lynn Kurland who had several like that.
I very much liked Nicola Cornick’s The Phantom Tree, which is unusual in having a heroine who’s come forward in time (Tudor times to contemporary). I’d love recommendations for any others like that.
I don’t seek time-travelling stories out, but I will read them if the plot interests me. I’m not interested in how the time travel happens (that I feel is a mere McGuffin to get the plot rolling) – but I do want fairly consistent rules about what can or can’t happen while the protagonist(s) are travelling. Thinking about it, I realize that overall I’ve read and enjoyed more science-fiction based TT stories than romance ones. I’m not sure why I prefer science fiction over romance when it comes to TT – maybe because if I am consciously choosing a TT story, I’m going to want the TT aspect and its possible paradoxical consequences to be central to the plot. In a lot of the romance TT stories that I’ve read, the TT aspect seems to serve more as a way for the MCs to meet cute.
Back in 90s when time travelling was a big romance trope I read a fair number (e.g., Devereaux’s A Knight in Shining Armor, Linda Howard’s Son of the Morning, some category ones by Nora Roberts). I’m not sure how well most of thoseTT romances would hold up – certainly I don’t remember a lot of details about them and am not interested in tracking any down. (The one thing I do remember is that I was fine with the ending of AKISA, but I know lots of people hated it.) Outlander never worked for me, I DNF it several times, before I finally gave up on it.
Unlike Outlander I did finish TTTW. I wanted to like it (part of it was set near where I grew up), but I found it too melodramatic and problematical. Also at one point in the book Henry runs along the shore of Lake Michigan at low tide – but Lake Michigan (like all of the Great Lakes) does not have tides. (Emily Henry I believe makes the same mistake in Beach Read – why do authors, who have actually lived near Lake Michigan, make this mistake? Do they not ever go down to the beach and watch the lake? This is one of those errors that always, always knocks me out of a story.)
One TT book I think that straddles the romance/science fiction divide is The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen Flynn – the time travellers, a medical doctor and a literary scholar, go back to the year 1815 (they are from the distant future era and possibly also from an alternative timeline to ours). Their mission is to befriend Austen so that they can find and save a rumoured unpublished manuscript of hers and if they can, they are suppose to diagnose the illness that will lead to Austen’s death in 1817. Of course befriending Austen makes it harder and harder for the doctor to ignore the fact that she might be able to save Austen from a premature death, but at the cost of altering her own chance to return to her own time. Both the romance and time travel plot lines are equally important to the story.
On the clear science fiction side – Connie Willis has done a loosely connected series of time-travelling books and short stories around a group of Oxford historians at an underfunded university time-travelling institute. The stories range from fairly serious (Doomsday Book, All Clear, Blackout) to fairly light-hearted (To Say Nothing of the Dog). There is usually a light thread of romance, but not always a happy ending.
Some of my favourite science-fiction TT stories from my tween and teen years are A Wrinkle in Time, which isn’t about time travel in the way that most people think of it – but instead uses “folds” in the time/space continuiuum as a way to travel great distances through the universe extremely quickly; Kindred by Octavia Butler, about a 26 year-old African American woman, who inexplicably travels from 1970s America to the antebellum south; and Ray Bradbury’s short story, “A Sound of Thunder,” which is literally about the butterfly effect.
And I loved Scholastic Books Service – my battered childhood edition of Wrinkle in Time was just one of the many books I purchased from them.
@Jayne: I hated the movie. Hated.
@Misti: Kearsley’s are my favourite time travel books. The Rose Garden and Mariana are fantastic. The Winter Sea is time-travel adjacent I think but my favourite of her books.
I loved your discussion, as Time Travel has always fascinated me, but I was often disappointed by the execution. Not in the science of it, as I don‘t need it to be very accurate, but I want to be able to believe it, for it to make sense to me. Also I am very much a happily ever after reader, so some Time Travel stories are just too sad for me.
I did an episode on my own podcast on the subject – here is the link to my page with the books and movies I mention in it.
https://notjustcheeseandchocolate.wordpress.com/2021/11/21/episode-09-on-time-travel/
@Suzanna: Have you tried Cornick’s “House of Shadows”? Kaetrin reviewed that one.
https://dearauthor.com/book-reviews/overall-b-reviews/b-minus-reviews/review-house-of-shadows-by-nicola-cornick/
@Hilly: I believe the Jude Devereux book is A KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR. I’d totally forgotten that one! Back in the day, I read a ton of her books, including that one. The heroine gets transported back in time (Elizabethan England?) and falls for the lord of the manor. Then he comes to the present with the heroine (where he’s fascinated by pencil sharpeners and Playboy magazine). This one has a very bittersweet ending: the heroine and hero do not stay together and there is no HFN/HEA, but the heroine does manage to alter events and salvage the hero’s historical reputation.
I love Groundhog Day style time travel romances where the character gets the chance to repeat a certain day or time period and influence the outcomes (or just to figure out how to stop the loop and escape!). Eventually I even wrote my own and had so much fun working out all the twists. I’ve loved the concept of time travel since I saw the old “Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” movie with Bing Crosby on late night TV as a kid. I thought IN A HOLIDAZE by Christina Lauren was quite fun and a wonderful example of this romance trope within the time travel genre. It’s one of my favorites!
@DiscoDollyDeb: We’re going to talk a bit about AKISA on Monday’s part II post. ☺
@DiscoDollyDeb and @Jayne: I’m swamped this week and can’t comment much but yes, we discuss many of the books that have been brought up here, and some others
tomorrowin Monday’s post. Since we don’t go into the ending of the book in detail, though, I just want to amend what DDD said briefly. Whether or not the hero and heorine end up together in A Knight in Shining Armor is debatable sinceSPOILER
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The hero is reincarnated and the heroine meets him in the last scene.
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END OF SPOILERS
Since I believe that in RL most scientists say time travel, other than the standard forward movement we all experience, is impossible, I’m willing to suspend disbelief and usually don’t care too much about the method an author chooses to move her characters backward and/or forward in Time. I did find the Jack Finney method, however, just a little too far-fetched, as it left unexplained why re-enactors don’t move backward in time.
Linda Howard was a hugely popular author when I began to read Romance, but the first book of hers I read was “An Independent Wife” (not a TT, about a woman who was more doormat than independent), and I despised it. But I then read and loved “Son of the Morning”. Didn’t have a problem with the way Devereaux brought her couple together in AKISA since it seemed that if I could accept TT I could accept reincarnation (or the possibility that the hero was a many-generations descendent of the original hero). IIRC, “The Changling Bride” by Lisa Cach has the heroine travel back to Georgian England when the fairies repay a debt owed to one of her female ancestors — so not only do you need to believe in TT, you need to believe in fairies. I’ve not read it in years but I remember I liked it at the time.
A recent TT book that is “Before the Coffee Gets Cold”, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. It is romantic, poignant, bittersweet as it relates the stories of 4 people who get the opportunity to TT by sitting in a special chair in a Tokyo cafe. There are rules to be followed, the present isn’t changed, and the visit lasts only until the coffee gets cold. It’s different and an interesting take on what TT can, and can’t, achieve.
@Susan/DC: “before the coffee gets cold “ sounds interesting will check it out thank you .
For a recent twist on this, try Totally Rad Wormhole by Douglas J. Eboch. Two nerds from the ’80s accidentally open a wormhole to today and meet their adult selves at their 30th high school reunion. They don’t like the future they see, so they go back and try to change the future from their end.
The most “believable” and best time travel books I have read are Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book. In that world, time travel is a discipline and there are rules to how to behave when people go back in time (rather like on a field trip), and a time travel machine. I suppose another aspect of time travel in science fiction is when characters are frozen, and then reanimated many years later in the future – such as in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. I had forgotten about Linda Howard’s Son of the Morning, which I enjoyed back in the day.
@msaggie: Interesting that time travel machines make it more believable for you and for Sirius. They actually make it less believable for me. My dad is a physicist so I know a little about this and I don’t see how one could ever be made. So a machine just makes me more aware that the author is making this up.
@Jayne – I’ve read most of Cornick’s books and enjoyed them. I like dual time lines, too, and she does those well. But The Phantom Tree is distinctive in having the heroine come forwards in time. Seems like a theme which could be used much more.
@msaggie: To Say Nothing of the Dog was great. Funny and even has a romance thread with a HEA! :)
@Janine: In Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St. Mary’s series, there’s a time travel machine but the technology is totally handwaved. There’s a brief bit in the first book where Max gets an explanation of the tech but she doesn’t relate it to the reader. I find less information is better for me in these circumstances so I thought it was a clever choice by the author.
@Kaetrin: In almost all of the books I’ve read with time machines the technology is handwaved. It has to be handwaved anyhow because it’s such an implausible technology. Time machines don’t ruin the books for me or anything, they’re only a bit jarring. I mostly brought it up because Sirius and Msaggie’s take on them was very different than mine.