No-Tech Time Travel Books

No-Tech Time Travel Books

This article relates to The Other Valley

Exploring alternate realities through time travel is a familiar subject across fiction. Traditionally, the mechanism for making such a feat possible is the invention of a new technology: a time machine, a spaceship that can go faster than the speed of light, etc. Yet books built around these high-tech means often come with a mind-bending interpretation of physics that makes your head hurt. While H.G. Wells' The Time Machine is a classic tale, sometimes you're just in the mood for something different.

Luckily, heavy sci-fi works aren't the only stories that deal with the theme of traveling through and potentially changing the course of time. Scott Alexander Howard's The Other Valley brings time travel into the realm of physical boundaries and geopolitics by having its characters walk to different valleys representing different points in time. Plenty of other books offer non-tech-related mechanisms for time travel that play across various fictional genres, including murder mystery, historical fiction, and postmodernism. Here is a list of books that feature time travel and alternate realities without a time machine.

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

Trapped in a closed time loop in a moody 1920s country manor, the protagonist has eight days of reliving the same course of events, as a new person each day, to prevent the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle. No time machines, just some good old-fashioned falling asleep (drunk or otherwise) and waking up as someone else. This book is a play on the Agatha Christie-era dinner party murder mystery.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Like Howard in The Other Valley, Hague uses a physical "portal" to an alternate dimension, but imagines his as a library of books. Nora passes through the Midnight Library, picking up books of alternate realities she might have lived had she chosen a different career, made a different decision, or pursued a different path, all while coming to understand what truly is fulfilling to her.

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

A testament to the power of dreams. New lovers Ben and Kate are happy together, until a recurring dream Kate has threatens what others see as her grip on reality. While asleep, Kate travels back in time to the 1500s, where she is Emilia, a nobleman's mistress. When she awakens, everything seems just a little bit different somehow, as if her dream actions have changed her present.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The classic line "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time" almost needs no introduction. Vonnegut's postmodern, anti-war novel features a young war vet suffering from PTSD after the Dresden firebombing, and his "time travel" is arguably a dissociative response to his condition. Readers travel back and forth with him through flashbacks, nonlinear storytelling, and more-than-likely delusions. Yes, there are aliens involved, but are they real or has Billy suffered a mental breakdown?

Kindred by Octavia Butler

A young woman is abruptly transported from her modern SoCal home to the antebellum South, where she must save a plantation owner's son in order for her present as she knows it to become real. The mechanism for her time travel is not immediately clear, so readers need to suspend disbelief and just accept that she has been abruptly snatched from her present reality, an experience that hauntingly mirrors the lack of choice and control she has as a plantation slave in her new reality.

Filed under Reading Lists

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Other Valley. It originally ran in March 2024 and has been updated for the February 2025 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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