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Time Travel Devices Come in All Flavors

Time Travel Devices – Is It Fantasy or Sci-Fi?

Time travel novels span many literary genres. You can find them in science fiction, fantasy, literary, and romance categories on Amazon. Between H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series lies a vast continent of stories of moving backwards and forwards in time. Often, the category depends on the mechanism for time traveling. If it’s mechanical, it generally conforms to science fiction. If it’s not very much explained, it’s fantasy.

My Favorite Time Travel Novels

Having just written a time-travel novel, The Renaissance Club, involving a young art historian and her artist-hero, the great Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, I’ve  been reading stories that hinge on magical treatments of time. The Renaissance Club by Rachel Dacus

I like to call them time-bending stories. Here’s one of my favorite time-travel novel lists, from LibraryThing. I love that it encompasses the spectrum of treatments, from Poul Anderson’s and Ray Bradbury’s serious considerations of time-travel mechanics and consequences to humorous uses of device, as in Douglas Adams’ books. However, the omission of Kate Atkinson’s intriguing Groundhog-Day style novel, Life After Life, is a serious one. I think alternate reincarnations and versions of the same life should count as time travel.

Mechanical Time Travel Devices

My far and away favorite machine that takes people through time features in Jodi Taylor’s hilarious series, Chroncles of St. Mary’s. Her time-traveling historians move through centuries in a cement hut that smells of cabbage and often malfunctions because of operator error. The same distinctive cast of characters appear in all  the books and their quirks and foibles form a large part of the series’ charm. They often find themselves stranded in dangerous times because they can’t get the device to work properly. It’s hilarious, addictive fiction. I don’t recommend starting the series with the first volume, One Damned Thing After Another, because you will never get out again — much like being trapped by a malfunctioning time machine. 

Organic Time Travel Devices

In my time travel novel, I have a time traveler going back thanks to the offices of a mysterious tour guide, who is in many ways my time travel device through my Timegathering Series.  I don’t much enjoy thinking about quantum physics and its relation to time travel, but I really enjoy the idea that history (time) branches off into infinite possibilities. I also love the idea of time travel as a biological function.

Maybe those alternate worlds are contained in those baby universes posited by Stephen Hawking, the ones that might even at this moment be passing through your body. Or maybe your body contains multiverses, and traveling between them is a matter of developing the habit, the way a yogi learns to control his breathing. In the same way, George St. James trains to be an adept timegatherer, and to guide others in their passages through history.

 

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