Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
This book is a big fat whopper of a lie.
Embedded throughout the lie, however, are facts and truths, insights and entertainment and even wonder. It’s only fair to offer you some help in telling which is which, even though most of it will be obvious.
The central conceit of The Time-Traveler’s Handbook is that practical time travel has been invented. It hasn’t, or it has been invented so secretly that word has never leaked out. All my chips are on the first one.
The concept of time travel, of course, has been with us a long while, expressed through literature, film, television, games and more, just as the first prologue said. It has become a strong enough thread weaving through the larger culture that it has earned the right to be taken seriously at some level. A number of theoretical physicists have done that, though with results that aren’t aesthetically clean or straightforward, or even clearly comprehensible to many people. (A lot of theoretical physics is like that.) I will guide you through some of the tangles, before getting to the fun stuff.
But it won’t be all fun and games. More accurately, the games will have rules. I don’t believe in playing tennis with the net down. If time travel ever were invented, it would not be a breezy caper to visit some past or future century. Even closer destinations would have their problems, in a few ways bigger problems than the longer trips.
The Time-Traveler’s Handbook provides a look at what time travel could really be like, if it came somewhere within the reach of ordinary people like us. Much of the physics is real, up to the point where I explain how time travel “happened.” The ways paradoxes could resolve themselves, and the way I posit that they do, are drawn from serious theory and will at least be plausible in that framework.
The challenges you would face while visiting another point in time, physical, societal, and cultural, are quite real. Examining how one would work around them can teach us many things, that only start with the history we’d be witnessing. The thought experiments of time-travel scenarios give us fresh perspectives on a host of topics far beyond physics and even metaphysics. A lot of current-day concerns and assumptions will look different, or at least deeper, when seen from those new angles.
While I’m leaving the net up, I’m not raising it three hundred feet high and topping it with razor wire and guardian pterodactyls. I won’t be a glum hardnose about the physics or a pessimistic pedant regarding getting by in an unfamiliar culture. (I’m sure I’ll be a pedant at some points, but I’ll try to be chipper about it.) My conception of time travel in this book will be “hard but doable,” the way most technologies are when they’re first emerging. It helps along the verisimilitude.
I invite you to join in this adventure. Time travel is a mind-expanding, horizon-broadening, enriching experience, without even needing to be real.
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