How to Time-Travel? Let Me Count the Ways

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The vehicle in The Time Machine movie from 1960. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images.)

I’ve written before about how I love to occasionally read time-travel novels — even mediocre ones. It’s exciting to see how sojourning characters react to the past or future, to see how residents of the past or future react to those travelers, and to think about ourselves leaving the current era. Other reasons to enjoy those novels, too.

But one angle I’ve never focused on is the wide variety of methods authors use to get their characters into another time period. That can be fascinating, and we admire the oft-cleverness of said methods.

I just read the compelling Timeline by Michael Crichton, who transports his late-1990s characters into 14th-century France with the help of computers and quantum physics. People are sent to the past like Star Trek crew members beamed to a planet’s surface, or maybe more like three-dimensional faxes. (It’s hard to explain; you’d have to read the novel. 🙂 )

What are the transporting methods in some of the other time-travel novels I’ve enjoyed?

There are books, of course, that put their characters into the past or future via an actual time machine, as in H.G. Wells’ novel…The Time Machine.

Or characters can be in a seemingly ordinary vehicle that ends up making a temporal journey — as with a railroad train that takes the protagonist of Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back into the past, and a subway train that does the same for the children in Caroline Emerson’s novel The Magic Tunnel.

Hermione in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban uses a small “Time-Turner” device that enables the studious teen not to miss any courses scheduled at the same time. 🙂

An unusual library situated between life and death provides the means to visit various timelines in Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library.

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series has her characters go through stones to travel from the 20th century to the 18th century and back again.

Drugs? Those, too. The 1960s protagonist of Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand gets to the 1300s that way.

A severe blow to the head also works; that’s how “Camelot” is visited from the 19th century in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Self-hypnosis does the trick in Jack Finney’s Time and Again. Similarly, the lead character in Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward goes to the future via a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep.

The co-star of The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is repeatedly pulled from the present because of a genetic disorder.

How some other characters travel through time is kind of mysterious. Octavia Butler’s Kindred protagonist is yanked to the past perhaps by being summoned by an ancestor? The star of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time somehow uses her empathy and perceptiveness to interact with a future being.

Thoughts about and/or examples of this topic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my town’s unpopular mayor thankfully not seeking reelection — is here.

105 thoughts on “How to Time-Travel? Let Me Count the Ways”

  1. Pingback: How to Time-Travel? Let Me Count the Ways – Lively Co Travel

  2. Pingback: How to Time-Travel? Let Me Count the Ways

  4. Just randomly. I am aware that there is a belief that if time travel becomes possible, it will only be to travel forward in time. And of course it makes sense that if backwards time travel ever happens, there’d be evidence of it. However I’ve also heard that time travel may work like a telephone and there’d need to be working Time Travel Devices at either end of the journey. And while that would make backwards time travel possible, it would only be back to the point of the first working TTD. Sorry, this still has nothing to do with books. Hopefully I can come up with some literary con artists in the next few days…

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    • Thank you, Sue, for all that thought-provoking, mind-twisting information! It all makes sense. If you comment on con artists, I’ll travel a blog week into the future to see that. 🙂

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  5. Seems you have covered the books I have read.

    There was an old series that I have only seen a few episodes of (it’s not that great) – “The Time Tunnel”.

    Here’s a backwards thing. “Timeslip”, a novel by Murray Leinster, is based on that TV series.

    Normally a TV show or movie is based on a book, but this is a book based on a series.

    The Library is back up. It’s been hacked down for 5 months, all in all.

    Now I forgot what books I was going to borrow! 🤔

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  6. Not a novel, but a short story, “Arria Marcella” by Theophile Gautier, in which three 19th century young fellows tour Pompeii,but one experiences, as he walks under moonlight in the ruins of the ancient city, the ancient past as palpably present, meeting a woman whose earthly form he saw first, hours earlier, imprinted on volcanic ash in a museum.

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  7. I do a fair amount of time travel myself, these daze. What I mean: I tend to immerse myself in films out of the past, to the point of feeling myself relax when I light on a black and white movie– not something that was itself set in the past, but one that was more or less contemporary with its first-run audience.  There’s an old refrigerator– I know how to defrost it; there’s an old stove– yep, I can operate that thing even if it burns wood..  I can wash my dishes in any old sink I see, and so forth.  If I were in the market for a house, I’d insist on a pre-war kitchen.  As it is, my 95 year old apartment provides…

    I know somewhere among my many comments here I wrote up a description of “The Man Who Lived Twice”, a 1921 novel by a Viennese author Paul Busson.  But a good book bears repeating.  

    Can’t say I was much pleased with its ending, but getting there was engaging and strangely yet believably somehow realistic.  A fellow believes he has been protected by a sort of guardian, who appears at crucial and often dangerous moments throughout his young life. 

    He also believes he has lived before– several generations before, and he’s got memories to match.  And that’s what makes this novel a stand-out: the memories are compelling and particular and singular and odd, and though occasionally fantastic, they never intrude on the reader’s suspension of disbelief– not this reader’s, anyway.

    “The Man Who Lived Twice” may be hard to come by, though I haven’t checked the interwebs to be sure. My copy was published by Dover Books in 1976, the second of a two-part offering, the first being the more famous and enduring “The Golem” by Gustav Meyrink.

    Worth seeking out, as I like to say, for time-travel aficionados,and for those who might be curious about German between-the-world-wars supernatural fiction.

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    • Thank you, jhNY! You definitely like older things, and I share that like in various areas. 🙂

      “The Man Who Lived Twice” sounds really good (other than its ending), and you described it intriguingly. Will look for the novel in my local library, though, from what you said, finding it might be a long shot. But the library does have a fairly eclectic collection, with some pretty old editions among it.

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      • I’m perhaps unjustly proud I managed to make my funny-serious point in my first paragraph without mentioning phones that plug into the wall, which I’ve still got, though with a digital interface thingy forced on me by Verizon. To say nothing about those phones I see other folks addicted to that don’t. As a withering curmudgeon, I’ve got to pick my shots with care. Happy hunting Busson!

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        • I also still have a landline phone (in addition to my iPhone). I called Verizon a few years ago to disconnect the landline, but they offered a package where I could keep it for about $2 a month, so I figured what the heck — if there was a power failure or something and my iPhone ran out of charge. But hasn’t happened yet. 🙂

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  9. A Sound of Thunder by Bradbury. And I would like to mention another, but I can’t find it anywhere. It was in an anthology of Russian scifi stories. I don’t even remember the name of the book and/or the story itself. Yet I do remember the premise is this: 2 individuals vow to meet each other, unfortunately one cannot inhabit space while the other cannot inhabit time. Another quite like it by Theodore Sturgeon is The Widget, The Wadget and Boff. Who could forget a title like that? This one I read in a summer school class I was taking for of all things Science specifically biology, ha. Then there’s Timescape by Gregory Benford. Nice theme. Thanks Dave. Susi

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  10. Hi Dave,

    I got excited when I saw this week’s topic as I’m right in the middle of a time travel book. Then I realised, no, I’m in the middle of a time travel TV series. I’m watching “Twelve Monkeys” which is kind of adapted from the 1995 movie of the same name. They treat time travel quite differently with the movie characters going back only to set in motion all the events that they’re trying to change. The TV show however has the kind of time travel that allows the characters to go back in time to change the future.

    Anyway, none of that is about HOW they travel back in time, so I thought of another TV show I was watching. In “Futureman” they use a TTD to travel through time. TTD is the very technical name for Time Travel Device 🙂

    Sorry, bit naughty of me talking about TV instead of books. But any books I could think of (“The Time Traveler’s Wife”, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, and “11/22/63”) have all been mentioned. I’ll see if I can come up with someone new before the end of the week…

    Sue

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    • Thank you, Sue! I’m totally fine with mentioning TV series that feature time travel. 🙂 Both of the ones you discussed sound interesting! I remember watching a time-travel TV series called “The Time Tunnel” when I was a kid. Not the greatest show, but irresistible. 🙂

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  11. I’m happy to say I’ve read a lot of these – with the Time Traveler’s Wife and Midnight Library being among my favorites of the mentions. I read a really good time travel book a few years ago called the Time Collector by Gwendolyn Womack. It was about a woman who had a condition where she could travel through time by touching objects from that era. It was very good!

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  12. I’ve read the books you mention, Dave and some mentioned by others in comments. I enjoy the notion of time travel and the ways in which writers have worked with it throughout time (sorry).

    Though not books, I’ve read most of the short stories that inspired (or were inspired by) the Twilight Zone episodes about time travel. Some of the stories were published after the episodes aired, but until syndication brought the series back, it was the only way to reach the Zone.

    The methods varied from complex machines to vehicles, to assistance from the devil. My favorite episodes are the ones where people simply find themselves in a different time. There are about a dozen episodes.

    Thanks for exploring another great topic.

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    • Thank you, Dan! “The Twilight Zone” was such a great show! (I’ve seen many of the episodes in reruns.) Whether the episodes involved time travel or not, some of them were incredibly memorable. And I have an old paperback collection of terrific “Twilight Zone” stories.

      “…throughout time” — ha! 😂

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  13. From the books you mentioned, Dave, I liked Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library and Nora’s various attempts to find a life worthwhile to live! Maybe also “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens can go into this category of Time-Travel novels because the heartless miser or Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of earlier business partner and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come in order to teach him a lesson about his selfish ways. Many thanks:)

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    • Thank you, Martina! “A Christmas Carol” definitely fits into the time-travel category. A very early novel to do that! And “The Midnight Library” was a fascinating book. I appreciate the mention of both titles!

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  16. Interesting topic, Dave. I haven’t read any time-travel books recently, and have read a few of the books mentioned. Time-travel is a fascinating concept with amazing possibilities for changing the course of history or our own lives. In “A Christmas Carol,” Dickens uses ghosts/spirits to transport his male protagonist across time–past, present, and future–with the aim of transforming the character into a kinder and happier person.

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  17. Dave – time travel is a wonderful topic. The first time travel book that I read was The Time Machine by H.G. Well, which prompted a great deal of speculation on whether I would eventually be able to time travel. What an exciting adventure that would be, I thought!!

    Alas,time travel remains a topic of scientific exploration, with current theories suggesting that while time dilation is possible according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, traveling back in time is still considered highly unlikely. But,good news! Time travel to the future is theoretically feasible based on current scientific understanding. So for now, I will be satisfied to travel back and forth in time with books, where everything is possible.

    One of the books that I have on my reading list for this year is “A Rip through Time” a series debut by Kelley Armstrong. I’m going back in time to Victorian Scotland with a modern-day homicide detective who finds herself in an unfamiliar body—with a killer on the loose.

    I have to leave you this quote by Stephen Hawking from his book A Brief History of Time: “If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?

    I continue to hope…

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    • Thank you, Rebecca! I didn’t know it was theoretically easier to travel into the future than back to the past. Fascinating!

      And I think “The Time Machine” was also the first “grown up” time-travel book I read. I enjoyed “The Magic Tunnel” (mentioned in my post) when I was a preteen; it’s a children’s or YA novel.

      That’s a VERY good question from the brilliant Stephen Hawking!

      If you’re eventually able to travel through time, Rebecca, I think your blog post and/or podcast about it would be brilliant, too. 🙂

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  18. Hi Dave, I don’t read much sci fi although I have obviously read Harry Potter and HG Wells. I thought of The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub but that isn’t really time travel, it’s more travelling in a different world. In 11/22/63, the time traveler travels through a timeslip which is the diner. I can’t think of anything else right now, but I’ll think. Have a lovely evening.

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  19. Another interesting topic which I’ll have to think about. I’m not a very ‘sci-fi’ person (although I love Star Trek) so I haven’t read the books you list above (apart from A Connecticut Yankee’). I’m sure I can come up with something though–it’ll probably wake me at 3am! Thanks for the mind workout. 🙂

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  21. I love the idea of time travel, and have enjoyed many books built upon that theme! In general, I prefer those that include a mystery and/or a love story. As opposed to the more science-based explanations for the travel, I prefer the mode to be either just going to a special place or for that to be a mystery, as well, such as in Wrong Place, Wrong time by Gillian McAllister. The main character has no idea what is making her travel through time.

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    • Thank you, Becky! Glad you’re a fan of time-travel fiction, too! And I agree that it helps when a novel of that sort has a mystery and/or a romance and/or some other element in addition to the time travel and the science that makes that travel possible.

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  22. I am fascinated by time travel. I particularly love The Outlander series of books. When I visited Scotland and saw some standing stones, I automatically touched them and hoped to be transported back in time. (no luck) You listed my favourites here. A great topic.

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