There’s something about time travel stories that grabs me in a way few other genres do. Maybe it’s the wonder of possibility, or maybe it’s the irresistible idea that one small change in the past could ripple forward and completely reshape the present. But for me, my love for time travel all started in a movie theater, with a flux capacitor and a DeLorean.

I still vividly remember watching Back to the Future for the first time. The lights dimmed, the music swelled, and there it was: the idea that you could accidentally zap yourself 30 years into the past and meet your own parents as teenagers. How wild is that? The thrill of watching Marty McFly navigate 1955 while knowing all the “future” secrets of 1985 was just pure magic to me. I walked out of that theater buzzing—not just from the story, but from the whole concept. Time travel! The ultimate “what if?”

It wasn’t just the action or the science fiction elements that hooked me. It was the emotional heart of the story. Meeting your parents when they were young and clueless, before they became the people you knew—what a mind-bending, human idea. It gave me a new kind of empathy. What were my parents like in high school? What were their dreams, their fears? Time travel stories ask us to look at our loved ones, and ourselves, with fresh eyes.

Another story that left a lasting impression on me is Jack Finney’s Time and Again. It’s a slower, more atmospheric journey through time—one that doesn’t rely on machines or wormholes, but instead on the power of the mind. The main character, Si Morley, becomes part of a secret government experiment in time travel, but the method is as unconventional as it is beautiful: he essentially dreams himself into the past. By immersing himself in the details of another era—clothing, language, surroundings—he mentally transports himself to 1880s New York. There’s something so elegant and fragile about the concept, as if time is a place we can still access, if we just know how to believe our way into it.

What I found so intriguing—and oddly romantic—was that Si doesn’t just travel alone. At one point, he manages to bring a love interest along for the ride. The sheer emotional and psychological weight of that decision blew me away. Finney’s take on time travel asks you to consider what we carry between eras—not just knowledge, but longing, memory, even love.

Reading Time and Again sparked a vivid memory from my childhood: watching Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve. That film left a deep mark on me as a kid. Like Finney’s novel, the main character uses self-hypnosis—pure belief—to send himself back in time to meet a woman whose portrait has haunted him. It’s haunting and lyrical, almost dreamlike, and it planted the seed early on that time travel doesn’t always need circuits or sparks. Sometimes, all it takes is obsession, passion, and an open mind.

Both stories, though very different in tone, reminded me that time travel isn’t just about bending physics—it’s about bending perception. It’s about what we feel when we look at the past, and how those feelings can pull us across time just as powerfully as any machine—or extradimensional passageway.

Years later, I found myself deep in that same headspace again—only this time, it was because of Stephen King’s 11/22/63. I was in the middle of drafting my own time travel novel when I picked up King’s book, and I was instantly hooked. I could not put it down. The way he wove history, suspense, and the emotional cost of meddling with time—it was masterful. At the time, I was commuting by ferry every morning across the Bay, from Oakland’s Jack London Square to Oyster Point in South San Francisco. That peaceful slice of time each day—just me, the water, and that book—felt like stepping into a portal of my own. I tore through those chapters on the deck, wrapped in fog and fascinated by a world so vividly stuck in the past.

And that’s part of what I love most about time travel stories: the immersive shift in perspective. Whether it’s a leap to 1960s Dallas or a stroll through a 1950s high school hallway, time travel lets us peer into different worlds—different rules, politics, technologies, even different mindsets. There’s something powerful about observing not just how far we’ve come, but also how familiar the past can feel.

Time travel stories also ask big, lingering questions: What if I could undo something? What if one decision could change everything? Can we ever really outrun the consequences of our actions? These aren’t just sci-fi concepts—they’re deeply human ones. They challenge us to think about time not as a line, but as a web of possibilities. In the end, time travel stories aren’t just about machines or paradoxes or cool futuristic tech. They’re about people. They’re about choices. They’re about perspective. And maybe most of all, they’re about the strange, beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking truth that time moves on—whether we’re ready or not.

So here’s to the time travelers, the historians, the dreamers. And here’s to the stories that let us leap backward (or forward) in time, if only for a little while.