Friday 17 May 2024

A Versatile Sub-Genre

Time travel can be a way to explore the future:

The Time Machine by HG Wells;
"Flight to Forever" by Poul Anderson - 

- or to explore a particular period of the past:

The Dancer from Atlantis by Poul Anderson -

- or to follow historical developments from the past into the future:

the Time Patrol series by Anderson;
The Corridors of Time by Anderson;
There Will Be Time by Anderson -

- or to focus on the lifetimes of individual characters:

The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger -

- or to speculate about alternative histories:

the Time Patrol series does this while still remaining mostly time travel fiction, not alternative history fiction -

- or to construct elaborate paradoxes:

see some of the above. (There are other examples that I am not listing here.)

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

A favorite of some writers is speculating what might have happened if Lee had won at Gettysberg, enabling a victorious Confederacy to enforce its independence from the US (as in Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee"). I am inclined to be skeptical because, barring a catastrophic collapse in will and morale, the US was too strong for the Confederates to defeat.

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

Who else has written about this apart from Ward Moore?

Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I would need to go over some of my SF books, but off the top of my head there's Harry Turtledove's GUNS OF THE SOUTH, where he has time travelers arriving in January 1864 to arm the Confederates with modern weapons enabling them to defeat the USA. In our real history the Confederacy was being slowly but relentlessly strangled at that time.

Ad astra! Sean