Time Travel: The Swiss Army Knife of Fiction

Why do we love time travel so much?

I have a few theories.

Time travel shows us what life might’ve been like had we taken another road. For those of us who face huge decisions in life (and probably agonize over them too much) time travel fiction gives us an escape with characters like us, at crossroads in their lives where they make big decisions. Time travel stories allow us to examine what might have been if those characters took another road. We learn from that.

I think we also love seeing characters in time travel stories develop. We watch them change and reflect on their lives and realize what might’ve been if they had taken another road.

Time travel also has this wonderful ability to stretch across genres. In Terminator we see the potential for action. What if a machine was sent back in time to change the future?

We see the potential for family drama in movies like Back to the Future. What if you could go back in time and change the seminal moments in our parents’ childhood? What if they were different today because of something you did?

In amazing movies like 12 Monkeys, we see how pandemics and major global events have an impact on the future. It’s frightening. And enlightening.

My new novel, Lost in Time, has a mix of all these things. In the story, a scientist is accused of murder. So is his daughter. To save her, he confesses to the crime. But in the future, murderers aren’t sent to prison. They’re sent 200 million years into the past, to the time of the dinosaurs. And so, our hero accepts his fate. But his daughter doesn’t. She resolves to find the real killer and get her father back. So begins a time travel adventure that stretches across 200 million years and in which the fate of one family hangs in the balance. And humanity. I hope you enjoy it.

Lost in Time was published by Head of Zeus – an AdAstra Book on 1 September 2022