This weekend we observe “Fall Back,” when we reset our clocks for standard time and gain an hour. The change in time and the momentousness of Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear has me thinking about books that involve some element of time travel. Revisiting one’s own past or some other time period, either one that came long before or that hasn’t yet occurred in the future–it’s one of my favorite tropes, but I’m not one for the typical “pew-pew” laser gun science fiction. I’m just interested in the story and the contrasts between the character’s lived, expected experience, and the world they find themselves in upon their arrival outside of their linear lifetime. Thoughts, experiences and emotions over metaphysical philosophies or technologies.
If you are like me and love time travel but prefer the lasting effect it has on a character over the special effects involved, you may enjoy one or more of these titles… Happy travels!
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler 1979
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father the daughter who will become Dana’s ancestor. Yet each time Dana’s sojourns become longer and more dangerous, until it is uncertain whether or not her life will end, long before it has even begun.
Somewhere In Time [DVD] directed by Jeannot Szwarc 1980
A Bridge of Years by Robert Charles Wilson 1991
11/22/63 by Stephen King 2011
On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North 2014
Some stories cannot be told in just one lifetime. Harry August is on his deathbed. Again. No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes. Until now. As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. “I nearly missed you, Doctor August,” she says. “I need to send a message.” This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.
Last Year by Robert Charles Wilson 2016
Two events made September 1st a memorable day for Jesse Cullum. First, he lost a pair of Oakley sunglasses. Second, he saved the life of President Ulysses S. Grant. It’s the near future, and the technology exists to open doorways into the past–but not our past, not exactly.
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai 2017
Utterly blindsided by an accident of fate, Tom makes a rash decision that drastically changes not only his own life but the very fabric of the universe itself. In a time-travel mishap, Tom finds himself stranded in our 2016, what we think of as the real world. For Tom, our normal reality seems like a dystopian wasteland. But when he discovers wonderfully unexpected versions of his family, his career, and–maybe, just maybe–his soul mate, Tom has a decision to make. Does he fix the flow of history, bringing his utopian universe back into existence, or does he try to forge a new life in our messy, unpredictable reality?
An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim 2018
An Ocean of Minutes is a gorgeous and heartbreaking story about the endurance and complexity of human relationships and the cost of holding onto the past–and the price of letting it go.
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton 2018
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi 2019
Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen 2019
Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore 2020
The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston 2023So Clementine forms a plan to keep her heart safe: work hard, find someone decent to love, and try to remember to chase the moon. ..And then she finds a strange man standing in the kitchen of her late aunt’s apartment. A man with kind eyes and a Southern drawl and a taste for lemon pies. The kind of man that, before it all, she would’ve fallen head-over-heels for. And she might again.
Except, he exists in the past. Seven years ago, to be exact. And she, quite literally, lives seven years in his future.