Wells to wonder what would happen if we could also travel through time. The human ability to travel through space vertically via hot air balloon and the greater freedom to travel horizontally via the railroads incited the imaginations of writers like H.G. While on the rise in our literature for decades, the idea of time travel didn't even exist until the late 1800s. What better way to come to terms with the inevitable erasure of time than through an ability to break the boundaries time imposes on us? There's an apocalyptic sense in the world today." Paul Booth, organizer of a pop culture conference at DePaul University with time travel as its May 2023 theme, also links the popularity of time travel to our current moment: "There's a common distaste for the current climate - political, cultural. In The New York Times Book Review, Elisabeth Egan attributes the popularity of "The Midnight Library" partially to "the life-altering, priority-jumbling pandemic" - an explanation that perhaps applies to the popularity of time travel in general. John Mandel's bestselling literary novel "Sea of Tranquility" (2022) uses time travel to raise philosophical questions about the nature of reality. (2023), Gillian McAllister's "Wrong Place Wrong Time" (2022), and Joshua David Bellin's "Myriad" (2023). Recent mysteries and thrillers with time twists include Lauren Thoman's "I'll Stop the World". Protagonists travel through time to re-examine relationships with parents in Helen Fisher's novel "Faye, Faraway" (2021), Emma Straub's novel "This Time Tomorrow" (2022), and Maurene Goo's YA novel "Throwback" (2023), which follows a contemporary second-generation Korean-American teen who meets her teenage mother in the '90s.A man and his daughter time travel in search of their lost wife and mother in Dean Koontz's horror novel "Elsewhere" (2020).Casey McQuiston's protagonist August develops a crush on a woman who proves to be displaced in time on the subway in her 2021 LGBTQ+ romance/romantic comedy "One Last Stop.".In Rebecca Serle's 2020 novel "In Five Years," Dannie glimpses her life five years in the future-an experience that impacts her present.In another clever time loop twist, Holly Smale's "Cassandra in Reverse" stars a protagonist who discovers she can rewind time, a process that sheds light on neurodivergence and her struggle to fit in.Sarah Lariviere's 2021 young adult novel "Time Travel for Love and Profit" stars a teen stuck in a time loop for ten years, repeating her freshman year of high school-pretty much everyone's nightmare.Jodi Picoult's 2021 "Wish You Were Here" features the Covid pandemic and a parallel-universe twist that it would be a spoiler to elaborate on any further.after 2020, revolves around a magical café in Tokyo where patrons can time travel - but they can only stay in other realities for the amount of time it takes for a cup of coffee to cool off. Toshikazu Kawaguchi's "Before the Coffee Gets Cold" series, primarily published in translation in the U.S.Parallel universes lighten dark themes in Matt Haig's 2020 "The Midnight Library." In it, protagonist Nora takes a drug overdose and hovers between life and death, trying out all the different lives she might have led. The proliferation of time travel novels is staggering. Notably absent are characters who set out to kill Hitler or use time travel as a contrivance, à la Mary Pope Osborne's long-popular kids' "Magic Treehouse" series to deliver lessons in history-although history provides a rich backdrop in, say, Kiku Hughes's 2020 YA graphic novel "Displacement," about Japanese internment camps, and Leah Henderson's 2020 middle grade "The Magic In Changing Your Stars," which evokes a rich history of dance in 1930s Harlem. Time travel provides a mental escape."Īnd most often, the novels in this new wave straddle more than one genre as they use time tropes to explore relationships and probe mysteries. If we could have seen what was coming at the end of 2019, what would we change?" In addition, "It felt like during the pandemic the timeline split, like we're in an alternate timeline we're not supposed to be in," says writer and avid time travel fan Rebecca Johns-Trissler. What's going on? Have we traveled to an alternate universe with a whole new set of literary expectations around time?Īlready in the pipeline before the pandemic, many of these novels may have struck at the right moment, given a boost by a widespread distorted perception of time.Īfter all, during shutdowns it felt like many of us were stuck in time loops, repeating the same day over and over. " Vaulting through Time," but suddenly it seemed that everywhere I turned I found new books about temporal displacement, time loops, time skips, time slips or parallel timelines, and the onslaught continues today. Maybe I just had time travel on the brain in 2020-21 when I was working on my own time travel novel,
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