{"id":4215,"date":"2026-10-29T08:00:18","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T15:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/?p=4215"},"modified":"2026-10-29T10:11:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T17:11:14","slug":"fall-back-time-travel-for-the-non-science-fiction-reader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/2026\/fall-back-time-travel-for-the-non-science-fiction-reader\/","title":{"rendered":"Fall Back: Time Travel for the Non-Science Fiction Reader"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

This weekend we observe “Fall Back,” when we reset our clocks for standard time and gain an hour.\u00a0 The change in time and the momentousness of Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear<\/em><\/a> has me thinking about books\u00a0that 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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

\"Book<\/a>Kindred<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by Octavia E. Butler<\/strong> 1979<\/p>\n

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<\/span> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"DVDSomewhere In Time<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>[DVD] directed by Jeannot Szwarc<\/strong> 1980<\/p>\n

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A young writer sacrifices his life in the present to find happiness in the past, where true love awaits him.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\"BookA Bridge of Years <\/a><\/strong><\/em>by Robert Charles Wilson<\/strong> 1991<\/p>\n

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Tom Winter thought the secluded cottage in the Pacific Northwest would be the perfect refuge\u2014a place to nurse the wounds of lost love and happiness. But Tom soon discovers that his safe haven is the portal of a tunnel through time. At one end lies the familiar present. At the other end\u2014New York City, 1963.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"Book11\/22\/63<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Stephen King\u00a0<\/strong>2011<\/p>\n

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\u2019s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination\u2014a thousand page tour de force.<\/p>\n

\"BookThe First Fifteen Lives of Harry August<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em> by Claire North\u00a0<\/strong>2014<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\"BookLast Year<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Robert Charles Wilson<\/strong> 2016<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\"BookAll Our Wrong Todays\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Elan Mastai\u00a0<\/strong> 2017<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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An Ocean of Minutes <\/strong><\/em><\/a>by Thea Lim\u00a0<\/strong>2018<\/p>\n

An Ocean of Minutes<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

\"BookThe 7 1\/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Stuart Turton\u00a0<\/strong>2018<\/p>\n

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Doomed to repeat the same day over and over, Aiden Bishop must solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle in order to escape the curse in a world filled with enemies where nothing and no one are quite what they seem.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\"BookBefore the Coffee Gets Cold<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Toshikazu Kawaguchi\u00a0<\/strong>2019<\/div>\n
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In a small back alley in Tokyo at a century-old coffee shop rumored to offer patrons the chance to travel back in time, four customers reevaluate their formative life choices.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\"BookHere and Now and Then<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Mike Chen\u00a0<\/strong>2019<\/div>\n
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Kin Stewart works in IT, tries to keep the spark in his marriage, struggles to connect with his teenage daughter, Miranda. Memory loss is wiping his memory as a time-traveling secret agent from 2142. Stranded in San Francisco since the 1990s after a botched mission, Kin’s rescue team arrives eighteen years too late. Their mission: return <\/span>Kin to 2142, where he’s been gone weeks… and where another family is waiting for him.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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This Is How You Lose the Time War <\/strong><\/em><\/a>by Amal El-Mohtar\u00a0<\/strong>2019<\/div>\n
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Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something<\/span> romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them.<\/span><\/div>\n
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\"BookOona Out of Order<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Margarita Montimore\u00a0<\/strong>2020<\/div>\n
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Just because life might be out of order, doesn’t mean it’s broken. It’s new years eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or follow her heart and remain at home in Brooklyn to be<\/span> with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the new year begins, Oona feels lightheaded, woozy, and it’s not from the champagne. At the stroke of midnight Oona is torn from her life and everyone she loves, finding herself in her 51 year old body thirty-three years into the future.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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This Time Tomorrow <\/strong><\/em><\/a>by Emma Straub\u00a0<\/strong>2022<\/div>\n
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What if you could take a vacation to your past, without the filter of memory? What would you give to go back in time and relive your youth, in person, with the people who shared it? On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice’s life isn’t terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn’t exactly the one she expected. She’s happy with her apartment, her romantic status, her<\/span> independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But something is missing. Her father, the single parent who raised her, is ailing and out of reach. How did they get here so fast? Did she take too much for granted along the way? When Alice wakes up the next morning somehow back in 1996, it isn’t her 16-year-old body that is the biggest shock, or the possibility of romance with her adolescent crush, it’s her dad: the vital, charming, 49-year-old version of her father with whom she is reunited.<\/span><\/div>\n
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\"BookThe Seven Year Slip<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by Ashley Poston\u00a0<\/strong>2023<\/div>\n
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Sometimes, the worst day of your life happens, and you have to figure out how to live after it.
\nSo 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\u2019s 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\u2019ve fallen head-over-heels for. And she might again.
\nExcept, he exists in the past. Seven years ago, to be exact. And she, quite literally, lives seven years in his future.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This weekend we observe “Fall Back,” when we reset our clocks for standard time and gain an hour.\u00a0 The change in time and the momentousness of Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-shaunar","post-4215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-book-lists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p71KTL-15Z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4215"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4224,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4215\/revisions\/4224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pasadena-library.net\/adult_services\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}