What Books Taught Us -Time Travel

Have you checked out our various Features pages lately? Julie and I are all about Features posts. (Who doesn’t need an occasional break from reviews?) In this new feature post, we will be discussing What Books Taught Us. And no, we don’t mean cooking, crafting, or organizing. We are talking about serious, useful skills. Like how to Time Travel. We want to make sure all of our readers are prepared!

We all know the tricky rules to time travel. These books have helped us keep those rules straight.

Find a magical passageway and meet a Highlander: I don’t know if Outlander started the trend or not, but there are definitely quite a few books out there about traveling through time and meeting a Highlander. All of which involve magical passageways. And set some very unrealistic standards for every other man. Personally, I never really understood why Clare was in such a hurry to get back to Frank when she had Jamie. Right there in front of her. Seems like an obvious choice to me.

In addition to Outlander, Karen Marie Moning and Gwyn Cready both have series based on time traveling and Highlanders. In the Highlander series, the MacKeltar’s are druids who eventually end up in modern times with their true loves. Much more my style, with my appreciation for modern plumbing and antibiotics. In A Novel Seduction, Ellery is reading Kiltlander, a not so subtle nod to Outlander. Even fictional characters are obsessed with Outlander.

     

Rediscover your true love by not actually travelling anywhere: Ok, true, neither of these books are strictly time-travel-y, but this is my post, so I say they count. In Landline, Georgie and Neal have grown apart. More due to Georgie putting her work before her family. To the point of staying home to work while Neal takes their daughters home to see his family over Christmas break. But luckily, Georgie finds a magic phone. One that allows her to call Neal when they first were together. And through these phone calls, Georgie rediscovers why she loves Neal. And realigns her priorities.

He kissed her like he was drawing a perfectly straight line. He kissed her in India ink.

In Winter Sea, Carrie is having ancestral memories of Sophia’s life. Sophia lives in 18th Century Scotland. And falls in love with a Jacobite, like one does. Through Carrie’s memories, we learn of the friendship and love between Sophia and John Morey. And, we get a second love story between Carrie and Graham. I love how well the two stories tie together. And how, even without physically traveling through time, we can imagine what life was like for Sophia.

 

Use your magical abilities to discover your true self: Diana and Matthew travel to London in 1590 in Shadow of Night. To find Diana a teacher. But also for safety. But here’s the classic time-travel problem, Matthew ALREADY lives in London in 1590. (Vampires, you know, are long-lived.) Ms. Harkness solves this problem by having the current Matthew replace the 1590’s Matthew. Which makes more sense while you are reading it. For me, though, these books are not just about the relationship between Diana and Matthew, but of Diana finding her true time-weaving self. And her Wyvren. I only wish that the ending of the series would have turned out better for Gallowglass.

Use a time machine to fix history (or the present or the future): In the Traveler series, Timeline, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the main characters have special tools to travel through time to fix the already broken time lines. These authors excel as breaking down and putting back together the rules of time travel. The multi-verse of the Traveler series is so complicated that the different Trav’s take to wearing ball caps just to tell each other apart. Seeing how different actions cause different results makes Trav (and the reader) realize his past mistakes, and to correct them for the present/future. What I appreciate about Timeline is that it takes archaeologists to fix what modern scientists and the military have broken in 14th Century France.

Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.

The characters are tasked with finding Professor Johnston, who’s been lost in time. But also, need to decide if they should save the Lady Claire, or let her fate play out as it should. Complications ensue.

Harry and Hermione travel back to save Sirius and Harry. And Buckbeak. Noble and risky. While poor Ron gets left behind.

   

 

It’s a great appreciation of history that makes time travel books interesting. Well, that, and the possibility of meeting a Highlander. But it takes a skillful author to keep all of the rules straight.

 

 

 

 

 

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