At a time when historical amnesia is making itself widely felt, these stories show how readily the past can be rewritten
Time-travel stories sit at a nexus of the literal and figurative. All of us are travelling through time – at the ambling pace of a human life, moving in a direction we think of as forward, with the future ahead and the past behind. But memory is a form of time travel, the study of history is an attempt at building time machines, and past and future are entangled.
In 2016, I sat down with my co-author Max Gladstone to write our novel This Is How You Lose the Time War, which follows two time-travelling female spies as they fall in love. That same year was also when I first heard people speaking earnestly and frequently about feeling as if they were in the wrong timeline, as the Brexit referendum results rolled in and Donald Trump was elected US president. But our book did not feel like it was specifically about 2016; as we finished and moved on to other projects, I remember being troubled that it would feel inadequate to the moment, that when the world needed rallying cries against fascism and white supremacy, we’d given it a time-crossed love story.
Every time we affirm that queer people have always existed and often led happy lives, we change not the past but history
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