My second novel, The Time Telephone, focuses not on actual time travel, but calling through time. The young protagonist, 17 year old Megan McConnell, is trying to save her mother from being killed in a bomb blast while covering the war in Afghanistan by calling her in the past. It’s a different twist on a genre that’s been popular for at least a couple thousand years, dating back to ancient folktales. The early time travel stories involved traveling to the future, including The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (pictured above.) Traveling to the past is a more recent idea in fiction.
Scientists continue to discuss whether time travel is actually possible. One way we know it IS possible is to travel into space. Time for an astronaut speeds up, but only by a matter of milliseconds. But if we had the technology to travel long distances in space, the theory is that an astronaut would return to earth after a few short years in space only to find that many decades (or longer) had passed on earth. Think Interstellar.
Interestingly, British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has made some interesting comments on time travel. He says if time travel becomes possible in the future, then we would know it because there would be tourists visiting us from the future. But he also says if humans eventually figure out how to travel backward in time in a region of spacetime that’s warped correctly, then tourists could only travel to that date, not before that date. Good idea for a novel maybe.
So while scientists continue their research, authors continue to create stories to feed the reading public’s appetite for time travel. Like The Time Telephone.