From Star Trek to Dr. Who, our culture is rife with stories of time machines: contraptions capable of bouncing between eras, immersing us in how people lived way-back-when, and what the future might look like.
Short story collections can be time machines, too. Without knobs or flux capacitors, they can zip us to pre-history, then the far future and back again. Authors can stretch and squish time like putty, helping readers to face hidden possibilities: How might our world be otherwise? What alternate paths might we have taken, and what are their dangers and opportunities?
Octavia Butler, in her 2000 Essence essay “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” explains that her fiction about the future is informed by the past, “filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.” When authors nudge us out of our own time period, they challenge our assumptions: about progress, permanence, legacy, even humanity. They ask: what are we here for in these brief lives? Big stuff for short stories.
Yet short fiction is as close as I’ve come to my own personal time machine. In my collection, The Man in the Banana Trees, I write about 1493 and 2073 in the same story, from the perspective of the famous Unicorn Tapestries. Another story has a ghostly narrator, able from her unique perspective to overlay the past version of her beloved artist colony with its current reality as a corporate retreat.
Similarly, these eight authors explore the past to interrogate our present and future. Within the same collections, they soar forward and backward to different eras, transporting us out of the comfortable and familiar. They distort time, stretch time, collapse time, and cycle through it like a deft dancer, revealing patterns and causes and questions and possibilities.
Tender by Sofia Samatar
Tender highlights characters on the margins of history and the future, giving them voice and magic. Monsters, servants, reluctant cyborgs and determined artists live through time periods that could seem apocalyptic. One standout story “Ogres of East Africa,” is a “false text” taking the form of a compendium of ogres “catalogued by Alibhai M. Moosajee of Mombasa, February 1907.” The story emerges in the margins of this text, in notes that Alibhai writes about his domineering “employer” and his subversive “informant,” Mary. Along the way the reader learns that the employer is an outsider, presumably white, who complains of the African environment, while Mary is a knowledgeable local who shares the stories of the ogres. As the story continues, the margins literally expand, growing longer than the entries in the catalogue. In the margins, Alibhai begins to fall in love with Mary, and documents the plan the two share to use their knowledge of ogres to subvert their racist employer, lead him into danger, and escape to join the ogres themselves. As Alibhai notes in the last marginal entry: “There will be no end to this catalogue. The ogres are everywhere.”
Jewel Box by E. Lily Yu
E. Lily Yu’s stunning speculative collection goes from fables about insect societies in small pre-industrial villages (“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees”), to a cyberpunk telling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth (“Music for the Underworld”) and near-farcical futures where a lavish wedding takes place against a backdrop of unfettered income inequality and climate disaster (“Green Glass: A Love Story”). Yu writes deftly about politics, power, and fragile hope. No matter what time period a story is set in, tender characters are threatened by brutal forces. There’s a timelessness to the stories, suggesting that we have been here before, we’re repeating the same mistakes, trying desperately to break out of the cycles. “Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire,” makes this cyclical retelling explicit: revising the folktale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in repeated iterations:”unnecessarily grim, you say? Unrealistic? Scenes this bloody no longer occur in the civilized world…There’s nothing for it but to try again.”
The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
Ken Liu’s marvelous The Paper Menagerie includes unlinked stories from across the past and into the future. Technology and fable flow into each other. Many stories deal with relationships between parents and children, or between generations. In “All The Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu, The Chinese God of War, In America” a young girl in 1870s Idaho meets a Chinese-American storyteller who might be a god. “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel” imagines the construction of an undersea tunnel connecting Japan to the Western United States, as well as the abuses of the workers who dug the tunnel, and the burden of their buried stories. In “Good Hunting” a Chinese man and fox-spirit (hulijing) navigate colonial Hong Kong, combining supernatural abilities with industrial age technology to “hunt” those who oppress and threaten them:“She darted the streets of Hong Kong, free, feral, a hulijing built for this new age…I imagined her running along the tracks of the funicular railway, a tireless engine racing up, and up, toward the top of Victoria Peak, toward a future as full of magic as the past.”
There is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr
Ruben Reyes Jr.’s debut collection There is a Rio Grande in Heaven uses elastic time to tell surreal and speculative stories about the lives of first- and second-generation Central American immigrants to the US. In “The Salvadorian Slice of Mars,” near-future climate disaster has turned the tables on the 2020s power dynamics of borders: Central American nations control access to Mars, while American citizens are restricted and policed. Throughout the collection, short vignettes all titled “An Alternate History of El Salvador or Perhaps the World” play with time, memory and possibility. In the first one, Columbus’ ships never land: “There is no war, no aftermath, no nation. No blood or sweat or singed skin in the dirt.” Memory, amnesia, and history are recurring themes. In “The Myth of the Self-Made Man,” Victor, a historian in the year 2175, sifts through documents in the National Archives looking for the secrets of a cyborg servant marketed by a “Hispanic business mogul” as part of the American dream. As Victor digs deeper “every hour spent in the archive brings [him] a step closer to unearthing the truth of his ancestor’s anger: where it came from, whether it was justified, and how knowing his own history might empower him to reshape his future.” But, as this collection shows, time is full of forking paths, each leading to alternate possibilities: “the past is an ever-growing cavern, and even a lifetime of spelunking won’t reveal it all.”
At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson
Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees showcases unlinked stories with humor and heart. Many are speculative, and in Johnson’s case that means both Kitsune (fox) fantasies set in Heian-era Japan, and post-Earth far-future science fiction.
She takes on the voice of a seemingly 18th-century male author, in the style of Jonathan Swift or Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy: ostentatious and obtuse, in a story titled “My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire—Exposition on the Flaws in My Wife’s Character—The Nature of the Bird—The Possible Causes—Her Final Disposition.” The reader joyfully gets to piece together the real story of what has happened to the narrator’s wife, behind his ostentatious and obtuse ramblings. And right next to that is a dystopian future story about an “Empire Ship” and its inhabitants, opening with the lines: “We tell these tales, we who lived on the Ship. We do this so that our home planets and our time on the Ship will not be forgotten—so that we will not be forgotten.” It’s hard to imagine stories more disparate in setting and tone, and their boldness is exaggerated by reading them back-to-back.
Two favorites of mine include stories that explicitly play with the concept of time: “The Horse Raiders,” set on a planet on which rotates so slowly that nomadic people cross the landscape while staying in the same dusky time of day, avoiding the too-hot sunlight, and “Names for Water” in which a engineering student is receiving phone calls from the future.
All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva
Though the stories in this masterful collection couldn’t be more varied, there’s a sense that the wise and troubled characters are engaged in a single conversation across eras—a reminder of the vast power of a short story collection. In 1667 we meet an aging John Milton collaborating with an actual angel to weave a rebellious thread into his Paradise Lost. That story, “Killer of Kings,” interweaves Milton’s boyhood with his old age. Time is slippery within the story as it is in the collection as a whole. In nine dense stories, Sachdeva tackles a near-future in which aliens are replacing humans’ hands, and the lives of Nigerian schoolgirls after being kidnapped by Boko Haram. Fabulism and fairy-tale logic show up in unexpected ways. As AM New York said about the collection, these stories “seem to float in time, untethered by commercial or cultural touchstones, making them feel eternal.”
Boys, Beasts & Men by Sam J. Miller
The 2023 Locus Award Winner for Best Collection, Miller’s Boys, Beasts and Men challenges notions of masculinity and monstrosity. Often both horrifying and heartfelt, some stories depict a post-climate collapse future. One standout story is “The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History,” a speculative work of historical fiction that literally re-writes the narrative to include more voices. Through various fictional perspectives, the cause of the fire at the Stonewall Uprising is revealed to be multipsionics, or collective psychic energy, of the shared anger, resistance, and joy of the queer patrons. As one character explains:
“‘I think it’s happened lots of times, except we’re reading history the wrong way. We read it the way The Man wrote it, and when he was writing it, I bet he didn’t know what to do with multipsionics. But I’ve studied this shit. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising happened on Passover, after all, and the Haitian Revolution began with a spontaneous uprising at a vodoun religious ceremony. When people come together to celebrate, that’s when they’re unstoppable.’”
The Caprices by Sabina Murray
The Caprices is less speculative than many of the time-traveling collections in this list, but no less inventive in how it bends and distorts time to enliven history. The majority of Murray’s stories are set during World War II in the Pacific. The final story, “Position,” propels the reader through centuries on Guam as famous historical incidents and figures flit by. Starting in 1521 when “Magellan sights the islands,” the story hop-skips to Amelia Earhart landing on Saipan: “Aviator. Wife. Writer. Woman. Does she also need to be a spy?” Murray accelerates and decelerates story-time: centuries fly by in a single sentence, before we lurch to a halt and a single, horrific scene is lingered on for pages. Murray manipulates time to illustrate war’s impacts on a place and its people. By the time the Enola Gay enters the pictures, readers are catapulting towards an ending that leaves me breathless, and has haunted me the fifteen years since I first read the story, an ending full of possibility and yearning.