Time Travel Books

I love when authors create unique rules for time travel. Annalee Newitz's The Future of Another Timeline takes the idea of time travel that has been a part of Earth's history since before there were humans around to have history. Time travel can only be done at a location with a machine, several of which are difficult to access during certain time periods. Historians naturally use them all the time to visit the areas of the past that they study. There are both limits and rules; some physically enforced by the mysterious machines, and some adhered to - or not - by the time travelers themselves. Why can someone bring through clothes, but not weaponry? Who knows, but it's probably a good thing for the past that there's a hard limit imposed by the machines. As a general rule with heavy consequences throughout history, travelers should never revisit earlier years within their own lifespan. And of course no good time traveler would attempt to change the course of events to alter their own present day, right? Maybe just a nudge... by a member of a secret society of mostly women who are working to shift the timeline towards a more equitable future for all. Or maybe more than a nudge, by a member of a darker timeline.

On a significantly smaller scale, the time travel in Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi can only be conducted within the bounds of a single cafe while seated in a specific chair. Plus, the trip only lasts for the length of time it takes for a coffee to go cold, and a traveler can only go once in their life. The chair which allows time travel is frequently already occupied. And no matter what the time traveler says or does, the trip will not affect the facts of the present.The limitations are severe - so much so that the first time traveler of the book wonders what the point is, before going forward with her trip anyway. But the effect these short trips through time have on the cafe regulars are immense and moving.

In This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone threw out all the rules. The main characters move forward and backward in time in service of their respective futures (though they call the directions of travel up and down). The two women don't need any external device to change timelines, moving up and down thread seemingly at will, sometimes spending decades in one time and place, other times dashing from one time period to the next in the blink of an eye. Each agent is trying to win the time war, so their side will become the final, true future. However, from the very beginning of the story, the existence of multiple threads of time spinning off multiple iterations of each time period calls into question whether winning is even a possibility in a universe with so few absolutes.

Time travel happens the long way around in A History of What Comes Next, the first of a trilogy by Sylvain Neuvel. The individual women don't directly travel through time, but for generations, each mother-daughter team has pushed humanity towards space travel. Always one mother, always one daughter, replacing the grandmother who came before. Each daughter is told that they are the next generation of the Kibsu and that it's their destiny to make sure humanity goes to space. Each generation is instructed in the necessary steps to forward that mission and told to push and protect the science and engineering breakthroughs that will eventually launch rockets. The latest generations are steering humanity through Operation Paperclip followed by the Space Race as best they can. But how do they know the future discoveries that need to happen to begin with? That knowledge is lost to a previous generation - perhaps due to someone else who knows about the Kibsu and seeks to destroy their work.

And if all this talk of time travel has you concerned about crash landing in the past: don't panic! Ryan North has you covered with How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler. An actual science book wrapped in a delightful framing device, North walks potential time travels through different necessary skills & knowledge to recreate the comforts of the 2000s, should you find yourself in an era before the discovery of fermentation or invention of the printing press.