Time Travelers: Would You Do it? Be One That Is?

My husband and I had settled into a frequent routine that many couple’s fall into after they’ve been married a while. After dinner, he’d go in to watch Fox News or something about WW2 and I’d go read or watch something other than Fox . I was a big follower of True Blood and love Vikings …not the football team but the show on the History Channel…long live Ragnar. We decided that in the evenings we wanted to spend more time together. So we decided, okay, there’s Net Flix and I’m an Amazon Prime member, so let’s start binge watching programs that others have recommended. We started with Breaking Bad, then went on to House of Cards and then Ray Donovan. Now we’re hooked on Outlander. It is based on a series of 8 books written by Diana Gabaldon. Outlander, the first in the series, finds a female nurse and her historian husband going to Scotland, in 1945, to study his genealogy. Claire is drawn to a circle of ancient stones and hears a buzzing noise. She moves forward to investigate and finds herself transported back to the mid 1700’s in the midst of a firefight between the battle dressed British and the kilted Highlanders. She sees a British Captain that remarkably looks like her husband (turns out to be her husband’s ancestor) who proceeds to try and rape her. She is saved from this debasement by an extraordinarily handsome Highlander. Surprise, surprise…Gabaldon says booksellers have a hard time defining her books. She puts it this way, “If it is a young woman I’d say, ‘Oh, historical romance, men in kilts,'” she winks. “If it was a slightly older lady, I’d say, ‘Oh, it’s historical fiction-if you liked Shogun, you’ll love this.’ “If it is a young man, I’d say, ‘It’s fantasy, time travel, things like that:swords.’ And if it was an older man, I’d say it was military history.” All I know is the TV series, with verra attractive actors, I might add, got me started on the book series and I can’t put the darned things down.

As I began to do research on the Outlander series, I began to think of other time travel books or movies or TV series that I’ve read or seen. Most of these time traveler works are either, as Gabaldon stated earlier, romance or historical. But you also need to add in the “fantasy” novels. My first time traveler read was The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. But the first movie that I remember about time traveling was with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour in Somewhere in Time (1972)…Heart throb city. And, of course, there is that fun movie, Back to the Future, with Michael J. Fox. If these types of books are of interest to you, here are Goodreads top ten list for time traveler novels: outlander