7 Fantasy Books With Time Travel That Are 10/10, No Notes
The article presents seven fantasy books that use time travel to explore love, identity, history and the consequences of power. It argues that the device works best when it deepens the characters’ stories rather than becoming an exercise in explaining paradoxes.
The examples include *This Is How You Lose the Time War*, about rival agents who exchange letters across timelines, and Diana Gabaldon’s *Outlander*, in which former combat nurse Claire Randall travels from 1945 to 1743 Scotland. Octavia Butler’s *Kindred* sends Dana, a Black woman in 1976 Los Angeles, repeatedly to an antebellum Maryland plantation, where she encounters an ancestor. The supplied article text ends part-way through its discussion of *Kindred*, so the remaining selections and details are not available here.
- The books use time travel to examine relationships and history.
- *Outlander* sends Claire from 1945 to 1743 Scotland.
- *Kindred* confronts slavery through involuntary time travel.
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Time travel is a literary device used in fantasy fiction to explore themes such as love, identity and the consequences of power. An article examines seven fantasy novels that use this technique, arguing that time travel is most effective when it deepens a story's characters rather than becoming a puzzle about causality and time paradoxes.
The reviewed examples include *This Is How You Lose the Time War*, in which two rival agents exchange letters across different timelines, and Diana Gabaldon's *Outlander*, which follows Claire Randall, a nurse from 1945, as she travels to eighteenth-century Scotland. Octavia Butler's *Kindred* sends Dana, a Black woman in 1976 Los Angeles, repeatedly back to an antebellum plantation where she encounters her own ancestors.
These novels represent different approaches to deploying time travel in fantasy fiction. For readers unfamiliar with these works or the broader topic of how time travel functions in speculative stories, the article provides a range of examples showing the device used in different ways.