📈 Up and to the right

Melissa Pace is the author of The Once and Future Me, out this week from Holt Paperback. Below, she recommends three sci-fi historical fiction books.

My psychological thriller, The Once and Future Me, tells the story of a woman teetering between two realities, two possible selves: one a delusional schizophrenic housewife in 1954 and the other a time-traveling soldier from 2035. Her desperate quest for truth against the backdrop of 1950s America, with its smothering social conformity and constrictive gender roles, lets me explore how memory shapes identity and the consequences of one’s choices when love, history, and destiny collide.

Here are three books that powerfully combine historical fiction and science fiction:

Time and Again by Jack Finney (1970): This cult classic was my first time travel novel and, nearly fifty years later, inspired me to attempt one myself. A blend of sci-fi, historical fiction, romance, and mystery, it tells the story of Simon, sent back to 1882 New York City in a government experiment, who soon falls in love and must make some hard choices. Finney’s book has had a huge influence on other writers like Stephen King, who, in the afterword of his novel, 11/22/63, called Time and Again, “THE great time-travel story.”

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (2014): Harry August relives his life over and over from his birth in 1919, retaining memories from each previous life, but powerless to influence the world, until a message from the future about a coming apocalypse changes everything. The book explores everything from the nature of our existence and free will to the threat of technology, to the power of memory, purpose, and love, as it cycles repeatedly through the twentieth century.

Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979): Dana is a Black woman from 1976 who finds herself being pulled repeatedly back in time to antebellum Maryland to save the life of her abusive white ancestor, Rufus, so she and the rest of his descendants don’t flicker out of existence. Butler “set out to make people feel history,” and she most surely does, using time travel to show us the brutalities of slavery through Dana’s 20th-century eyes and sensibility as she’s forced to make increasingly painful compromises in order to both preserve her bloodline and stay alive.