Gotta get back in time: The current explosion of time travel novels goes beyond sci-fi and fantasy

Maybe I just had time travel on the brain in 2020-21 when I was working on my own time travel novel,
"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. What's going on? Have we traveled to an alternate universe with a whole new set of literary expectations around time?

Already 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.

After all, during shutdowns it felt like many of us were stuck in time loops, repeating the same day over and over. 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. "It's like something is off. Something feels deeply messed up. If we could have seen what was coming at the end of 2019, what would we change?"

Most of the novels I encountered aren't easily classified as science fiction or fantasy. Discussion of the butterfly effect, the grandfather paradox, or big balls of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff are scarce. This new tsunami of mainstream novels, many of which have hit bestseller lists, are often described as "genre-bending," categorized as women's, literary, and teen fiction; as mysteries and thrillers, horror and romantic comedy.

And most often, the novels in this new wave straddle more than one genre as they use time tropes to explore relationships and probe mysteries. 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.

The proliferation of time travel novels is staggering. Take the following examples:

• 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. 
• Toshikazu Kawaguchi's "Before the Coffee Gets Cold" series, primarily published in translation in the U.S. 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• In Rebecca Serle's 2020 novel "In Five Years," Dannie glimpses her life five years in the future—an experience that impacts her present.
• 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."
• A man and his daughter time travel in search of their lost wife and mother in Dean Koontz's horror novel "Elsewhere" (2020).
• 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.
• Recent mysteries and thrillers with time twists include Lauren Thoman's "I'll Stop the World"
   (2023), Gillian McAllister's "Wrong Place Wrong Time" (2022), and Joshua David Bellin's "Myriad" (2023).
• Emily St. John Mandel's bestselling literary novel "Sea of Tranquility" (2022) uses time travel to raise philosophical questions about the nature of reality.

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.

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. People are fed up. Time travel provides a mental escape. There's an apocalyptic sense in the world today."

While on the rise in our literature for decades, the idea of time travel didn't even exist until the late 1800s. 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. Wells to wonder what would happen if we could also travel through time.

Over the course of the next century, concepts like time slips, time loops and alternative timelines gradually entered the mainstream, becoming more firmly entrenched by the early 21st century with such influential works as Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 "The Time Traveler's Wife," a richly layered portrait of a marriage. In it, time travel becomes a potent metaphor for the transience of even the most permanent relationship, of love, loss, absence and longing, of the fragility and complications of our connections. In her hands, time travel was impossible to dismiss as a hokey gimmick.

Subsequent decades saw exponential increases in books, TV shows, and films centered on time travel-related themes, from "Outlander" (based on the series of books published beginning in the early 1990s) to Canada's "Being Erica" to France's "The Seven Lives of Lea" to U.S. shows like "Manifest" to our ongoing vast cultural obsession with the possibilities of the multiverse. In an article on board games, Booth notes that more than 100 games with a time travel theme are cited on BoardGameGeek. 

While works like "The Time Traveler's Wife" highlight tensions between our desire for control and our ultimate lack of it, in general, time travel may feel so appealing because of its ability to suggest that our existence is purposeful, that our choices have power. Otherwise, why, as a popular meme suggests, are time travelers to the past so often warned that even a random small act can impact the future?

Choice was also a prevalent theme during the pandemic, Booth points out. "There was a lot of discourse about our individual power to protect the herd, and conversely, about our individual rights, to wear a mask or not, to be vaccinated or not."

He cites a variety of other influences on the popularity of time travel, including the internet and the increasing fragmentation of our lives. "The mashup of online technology with traditional technology reflects a growing change in the way our culture understands and deals with time, memory, and history," Booth says. "For example, on Facebook the persona continues to live long after the person has died." Social media, he says, makes experiences feel at once timeless and fleeting.

The pandemic brought on a widespread heightened awareness of death as well, and what better way to avoid — or process — the reality of that? 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?

Certainly, in the relative isolation of our pandemic bubbles, many of us were grappling with regrets or applying hindsight to personal as well as larger political and social issues. Maybe it's a natural progression to imagine turning back time, playing the hero, changing outcomes — or to imagine visiting the future, making better choices as a result. Maybe greater confinement fueled our wanderlust or led us to seek comfort in nostalgia, to indulge in the wish fulfillment and possibility offered by the seemingly infinitely flexible fictional device that is time travel.

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