Time travel has long been a staple trope of fantasy and science fiction. It’s hard to say which might have been the first. 1819’s Rip Van Winkle comes to American minds, but the basic plot of Washington Irving’s classic tale has antecedents in folklore stretching back for centuries if not millennia. Folk tales of “the king under the mountain” type abound–the once and future king connected with the King Arthur legend, and so on. The Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus dates as far back as around 250 CE.

Perhaps the first–or maybe just the most well-known–to be considered “science fiction,” though, is H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.

Time-travel fantasy is an enduringly popular sub-genre, one of a number of so-called “portal fantasies,” where a character from a world we understand as realistic steps through some kind of gateway into a different time. There are similar types of fantasies where the portal might not lead to a different time but to some other kind of different reality, such as a parallel universe. We can all think of famous examples of those: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and the Harry Potter books, to name a few.

But for portal fantasy leading to a different time, here are a few recent ones and a few classics of the sub-genre:

Classics

Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in 1889. Like most of Twain’s writing, this novel is a social and political satire, this one in the guise of a time-travel fantasy. After a blow to the head, a practical American of the late 19th century is transported to the time of King Arthur. Beware kiddie editions, abridgements, and other shoddy versions of this novel.

H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine makes a stab at explaining the mechanisms of time travel, including a fantastical machine for doing so. Many time-travel novels leave the mysteries of it under a veil, as it were, but Wells tries to puzzle out how such a thing might happen, at least a little.

The cover depicted above is the one on the Norton Critical Edition of Wells’s novel (actually novella-length). This particular edition is pretty expensive but very well edited. You have to be careful about the editions of this novel sold on Amazon and similar places. The novel is in the public domain now, and many bad, cheaply printed, disgracefully edited editions of it (not to mention abridgements and reimaginings) are offered in these popular online venues. On a quest to re-read it, I recently ordered a fairly decent older edition for my Kindle. Only a few days later, it had seemingly been replaced on the Amazon web site by dozens of questionable editions. (If you’re interested in this very pervasive problem plaguing classics in the public domain, check out this article. See the warning for Twain’s novel, above. And for a laugh, look at this blog post.)

Strictly speaking, I suppose, The Time Machine is science fiction, not fantasy. There’s a thin line separating the two in any case. Is it overly simplistic to say the science fiction variety emphasizes the science of the story, while the fantasy variety doesn’t, or not so much? Sometimes it’s too close to call. Here’s a great article on the subject posted on Tor.com by Natalie Zutter: https://www.tor.com/2017/06/09/is-time-travel-science-fiction-or-fantasy/comment-page-1/

The Time Machine is short on details about how the machine actually works, but Wells puts some effort into explaining the principle of time travel. Wells also explores the physical and sociological details of the future environment he encounters, and shows the time traveler engaged in drawing hypotheses about them and experimenting to find out if he is right. In my opinion, these are the features that put the novel firmly in the science fiction category.

The characters in the novella take a back seat. It’s an interesting book, though, using the familiar 19th/early 20th century device of the frame story, especially the hair-raising adventure told to a group of clubby men by the intrepid explorer who survived the ordeal. Conrad’s masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, is that kind of story (although missing the time-travel element). The Time Machine is a variant of this narrative method. Wells gains a big advantage by relating the tale through one of the listeners and not the time traveler. Wells asks us to imagine a device near-impossible to describe, but he can present the time traveler as plausibly coy about the details of the machine he has invented.

The time traveler himself is a nicely-developed character, and the narrator is pretty well-developed. The other listeners are caricatures. Wells describes the beings of the future mostly in the aggregate: the fragile, child-like Eloi and the brutish Morlocks. Wells understood the bouba/kiki effect (aka the maluma/takete effect) very well when he named his two societies! The only future being we get any sense of at all, as an individual, is the Eloi female Weena. The time traveler is concerned about her, but his fears for her jeopardy take a distant second place to his fears for his own. The ideas in the novel are pretty fascinating; the characters not as much.

Wells shares this tilt toward a literature of ideas with a lot of science fiction. It’s not my own preference. I want the characters and the writing! If I were in it mainly for the ideas, I’d rather read some interesting nonfiction on the subject instead. On the other hand, I suppose I can admit that a work of fiction makes a nice thought experiment.

Another very famous science fiction take on time travel is Ray Bradbury’s great short story, “A Sound of Thunder,” published in 1952, in his collection R is for Rocket. The story invokes the “ripple” or “butterfly” effect whereby one tiny change in the past re-forms the entire future, a persistent trope in time-travel novels. I’m calling it science fiction, but Bradbury apparently didn’t. Bradbury credits science fiction great Robert Heinlein for steering him toward the humanistic rather than the technological side of science fiction, and he famously claimed that the only science fiction novel he ever wrote was Fahrenheit 451–all the rest he labeled fantasy. You might want to investigate these claims yourself. I’ve only read them on Bradbury’s Wikipedia page, where they are carefully footnoted. Yet I haven’t been able to run down the footnotes independently.

From the “Golden Age of Science Fiction,” Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity (1955) and Robert Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer (1957; first serialized in 1956 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) are especially memorable, and Heinlein’s novel features a great cat as a main character.

Here are some relatively new entries into the time travel canon

Audrey Niffenegger’s enjoyable time-travel fantasy, The Time Traveler’s Wife: Clearly fantasy. The hero suffers from “Chrono-Displacement Disorder,” which transports him willy-nilly backward and forward in time, apparently due to a childhood trauma. Beyond that, the mechanism of time travel isn’t explained in this popular novel from 2003.

Diana Gabaldon’s best-selling Outlander series (and the Starz long-form television series based on it): Again, fantasy. Claire, the heroine, goes back to the Scotland of the Jacobite Rebellion by touching a cleft in a circle of standing stones. These transport her to the past by mystical means. In Gabaldon’s novels, there’s the good (absorbing local color and a steamy romance) as well as the bad (wife beating more or less condoned, a gay villain portrayed in troubling terms), but the novel and its many sequels have their rabid fans. When I went on a tour of Scotland recently, at least half the other people on the tour were there because of these books. I haven’t been able to get myself to read past the first one, but I admit that I have obsessively watched all of the television episodes.

A Discovery of Witches and its sequels, by Deborah Harkness, wherein the heroine is transported into past episodes of her long-lived vampire love interest’s life: Fantasy again, because the mechanism by which this happens is mysterious and not really explained. I’ve blogged about these books previously on this site. I read several of them before giving up on them after a strange episode during which the main witch character conjures up Fourth of July fireworks via her magic. Once more, this is a fictional property I’ve enjoyed more in its long-form television version than between the covers of its books. It’s kind of a shame–Harkness knows more than I ever will about one of the main time periods her characters visit, and that’s the time period of my own scholarly research (such as it is). But her characters and the writing are pretty pallid.

Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life: This book from 2013 is billed by its publisher as a “postmodern novel” for its intricate plot twists and fractures. It’s not marketed as fantasy at all. Yet it’s a fascinating take on a time-travel idea that our lives (or some people’s lives) might be a succession of do-overs. (Think Groundhog Day, as a comedic example.) In Atkinson’s novel, the protagonist is transported back and forth in time, experiencing multiple variations on a life that illuminates the pain and difficulty of the World War II era.

A fun recent addition to the time-travel genre is Mike Chen’s 2019 Here and Now and Then:

The book is a nicely-paced story of a man torn apart by two different times, two different lives. I found the characters realistic, relatable, and compelling. I enjoy a character-driven story. And this one has secret agents, breathtaking chase scenes, and many enjoyable twists and turns of the plot.

Another new one, from 2020, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V. E. Schwab:

Schwab’s novel is slow, angsty, more of a romance than a fantasy, but the time-travel element is central. It’s part Picture of Dorian Gray, part Faust, part The Gift of the Magi. I found it interesting, but only by fits and starts. Its polysyndeton-riven style, which gives it a false and unearned gravitas, begs for an editor’s slashing pen. A major relationship begins far too late in the book (long after my patience frayed to a thread), and another stayed under-developed for far too long. Other readers disagree with me. It’s very popular. It has landed on multiple best seller lists, and you can even order tee shirts with quotations from the novel on them. I did like the novel’s ending, though. I’ll admit that. I found it a clever and intriguing way to bring the book to a close.

Later classics–books that defy genre

Kurt Vonnegut’s great 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five:

This is one of those books that helped define a generation. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, has famously “come unstuck in time.” He fought in World War II and in the present time of the book lives a conventional and privileged suburban life as an optometrist with a wife and children. But he can never shake the horrors he witnessed during the firebombing of Dresden, an especially meaningless and brutal episode of that war. The novel shuttles from past to present to some strange alternate future as Pilgrim tries to make sense of the senseless. Only the alien Tralfamadorians help him gain any perspective. Written during the height of the Vietnam War, the novel explores the tragedy and pointlessness of war. Is it a sci-fi classic? Is it mordant satire? Is it a Kafka-esque and absurdist cry of pain? A fractured post-modernist narrative? A savage depiction of PTSD? (Vonnegut himself survived the firebombing of Dresden as a serviceman.) All of the above, no doubt, and I’m probably missing a lot. So it goes.

Octavia Butler’s Kindred:

Octavia Butler’s absorbing 1979 slave narrative takes place through the perspective of a late twentieth century Black woman repeatedly transported back and forth from her own time to the plantation of her slave-owning white ancestor. Butler, who died in 2006, tragically early, won the important sci-fi awards–the Hugo, the Nebula–but she was also the recipient of one of the coveted MacArthur “Genius Awards.” Her book has influenced a generation of readers on the difficulties of thinking about the “problem of the 20th century. . .the color line,” as W. E. B. Dubois memorably put it. That problem has persisted into this next century of ours, and Butler’s novel and its reputation have, too. In other novels, Butler wrote memorable science-fiction or perhaps more specifically dystopian fiction, that transcends genre. Two of the most interesting are The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents.

I’m sure I’m leaving out a lot of good books in this post. If you have favorites to offer, please note them in the Comments.

Oh, covid, what have you done to me? I have a lot of catching up to do in this blog. I promised reviews of two important new historical novels, and here they finally are. I couldn’t resist reviewing two others I’ve recently read, as well.

Two historical novels, both published in 2019, take a speculative look backward at classical times just as remote from us as science fiction: Madeline Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.

Circe

This novel is actually a kind of hybrid: a novel that combines historically imagined archaic Greece with fantasty elements incorporating Greek mythology, especially the sorceress Circe who plays such a prominent role in Homer’s Odyssey. It’s a fascinating character study of a woman torn between her divine origins and her all-too-human emotions and roles: as woman, lover, parent. Miller is a wonderful and accessible writer who makes this very ancient story come alive. She is an acclaimed historical novelist with a degree in classics. Her novel, The Song of Achilles (2012) was also a New York Times best-seller.

The Silence of the Girls

Barker’s novel, too, begins with one of Homer’s two classic epics–in this case, The Iliad. Unlike Miller’s, Barker’s novel doesn’t have any magic in it; it’s the all-too-human story of what happens to women during the savagery of war. That the woman in question is Briseis, the queen captured and sulked over by the Greek hero Achilles, doesn’t prevent this book from being as contemporary as any novel set in any war-torn region. Barker is an amazing novelist. Some of her novels are set in contemporary times, and others are historical novels. I especially admire her Regeneration trilogy, about the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. Whatever books she writes, whenever she sets them, she has to be considered one of our era’s best novelists.

In a category by itself: The Mirror and the Light

This blog entry wouldn’t be complete without another quick review of another recent historical novel (2020), the third in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about England during the reign of Henry VIII and the life of his most important minister, Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell, often maligned in history and fiction (A Man For All Seasons, for example, where he is the villain), rose from humble origins to the office of Lord Privy Seal, the most powerful man in England short of the king himself. If you love fluffy “historical” novels that are little more than dressed-up romance fiction, or even well-meant but rather dumbed-down historical fiction like Phillipa Gregory’s (which I do enjoy–and as a writer of fairly fluffy novels myself, who am I to complain?), Hilary Mantel’s books may not be for you. They are huge. The Mirror and the Light clocks in at over 800 pages, and the first two in the trilogy, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) are almost equally hefty. When you read them, though, you will enter the world of Thomas Cromwell and Tudor England as if you lived in it. The novels are meticulously researched, but you don’t even think about that as you are swept into a world so far removed from your own, yet in its realpolitik, its family joys and problems, its unbearable personal betrayals, so very close. Some have said this third novel is not as good as the first two. I beg to differ. I could hardly bring myself to read the last hundred pages–I did know what happened to Cromwell–no spoilers here. If you’re reading this book, you probably know, too. But by the time I came close to finishing the novel, he was real to me, and even thinking of his fate had me shaking, not just over the brutality but the injustice and the terrible sense of loss. When I finished, I have to admit I was devastated. Absolutely, completely devastated. I was also absolutely struck dumb with admiration. This is how big a nut-case I am. I know. . .I know. . .”so many books, so little time.” Nevertheless. I got out my copy of Wolf Hall, re-read it, kept on going through Bring Up the Bodies, and finished with a re-reading of The Mirror and the Light. The ending of The Mirror and the Light circles right back to the beginning of Wolf Hall. In the very best sense, Mantel’s trilogy is one enormous super-novel. I was on fire to see how she brought it off. The answer? Brilliantly. If you have the attention and the patience for a long and very involved series of novels, read these. They are masterpieces.

Hild

Let me mention one more very long and involved historical novel, Nicola Griffith’s Hild (2013, a bit less recent than the others I’ve reviewed in this post). The politics of Hild are just as convoluted as anything in Hilary Mantel’s novels, and the world Griffith conjures up is even more remote from us than Tudor England. Hild is a young girl from Anglo-Saxon England who grows up to be St. Hilda of Whitby, but you’d never know it from this novel. There are other novels about St. Hilda. I haven’t read them and don’t know if they take any kind of reverent tone toward their subject. Griffith’s novel is having none of that. It shows us what it’s like to be a pagan seeress at a moment in English history where Christianity is on the verge of pushing out the old religions of the land–and where Roman Christianity is on the verge of pushing out an earlier, more indigenous brand of Christianity. As far as Hild is concerned, though, all that Christian stuff is alien and strange. As she and the people in her world come to terms with the passing of the old ways, including the old religion, their decisions are driven more by politics and expediency than anything else. This novel is an amazing coming-of-age story for a young woman caught between two worlds. It is beautifully written, supposedly the first book in a trilogy, although I haven’t seen any news of the next two. This book is long, complex, and not pretty. It creates a gritty reality, right down to details about the landscape, and the way people dress, and the way people love, and the way people talk and think. I’m afraid to say it takes an anthropologist’s eye to its subject, because that makes it sound dry. It’s passionate and real. I loved it. I’m eagerly waiting for the next two!

I’m finally posting more on this blog. What with all the moving around I’ve been doing, and the insane times we now inhabit, I haven’t posted lately.

So. Historical fiction. I’ve read some interesting historical novels lately, and I’m wondering. Speculative fiction or not? In the interest of readability, I’m going to divide this into two posts, one about the genre itself and one giving reviews of the two historical novels that made me start reading the genre voraciously again.

We play these defnition games with fictional artifacts of all types, and sometimes I wonder whether such definitions do much good. Insofar as ALL fiction, by its very nature, is speculative fiction, and the very term “speculative fiction” is therefore a tautology, I suppose that yes, historical novels are speculative fiction. But if we are using the usual fuzzy criteria–well? are they?

I maintain they are as speculative as science fiction. If science fiction projects us into a future or some alternate reality governed by the laws of science extrapolated into that future or alternate world, historical fiction projects us into a past we can never actually recover but, through speculative manipulation of historical documents and discoveries, builds a world just as compelling as the future or alternate world of the science fiction writer.

And just as speculative.

Back a bit. We cannot recover the past. We no doubt have a false sense of security that we can, but a lot of historical theory maintains we can’t. We can speculate about it, and speculate reasonably and responsibly, but we can’t ultimately know. (Not even, weirdly, our own personal past–see all the fascinating stuff about the dangers of writing memoir, for example.)

So what is historical fiction, anyway? If we zip off to that reliable (yes–really–pretty reliable) source of all information, Wikipedia, we see this: “Historical fiction is a literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting located in the past. . . . An essential element of historical fiction is that it is set in the past and pays attention to the manners, social conditions and other details of the depicted period. Authors [of historical fiction] also frequently choose to explore notable historical figures in these settings, allowing readers to better understand how these individuals might have responded to their environments.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_fiction

The Wikipedia article goes on to extend its definition to more than literary fiction: to opera, stage plays, movies, comic books, and on and on. The article also describes a number of subgenres, including historical fantasy, which really does count in anyone’s understanding of speculative fiction. It’s the kind of fantasy I’ve been writing lately, which may be why the topic interests me so much.

Moving a little deeper, I found this fascinating article by Sarah Johnson on the web site of the Historical Novel Society. The article, “Defining the Genre: What are the rules for historical fiction?” originated as a paper delivered at the 2002 conference of the Associated Writing Programs. She begins by pointing out that everyone–readers, publishers, writers, book sellers–has a different idea of what “historical fiction” means.

Fiction set in the past. Sure. How far in the past? Ten years? Twenty-five? Fifty and older? (All of those have been used as defining criteria.) What about fiction written by an author who lived through that past time and place and is writing about it now? She gives the example of a writer born during the World War II era who writes a novel about the war years, and a reader born during the sixties who sees that world and those events as firmly part of the past.

Johnson also deplores the snobbery swirling about the historical novel. Many writers of books set in the past don’t think of their novels as “historical novels,” many publishers don’t pitch or promote such novels as “historical novels,” and critiques of the genre often teeter between those who regard such novels as cardboard tales merely tarted up with a few “thees” and “thous,” and those who comb through such novels for historical inaccuracies as if they are Ph.D. theses.

We can all think of interesting examples of the problems plaguing the genre. Mildred Taylor’s acclaimed Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, her Newbery Award winning children’s novel about the lives of black families in the Deep South, was published in 1976, and Taylor was born in 1943. According to Taylor, some of the incidents in that novel and the two others in the trilogy were based on the recollections of her own childhood, some on family stories, and some on research. Should it be called an historical novel? Would that be how it is perceived by a sixth-grader reading it today? A sixth-grader reading it in 1976?

What about Edith Wharton’s classic The Age of Innocence? Wharton, born in 1862, wrote the novel in 1920. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921. The events of the novel are set in the Gilded Age New York of Wharton’s childhood, beginning in the 1870s. Historical novel or not? Several students of mine, reading the novel, simply assumed Wharton wrote it in the 1870s. Another great novel of  the era, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, was written in 1925 about events roughly contemporary with 1925–not an historical novel, then. But readers today often see the book through an historical haze, and the several recent attempts to film the novel take an approach roughly the same as would be taken with the film of an historical novel. The films are historical fiction; the novel is not.

Everyone can agree, presumably, that Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, one of the books that made historical novels a genre to be reckoned with, is a no-doubter example of the category. Scott wrote the novel in 1819; it depicts a highly romanticized England of the 12th century. The big first American example is James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer, the first of his very popular novels about the American colonial period. He wrote it in 1841 in imitation of Scott.

A more recent example would be Toni Morrison’s matchless Beloved, a kind of anti-Uncle Tom’s Cabin based on a real instance of an escaped slave, Margaret Garner, who killed her own daughter in 1856 rather than let her grow up in slavery. Morrison wrote the novel in 1987; it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.

How about Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series? Rollicking sea stories? Serious literary novels? Among the most carefully researched historical fiction ever penned? All of the above. And Hilary Mantel’s trilogy! Wolf Hall is the first; don’t miss it. The second, Bring Up the Bodies, is great, too, and the third of these superb novels of Tudor England, The Mirror and the Light, has just been published.

If we turn to other media, we might immediately think of Ridley Scott’s film, Gladiator, or Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. But what about Breaking Bad? What about Better Call Saul? Look at the phones all the characters carry. Look at the fax machines. These long-form television series are not about contemporary life. They take a look back–maybe not very far back, but . . .historical.

I’m going to claim historical fiction for my blog. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.