I know I do. I mean…I wrote a book centered around it.

I was a kid when I saw the old movie Bedknobs & Broomsticks, then Back to the Future came out, and ever since I’ve been daydreaming about time travel. I even made a point to study it a little while I was writing Switchers.

I’m sure you’ve noticed, the most common sort of time travel is one in which some sort of “time machine” transports its operator to absolutely any point in time, forward or backward. They can go back to yesterday and watch themselves take out the trash and get the mail. And, dangnabbit, do NOT (or DO (depends on the “mission”)) change something or the consequences…!

All that kinda stuff.

But there are cooler–or at least less explored–alternatives. Here’s a few things from my research that I incorporated into my novel Switchers.

Time Travel Rules

There are so many proposed, and I mean so many, hypothetical principles of time travel, but these are the big two that really stuck and helped me form my ideas for Switchers:

You can only time travel to a point where the time machine already/still exists. This makes more sense to me than the go-wherever-you-want DeLorean, even if it isn’t as sexy. To travel back in time, you can only travel as far back as the completion of the time machine. And you can only go where the machine is. Oh, and this thing:

You can only travel within your own lifetime. Again, not as sexy as going back to hunt dinosaurs (a la Ray Bradbury’s time travel story (which I have Easter Eggs for in my novel! (and a few others (but I’ll talk about that here!)))), but seems more logical. Otherwise, you’d have time travel tourism, and I don’t think tourists are self-aware enough to go completely unnoticed. But who knows.

I added something for the book though:

When you time travel, you enter your body in said time; the other version of you switches into the body from your point of origin. And when you throw in war, surprise military invasions, and a deadly parasitic fungus that’s driving humanity into extinction, you have Switchers.

---

Check out http://www.christophertallon.com for book info and links!

Click here to open a link in a new tab and see more information, reviews, purchase options, and free ways to read, like Kindle Unlimited.

---

Thanks for stopping by!

-CT

Christopher Tallon is the author of the dark, adventurous, time-travel novel Switchers.

Row row row your boat / Gently down the stream

Merrily merrily merrily merrily / Life…is but a dream

Amazon | Goodreads | Twitter | FaceBook | Instagram | Podcast