Don’t dwell on the Past, they say. Pshh: Don’t dwell in the Past, that’s my advice.
What’s the Past got? Plague, feudalism, no Netflix. Medicine is bugs eating you and/or “the robed man frowns.” Birth control options that range from “convent” to “death.” Some Johnny Rufflesleeves mansplaining the luminiferous aether. “Less pollution sometimes,” that’s about the best we can say for our friend The Past. (The Past is not your friend.)
Sure, patriarchy thrives in the 21st century and Progress is a dubious construct. My high school world history text made that clear when it argued that women in ancient Rome had more liberties than most (non-slave)women would enjoy “until the 19th century.” Who are you trying to impress, ancient Rome? Some freeborn Victorian broad? I’ll take my chances in this here temporal realm, where I can be president of the Latin club and have hobbies beyond the loom.
My time-travel fantasy is guiding a Ye Olde tourist who arrives in the present. When performing basic tasks — driving, purchasing groceries, gadding about unescorted — I’ll picture how impressed my visitor would be. That’s right, Margwainnea, I bought this bottle of wine myself. It’s called “second wine,” and is customarily drunk “next.” I’d scan my debit card like a pro, and not drop it or do it backwards like sometimes happens. How Margwainnea’s eyes would shimmer…
Anyway. What makes some women cross to the nether-centuries is beyond me. Here is an ordered list, from Horrifying to Most Horrifying, of women who have traveled to the Past.
1. Susan and Lucy Pevensie, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
“Narnia’s not the Past! It’s a parallel wonderscape breathed into being by a holy lion!” TRUE. But the Narn is still a preindustrial society without like, public school or trains or tampons. It’s cool they have enchanted healing cordial instead of leeches, but remember in The Horse and His Boy where Queen Lucy says, “the High King has so strictly charged me not to carry it commonly to the wars”? So we’ve got a) limited supply of useful medicine controlled by the elite b) brotriarchy, c) “the wars,” commonly, d) fancy wars, presumably?
Narnia gets points for magic, and because being queens is a good deal that Susan and Lucy could not have come by in 1940s England. Perhaps the most disturbing “back in time” aspect is the return to their 20th-century childhood bodies. As a YA reader I found no greater horror than the idea of growing up, overcoming puberty, and then winding up a 9-year-old again.
2. Aubrey Plaza’s character in Safety Not Guaranteed
This is that indie rom-com in which time travel is a metaphor for feelings…or more. Debatable whether she “goes back in time.” I sorta liked this movie, which annoys me, and that is how I imagine Aubrey Plaza feels about liking this dweeb who wants to build a time machine to be with Veronica Mars.
3. Reese Witherspoon in Pleasantville
She decides to stay in fake TV alt-’50s cause colleges will accept her, and that is not a bad reason! But what if you took the lessons you learned about literature and character and returned to a post-Civil-Rights era, Reese?
4. Amanda Price, aka the chick from Lost in Austen
In which a Pride and Prejudice fan straight trades lives with Elizabeth Bennett. This yikes of a choice is mitigated by the fact that original Lizzie has the good sense to stay in the 2000s and Amanda marries rich. Remember when I gave up voting for you, babe? This egg cup needs encrusting, rubies should do.
5. Women on Doctor Who, I think
Some time ago, I mentioned to a guy that I did not like Doctor Who, and his friend, a guy to whom we were not talking, turned and rage-bleated: “Yeah well JON SNOW DIES.” I have never and will never get over this, no matter how many times Jon gets Willow’d. I will carry this slight to my grave and bring it back with me every time I myself get Willow’d; I will nurse this grudge like a changeling babe that has tricked me into believing it is flesh of my flesh. Anyway, those Dr. Who companions probably had reasons for going back in time but I don’t have to like ’em.
6. That trashy romance novel my sister and I found at the church garage sale
The moon takes a lady into Olden France and she falls in love with a hot lord, and he mocks women’s rights and is very impressive at feudalism, and that was the beginning of my brief and uncomfortable “reading trashy romances from the church garage sale” period.
7. Hermione Granger, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Bends the fourth dimension to her will so she can do more homework. This could be the saddest thing in Harry Potter, counting all the deaths and Neville’s mom’s candy wrappers. My god, Hogwarts, get an academic adviser on staff.
8. Claire, S1 Episode 11 of Outlander (and the Outlander books, I guess)
Outlander is about a 20th-century Englishwoman who must choose between a sex kilt and a life without witch-burning. Claire is condemned to the flames in what is approximately the 734th attempt on her life in Erst Highlands. Sex Kilt rescues her and she gets the chance to go home — where her burned-at-the-stake risks falls from Imminent to Zero — and she’s all “nah, I’m good.” CLAIRE, THERE ARE HIGHER DEGREES OF GOOD THAN “WASN’T IMMEDIATELY TORCHED TO DEATH, JUST THEN.” That’s the last episode of Outlander I ever watched. Claire, how can I care about you when you care so little for your own self-interest? Don’t give me “love,” you can love wherever, there is only one timeline here in which “witch hunt” is a metaphor.
Related: Has there ever been a story where a woman has a choice between “anything” and “a man” and the man was the better choice?
Related further: Should I watch Outlander again?
9. Victorian Lady, Real Life / Your Weekend Hate-Reading
Thinks a time before Lemonade is a time worth living in.
10. Kate, Kate & Leopold
Remember when you were a kid, and all movies were an inherent pleasure because going out to the movies was a treat? Kate & Leopold is the first time I remember leaving the theater afroth with loathing. This is a “rom-com” about a woman who hurled herself into the East River until feminism froze long enough to let her marry some sentient epaulets.
Kate realizes my fondest wish — a Past Traveler joins her in the future-present to sputter in bafflement at her trousers and career! Except it’s not Margwainnea, it’s some white dude (yo, already have my fill of guys grappling with a lost monopoly on privilege, thanks!) and he has to get back to his stupid time or else elevators will kill everyone. But Kate loves him! Oh no! What’ll she do? Live her life, accepting that sometimes the laws of physics don’t serve as our matchmakers? Oh, no! She jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s either “no human rights or hygiene forever” or death. Margwainnea and I are out.
Special Mention: Dana from Kindred, Who Gets It
Octavia Butler doesn’t care about your corsets and sex kilts and fancy wars. She knows white supremacy and patriarchy are more than ornamental doilies at the antebellum costume ball. Butler’s novel sends Dana, a black woman from Los Angeles c. 1976, back to a Maryland plantation so she can protect her slave-owning ancestor and safeguard her family’s existence.
Let’s go over some ways Dana is BAMF. She: 1) figures out the parameters of the time warp immediately; 2) ties on a survival kit; 3) focuses on integration and alliance-building; 4) is ready to leap into the future by any means necessary. She opens her own veins. She stabs a guy. Her arm gets crushed by the weight of walls and history and she does not look back, because it’s time to get the fuck out of the Past. My hero.
Not willing to leap into the Future either, that’s just reckless. Please send all dissatisfied women-of-Yore to me; I’ll be a gracious host. Thank you for your time.
This is a “rom-com” about a woman who hurled herself into the East River until feminism froze long enough to let her marry some sentient epaulets.
I thought you had me at “the Narn,” but no. This is where you had me. I snortlaughed at work and now everyone knows I’m faffing around on the internet and not doing my work.
Also I think Donna Noble should go way higher on the list of Doctor Who’s companions than all the other companions, because Donna Noble is Catherine Tate, and is thus leagues better than the others, even if she was written by the same dudes that wrote the others, whatever. Donna Noble for life.
There are people who prefer ROSE to Donna Noble, and this baffles me.
But why.
I fully love the Doctor/Rose relationship which is why I love Rose so much but yeah, Donna is by far the better of the two.
How could anybody prefer Rose to literally any of the other companions???
I will never get over what happened to Donna Noble it’s probably the angriest I’ve ever been at television in general.
Same. I haven’t watched anything beyond her last episode AND I NEVER WILL.
You should see what happened with Clara at the end of the most recent season. It was a strong rejection of what the Doctor did to Donna Noble.
I agree; the only problem is that I never particularly cared about Clara, so the fact that she got that ending and Donna fucking Noble got the treatment she got burns me up to no end.
Also, Clara was accepting of death and the Doctor IGNORED HER WISHES just like he did with Donna. Please, Doctor, stop making everything about you.
Rose then Donna, everyone else is irrelevant. (Okay, I harbor a soft spot for Martha, but they didn’t do enough with the character.)
I can’t help but love Rose b/c Eccleston (who is my favorite) and Bad Wolf.
I loved Rose with Nine, but was pretty meh about Rose with Ten.
Brain twin.
This is where I am re: Rose, also.
If only I could fave this a million times. . .
I love Martha and mentally edit out any romantic interest she harbors toward the Doctor, because Martha is way to smart for that.
Martha is amazing and I hate how they paired her up with Mickey at the end just to give her a love interest.
Also, I don’t really like Mickey, but god Rose treated him badly.
I have always respected how Martha walked away from the Doctor on her own terms. Like, no, I’m done here, I want my own life.
And as much as I agree that her being romantical at the Doctor bugged me, I feel like with Young Attractive Doctors, they need to do something with the arc of “I Like Him But He’s Really Old and An Alien Who Doesn’t Like Me That Way” because it’s kinda realistic. This magical person swoops you (of all people they could have chosen!) up from your everyday humdrum life and shows you wonders, and they’re cute too… of course you might carry a torch. I think they could have handled Martha’s Getting Over It better, because she is smarter than that, but at least they actually tackled the issue. Unlike with Amy Pond who was always still ambiguously in love with him. (I am not a big fan of Amy, except the Alternate Universe Amys, who are usually badass.)
So yes, I appreciated Martha’s choosing to leave, and then going on to be kickass without the Doctor’s help, thankyouverymuch.
Yessssss Eccleston is the best Doctor and I do not understand people who advocate skipping directly to 10. Um, skip “The Empty Child”??? Are you mad?!?!
Right?! And The Doctor Dances right after that is so good. How do you not happy cry at “Everybody lives!”?
“Give me a day like this. Give me this one!” SOBBING
Yes, I am here for Eccleston, definitely my favorite of the doctors.
I had way more feelings about his regeneration–by the time they FINALLY got Ten there I was just so whatever. But I might have a bit of a Making a Good Death kink (in writing terms, I mean, not. . .in other ways.)
ECCLESTON.
He’s the best. And in every interview, he’s the best.
Now I’m wondering what a Donna/Eccleston pairing would have been like. He was definitely my favourite doctor. Rose was less soppy with him too. And I loved the chemistry when they added Captain Jack.
I saw her at a coffee shop last week, and thought very hard about going up and talking to her. But celebrities hate it when you bother them, and vastly prefer it when you just stare at them for the 8 minutes you are breathing the same air like you are pod-person and they are a Skeski who is going to drink your essence.
I know I’m late to this party, but no love for Amy? Angry redheaded Scot who is the boss of everybody! I hate all the romance subtext in Doctor Who, because he is 900 years old and should be mature enough to be *way* over 20-somethings who don’t know what they’re doing with their life. Amy gets to turn that on its head — they’re close because they’re family! And not even that father-daughter dynamic they make you think it’s gonna be at the start: she’s his MOTHER IN LAW!
Amy Pond: the boss lady.
(Also: Rory Pond.)
(Also I agree about Donna being great.)
I REALLY hate Rory. I am not here for his weird jealousy and did not find the Roman soldier thing even a little endearing.
Amy is okay. She’s fun and bubbly. One of my favorite episodes is the one with Van Gogh, and I think she works better in that story than any of the other companions. I think my feelings about her are largely affected by how much I hate a lot of the storylines during Matt Smith’s time as the Doctor.
Oh, least favorite companion: CLARA. NO.
I stopped watching Outlander after eight episodes, in which they averaged one rape attempt on Claire every two episodes. Four attempts in eight episodes. I noped right the hell out of there.
Quite, but pls be advised that in the eight-book saga this percentage only grows, and Jamie is equally at risk, so much sop that I figured he and Claire needed to hook up since they were both the objet petit a to every 18th century rapist within galloping distance.
Ugh. Apparently in old-timey Scotland you couldn’t nip down to the corner store for some milk without an attempted rape. At least that was my take-away from the show. That none of it stops happening makes the the show and books sound extremely unappealing.
I just watched the last episode of Outlander S1 last night, and I am SO DONE with all the rape. The final episode is basically one long gratuitous torture-porn rape scene. I don’t think I’ll be watching S2.
And Claire is an idiot. Yes, why go back home to the 20th century where you have the vote and antibiotics and dentistry, when you can stay in the 18th century and probably die of a treatable illness or in childbirth. Despite her idiocy, Claire has somehow memorised everything about the Highland Uprisings and 18th century Scottish customs, which is pretty handy for her. The only thing I like about her is that she’s drunk most of the time, which is pretty much how I’d handle accidentally travelling back in time.
Love Sex Kilt, though. It was almost worth watching 15 hours of rape attempts for that.
This. I started reading the books, but am calling it quits after the second one. Pretty much every plot advance is driven by rape or threat of rape. And the rape storylines only continue and become more convoluted as it goes on.
**SPOILERS SPOILERS HERE BE SPOILERS**
Greatest hits include “Claire drugs and rapes Jamie to cure him of his rape-induced PTSD,” “Claire and Jamie keep a drugged rape victim concealed in their house while hosting several friends, enemies, and the victim’s father at a dinner party,” “Claire has a miscarriage because she went off of bed rest to stop Jamie from duelling his rapist over a whole different rape,” and “Jamie pretend-threatens to rape Claire while actually raping her by exposing her boobs to his regiment without consent as a means of torturing a third party for military intelligence.”
SAAAAME.
The Victorian Chaise lounge by Marghanita Laski pretty well nails the “time travel would actually be horrible” aspect. The heroine does what most of us would do: acts extremely confused.
omg that book! love Marghanita Laski.
“6. That trashy romance novel my sister and I found at the church garage sale”
I like that we don’t need to know which this is, because it is all of them.
I find it weird that Hermione would even have to use a time turner, considering that there are only like, a dozen teachers on staff, there really can’t be that much overlap on the classes, can there? Unless there are some Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead-style teachers lurking just outside the pages of the books.
It would also help Hermione to learn to stay within the limits prescribed to her re: length of homework. More than once she’s described as having written way more inches of parchment than the assignment required.
Related: She essentially has unlimited time to complete assignments, right? Seems like that would majorly fuck up the grading curve.
I don’t think we have “grading on a curve” in the UK, particularly – Hermione doing well shouldn’t make everyone else do worse.
Right? Teachers DON’T actually like that, Hermione. You are making them spend more time on grading. They would like to watch Oil Painting Netflix in their eventides.
I’m picturing Snape chilling out to Bob Ross and it is delightful.
brb writin dat fic
I take points off for going over length as much as for going under. When I give a word range, I mean it. Respect the parameters, students.
Yeah. If there’s a max it’s because you should be able to make all the arguments you need to make within it. Learning to be succinct is important!
In my country writing longer assignments, and even going beyond assigned length, often netted you praise from the teacher and higher grades. This carried over to university even (I’ve heard thesis defenses where professors commented delightedly on the length of the candidate’s work). So there may be some cultural differences at play here. (Unless you’re from the UK, then of course I defer to your superior knowledge of your own school system!)
I studied and taught in the UK. We definitely penalise students for going over the word limit. It’s easier to express yourself if you have unlimited words and a challenge to make your arguments succinct.
The Hogwarts teaching schedule makes NO SENSE and of all the things in the Harry Potter books that are sort of handwaved and inconsistent, THAT is the one that drives me craziest. No wonder Snape is crabby, he has to teach every student in 5 grade levels, plus smaller elective classes for 2 more grade levels, and grade a million handwritten essays every night. (I guess the saving grace is the fact that the number of students at Hogwarts is also handwaved and inconsistent, so “every student in 5 grade levels” might only be like 100 kids.)
Yes I would’ve thought he was less keen to hand out so many punishments as they only seem to add to his workload.
THANK YOU! For all he is shitty to Harry, Snape is clearly a very talented potions master- so why is he teaching Intro To Caldrons? IRL he would be teaching the highly specialized Potions electives. And you are telling me all of History of Magic is one class? There is no in-depth Troll Wars and Wizarding Policy class? Heck, there are no literature classes of any kind? What kind of a school is this?!
It bothers me as much as all the Sytherins being evil. (Also: the Sytherin Quiddich team has no girls on it, really? In a house that people are sorted into because of their AMBITION not one girl made the team?)
That is actually an English thing rather than a Hogwarts thing – we don’t have in-depth modules, everything is all under one big heading that you either take or don’t, that then takes everyone through all the individual topics.
Yes – it is a bit odd that the school is small enough that there is apparently never more than one class of any given subject going on at one time, meaning there is just one person to teach Potions, one person to teach Charms, etc. (although my boyfriend has just joined Pottermore and pointed out to me that its entry on McGonagall says she joined as a professor in the Transfiguration department, under its head Albus Dumbledore. So it hasn’t always been the case).
(National/regional differences in education systems make this sort of discussion so infuriating and confusing because stuff that seems perfectly reasonable to readers in one country seems bizarre to readers in others. No, really, American readers, we do not have “highly specialized electives”! They are not a thing!)
My school actually was that small, so it is literally only on reading this right now that that point has occurred to me. But yes! Hogwarts is maybe just tiny? There’s a whole Internet theory about how the Wizarding World is kind of declining and disappearing, which would make going from a department to a single teacher make sense I guess.
I think I just assumed there were other teachers, but we only heard about the ones that Harry &Co had. And I found it nice that the High Up Important Teachers had to slum it and teach first-years.
(Really, I think JKR just didn’t think that much about it and only introduced a new teacher when she needed to. Because Story over Extensive Worldbuilding.)
JKR just didn’t think that much about it
True enough. It’s just not every day you find a story that focuses so excessively on trivia and background details that seems to have so little consistency or thought put into how it fits together.
on Slytherins being evil: YES. pet incandescent rage. fortunately for our collective fandom sanity, there are many excellent fanfics that address this and run counter to it, or even just subtly ignore that Slytherin = evil distinction.
like this what-if-Harry-was-sorted-Slytherin? exploration: http://archiveofourown.org/works/4330836
or, for a random example, this excellent fic on post-Hogwarts interhouse bonding: http://archiveofourown.org/works/392764/chapters/…
or this Gryffindor Draco: http://archiveofourown.org/works/78824/chapters/1…
Houseswap fics are My Jam so thank you for these recs!
I’ve always had the headcanon that it’s only 40 kids per grade, because there’s only five boys in Harry’s first-year bedroom–so 5 of each gender in each house. (I’m realizing now that would be weirdly exact.) But even 40*7=280, which is pretty tiny. It was always far larger in my head.
Rowling has said she imagined Hogwarts having 1000 pupils, I think, although she has said that the maths does not really work out with the details she has provided in the books.
There may even be fewer — there are only 3 girls in Harry’s year in Gryffindor. And, presumably, there were only 4 boys in his father’s year or else there was one really disgruntled and left out housemate in the group*. (And, really, doesn’t Peter make more sense when you think “There were four of them in the room, how could they possibly have left someone out.” )
* I’ll admit this didn’t occur to me until I read a fic where they had a fifth roommate who just seethed all the time.
This has been bothering me since I saw your comment earlier this afternoon, but weren’t there 4 girls in Hermione’s dorm at one point??? and the 4th girl disappeared somewhere in the middle of the first book or something????
yeah but it’s still 5 different preps x 2 sections of each + 2 more advanced classes. He [all the teachers, I guess, who teach main subjects] How often does each class meet? I think there are some books where Harry has “double-potions” (= two hour block instead of one hour block) more than once a week? But let’s be conservative. If, say, he teaches each less advanced class for 3 hours each week and each advanced class for two hours each week? That’s 34 hours of teaching a week. With 7 different preps and grading for 12 classes (and if there are ~40 kids per year, 10 of his classes have ~20 kids each, with, maybe half that (or less) in the advanced classes). Still, it’s a pretty raw deal; one hopes that the salary and benefits are REALLLLLY good.
I guess when your options are “Hogwarts teacher” or “lose Dumbledore’s protection from both the government and vengeful Death Eaters” the class schedule doesn’t seem so bad.
True, but couldn’t McGonagall negotiate a better contract?
Dumbledore granted her better benefits, knaw mean?
(Ew.)
The books do mention worksaving spells and appliances quite a lot (the Quick-Quotes Quill, the spelling correction charms, self-spelling quills, things like that) so it makes sense to me that those could be used by teachers for grading? Kind of like using Scantron sheets, just, better probably.
But it seems like nearly all their assignments are essays, right? I’d assume the teachers would actually have to read them, not just check for spelling errors and things.
I’m envisioning some kind of speed-grading spell. I mean, if there are suitcase-packing spells, Molly Weasley can tap a pot and produce onion soup on-call, and the Quick-Quotes Quill literally writes things based on what’s being said around it, there has to be something that can efficiently grade essays.
Just thinking about how many things I had to repeat on multiple papers (“This is not a thesis statement,” specific comprehension errors), I could see a spell worked out to hunt for those errors and mark them with a rubber-stamped phrase.
Then you could glance at the paper and decide how much personal attention it warrants. Paper already full of marks? That’s enough; it’s not worth your time to pile on. Paper bearing only a few marks? Go ahead and read it, since the student understood the assignment well enough to use your feedback. No marks? Probably Hermione. Save it for last, or when you’ve given up hope.
I’ve just finished a load of undergrad marking, and this? This is the dream.
I wonder if “Save the good students for last to restore your hope in humanity” is a real practice.
You betcha.
Or put one in every 5 papers or so to keep from burning out.
I’m imagining [Hogwarts professor] seeing a paper with no pre-corrections, groaning “Merlin’s nuts, not Granger again,” and reaching for the Butterbeer.
NB: I definitely read your comment as “Hermione’s papers are all too long, so grading her writing is tedious,” but the other way works better.
Plus, it’s pretty clear that a lot of those kids are entitled little pricks, making them not exactly a joy to teach even under the best of circumstances.
Honestly it’s rather surprising they weren’t constantly off to a late start due to teacher strikes.
And one of the teachers dies/is hospitalized for magical maladies/is actual evil every year, so you’d think staff morale would be outrageously low.
Yeah that’s the main thing, is that he has like 7 preps and it doesn’t seem like he can possibly have any free periods during the day, plus as Head of House for Slytherin a lot of his non-teaching hours are presumably dedicated to supervising/chaperoning student activities and (in theory; I’m gonna guess Snape specifically does not put much time into this, so for this bit pretend I said McGonagall instead) advising his house’s students. I mean, I understand the “that’s just how it works at small schools” comments, but… Hogwarts is not really presented as small enough for that to work, even though the number of known, named students potentially would be (there are, I think, a total of 27 named students in Harry’s year, which would be a reasonable class size, so if you taught 1 section per year the numbers could work — but we know that they’re almost always split up into two sections, which brings us back up to an unreasonable number of teaching hours).
This is actually alarmingly common in British schools. The (admittedly tiny) school I went to had exactly one teacher for everything optional at GCSE/OWLS, and maaaaaaybe three at most for the English/Maths/Sciences stuff. Hogwarts always struck me as being tiny – I mean, can you name any Harry’s-year Gryffindor boy who doesn’t sleep in his room? That puts the whole intake per year at like 40 students, which was a few more than my actual real-life school but not so much that the crazypants teaching style is unrealisitic.
My school had quite a few teachers for each subject, but we were a lot larger (my year group had about 250 pupils). I feel like maybe Hogwarts should have more, but I haven’t done the maths (nor has Rowling, to be fair). But teachers having to teach students from first year right up to seventh year isn’t that strange – there were definitely teachers at my school who taught across all year groups.
I think it just seems like Hogwarts should have more people because it’s a huge castle with improbably interior geometry.
haha so much this–the combination of logistics and the (unacknowledged) horrible things about Hogwarts (as opposed to the somewhat acknowledged ones) get under my skin.
Also, why no Maths or English or any other Muggle classes? I get that magic is why the kids are there and would push out other stuff, (.History of Magic instead of History, Potions instead of Science) but they still need basic skills to write their essays and work out how much eye of newt/do basic budgeting (although that might explain the Weasleys…). God knows how any of the students from the overseas schools learned English, unless their schools were better at Hogwarts in fitting Modern Foreign Languages into the curriculum.
And the rules of Quidditch are ridiculous. One team is winning 14-0, and the other catches the snitch and wins the game? That. Is. Not. A. Sport. That is like playing 90 minutes of football, then deciding who wins based on a coin toss.
Come at me, bro.
when I thought about writing fic (which I never got organized enough to do) this was something I kind of obsessed over–in part because to me it felt like it made it so that it would be really, really hard to try to leave the Wizarding World if you wanted to, with the non-magic skillset of a middle schooler. Also, I feel like there was this subtext that the WW didn’t HAVE to know anything like that because Magic! (which is why Mr. Weasley can’t go to the damn library and learn how airplanes stay up.)
I think I want to write that story someday–someone who leaves a magic culture and discovers that they’re utterly unprepared for mundane culture.
The Billfold’s How Wizards Do Money series touches on that: https://thebillfold.com/how-wizards-do-money-cho-… https://thebillfold.com/how-wizards-do-money-ron-…
There’s a great slash fanfic of that where Snape decided to leave the magical world and Lupin (who left it a few years back) helps him adjust to Muggle life.
LINK PLEASE. (please.)
The Way of the World by McKay
http://remembrall.slashcity.net/viewstory.php?sid…
Enjoy!
And there are Muggle-born witches and wizards! Do none of them ever want to do anything non-wizarding as a career? Do none of the kids want to be doctors or lawyers or football players or hairdressers or publishers or journalists (there’s only one wizard paper, after all)? Apparently joining the wizarding world is a one-way ticket – no one ever seems to go back, and they wouldn’t have the skills if they wanted to.
Yes I feel like there’s a creepy cult-like assimilation to the Wizarding World–you get cut off pretty completely from your family (is there a way to get owl post into Muggle mail?), I don’t know if you can even keep in touch at all with your friends even during the summers, since you can’t discuss what you do 75% of the year, and you’re pretty much locked into the claustrophobic everyone-marries-who-they-liked-in-sixth-year WW. And it’s normal/encouraged not to tell your Muggle parents about the high level of danger you run into at school. And you’re surrounded by a lot of people who basically laugh at your non-magic football posters and haven’t paid enough attention to years of Muggles to know basic words or fashions.
(I also think the WW seems really low on arts, although it’s possibly we’ve only been hanging around philistines, lol. But as an eleven-year-old, I’d have gone nuts if I had no new fiction to read for nine months.)
I mean, I do think the authorial assumption IS that no one would ever want to leave, but I think there are so many underlying assumptions that are pretty dark.
I find the way Muggle-borns are forced to assimilate into the wizarding world really creepy. There is such a huge separation between the two cultures, and the wizarding world seems to do its best to encourage it.
Which explains Hermione a little bit – it’s the “new convert” thing, like joining a new religion. You want to do everything right.
Ohhh man, that makes a lot of sense.
I think there’s also a bit of “oh, you think being a witch/wizard is the best thing ever? Ok, we’re all following all of the Wizard Rules now, since we’ve all decided that Wizard Rules are the best, yup, definitely the best, I see you breaking Wizard Rules, Pureblood Racist Shut-ins, I call foul.”
…man, this is really a whole side of Hermione’s character that I hadn’t thought of before.
and this is why I love fanfiction- it makes up for the deficits and the blank spaces around Rowling’s worldbuilding. there’s a few that explore the muggle occupations track, actually. try this one- this writer’s excellent.
http://archiveofourown.org/works/712656
(I haaaaate Quidditch.)
How do we even know they’d have middle school level? I may be wrong but there’s no mention of how they’re schooled before Hogwarts. Are we to assume every magical parent is prepared to homeschool until the age of 11?
Maybe that’s why Harry and Hermione are the heroes — they’re the only ones at the school who’ve had the benefit of an elementary school education.
Defeating evil with the power of long division.
I kid you not, there’s a fic for that too.
in this (incredibly intense but fascinating) parallel universe one, “Petunia married a biochemist, and Harry grew up reading science and science fiction”, and it’s all about science and logic and how that interacts with magic. I’m not joking on it being intense, though- it can get quite theoretical.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry-Pott…
I read this thread yesterday and had to come back to join in! I don’t care if Rowling says there were 1,000 students at Hogwarts, the commentator that said there’s approximately 280 students must be right. It’s not just a question of the dormitories; there’s also the common rooms. From what I remember the house common areas were small and homely – fine for 70 kids but not 250. There’s only one shopping street for them to do their shopping, they all have to arrive inconspicuously at King’s Cross, and characters like Hermione seem to know who everyone is.
I also always assumed that there were other teachers who were just not named, like how in Downton Abbey there’s heaps of other servants who don’t feature in the show.
In terms of the teaching load, I used to work in a school with 250 pupils in the secondary department (and 150 in the primary school). Each of the following subjects only had one teacher: geography, history, Latin, religious studies and philosophy, modern thought, art, and IT. The teachers would teach all of the first and second years for two 45 minute lessons a week, and then would teach those pupils who chose to take their subjects from third year on. We had one Home Economics teacher who worked part-time and who taught first and second years, and final year students, but no exam classes. We had two music teachers and four PE teachers (who all taught nursery and primary too), four maths teachers, six science teachers (who all went on maternity leave at the same time – oops), three English teachers, and four language teachers who covered French, German, Spanish and Italian between them. If we assume there are fewer compulsory subjects and more electives in Hogwarts, I think having one teacher for one subject for 280 students would work, but there would have to be more subjects than the ones named in the books.
I hope somebody finds this interesting! It seemed more interesting in my head.
I was very late to the party this time, but I wanted to say that I found this interesting!
Everyone wants to guide the time traveller from the past around the present, also known among my friends as ‘The Victorian Boy Hypothesis’ birthed from a conversation about showing a Victorian boy an iPod.
I watched like, one episode of Lost in Austen, and it was fairly amusing but really wore its research on its sleeve. The only bit I remember was an extended scene about tooth-brushing where one of the Austenites casually chatted about what they used to brush their teeth to modern lady as if that’s a totally normal discussion to have with someone you don’t think/know is a time traveller.
As You Know, the way we behave is different then how people in other times and places might behave! Let’s discuss those differences, you know, just so we’re all on the same page.
I love conversations like this, which is why I have a soft spot for LJ communities where US and UK people ask for information on each other’s cultures (sometimes for immigration, mostly for fanfic).
I totally thought I was the only one with a fake temporally displaced boyfriend. This is why the Toast can’t die. How else am I supposed to find out I’m not alone?
Ooo, offer him a chai spice latte. Temporally displaced significant others are a big fan of all the spices wars were fought over in a syllabub.
If he’s a Hamilton era fake boyfriend, go with pumpkin spice because they have this weird nostalgia for when they could only afford pumpkin.
I believe a temporally displaced significant others thread is in order so we can all compare notes.
Does yours talk a lot of smack about contemporary textiles?
But the colours, Bittern, the COLOURS!
So here for fake temporally displaced boyfriend!
As a classical musician who specialized in the History of Music I imagine explaining popular contemporary music to Mozart and Bach and Schumann, like, waaaaaay too often.
I imagine Mozart and Brahms would totally adapt quickly and start churning out Bieber-ish top 40 hits immediately but most of the others would be too overwhelmed and snobbish.
I think Liszt could become an EDM DJ
My fake temporally displaced (very not-)boyfriend was, for about a year or so, Sir Thomas More. For the record, I am not Catholic (I’m a Jewish-raised atheist), and I disagree with More’s views on nearly everything, so I’m not entirely sure why I picked him. Either I thought he’d be intelligent enough to get the hang of things pretty quickly, or I was really amused by just how much of today’s world would confuse the hell out of him.
Whenever someone asks me “What time would you have liked to live in” my response is always “Umm, now?”
Sorry, but being a woman was not a great gig for the vast majority of history. If I absolutely had to choose, I would go chill with my ancestors in Viking Scandinavia. At least they took baths, had some semblance of female empowerment, and drank heavily.
I like antibiotics and indoor plumbing. Also I enjoyed not dying in childbirth.
And reading for pleasure.
Me too, I am just trying to hedge my bets with Ye Olde Sweden. My mom gave birth to six kids with no issues, and her mom had 2 with no drugs, so I feel like I could take a gamble on the childbirth thing. And people who lived that far north got sick less because a lot of germs couldn’t live in the cold, so I’ve done all I can to mitigate my (hypothetical) health. As long as people wash on the regular I can live without the indoor plumbing, I guess.
Time travel is hard.
Ditto, ditto, and ditto. Also, in any other era I’d be dead from my genetic heart condition, so a huge HOORAY for right now and its life-saving medical devices.
I’m 70, and i sometimes try to work out how long I would have lived in my Great-Grandmothers’ time. (Both born around 1840).
Probably around 30, when I miscarried in my fifth month, if not the ovarian cysts before that. And no teeth by 20. And crippled by rheumatism.
But then I think, oh yeah, polio vaccine invented when I was eight! Hardly worth teaching me to read, actually.
CORRECT
Whenever this comes up, I preface my answer with ‘If I could be a rich white man…’ – even then, I’m not staying anywhere in the past for long if I can possibly help it. I’ll visit the 1920s for a bit maybe.
Exactly. I’ll pop back to certain periods just long enough to grab some clothes or something, but I am way too attached to the internet (never mind all the other excellent things like indoor plumbing) to go live in the past. Nope, I’m good.
I remember reading a story in elemetary? or middle school? where to study history you had to go back in time and survive for a given amount of time. They gave you plenty of info about the era and set you up with the right money and clothes and things. I would do it that way. Where I know I get to come back and I had all the right things to not be immediately identified as a witch and burnt to death.
Still … some of them didn’t come back. I wish I could remember more about that story …
Ooh, yes! that sounds like Connie Willis’ Oxford time travel books.
I am surprised no one has mentioned “glasses” yet. I mean they were supposedly invented in 1200 or so but I doubt they had anything that could handle my combination of astigmatism and nearsightedness until 1900 at least.
I also think about this a lot, my shitty eyesight in this time period just means I have to wear glasses, but in any time period without readily available glasses it would be a disability. Which generally makes me think about how we define disability/”reasonable adjustments” etc.
I never thought about that. I have decent eyes and am fairly healthy overall, so my largest concern would be 1. my total lack of civil rights 2. the lack of modern hygiene and 3. my inability to sit in Church. It would certainly be a whole different set of challenges for someone with a disability/ disabilities.
Oh absolutely. I am pretty sure that I would be the comic relief mess of a friend in any historical fiction due to my terrible eyesight, overbite, and allergies – all of which modern medicine has fixed for me. (Seriously, I am not going back to a time before non-drowsy antihistamines – my childhood was spent half asleep due to Benadryl.)
Glasses and dental care are pretty important to me. If I had been born in olden times, I would be effectively blind and probably toothless. I have no idea how my ancestors, some of whom presumably also had these traits, survived.
*inserts image of Leslie Knope holding up a copy of The Time-Traveler’s Optometrist, or would if she could ever get that to work*
I wouldn’t pick the future, either–I’m very pessimistic about our ability to deal with global warming.
Also I have heterochromia iridum, so I also have to worry about either being burnt as a witch or having some dude get way too fixated on my unusual eyes .______.
Me too! But mine isn’t terribly obvious.
I got so much push back from a boss who was playing this game once, among grad students in Geography, so these were people who know some history and things. The boys were all “Rome” “Greece” “England” “Medieval France” and I said “the future” and broke the game.
Then they kept ARGUING with me, while I was pointing out that women were objects only slightly more prized than cattle and that only if they produced sons, that were I to travel to any of these times I would be unable to travel freely, imprisoned or killed for being able to read, raped more or less instantly and pregnant the instant my birth control quit, and quite probably dead from childbirth if they hadn’t done me in for witchcraft before then. No. Just, NO.
It took serious effort to change the subject and even then (apparently I am STILL pissed off about this dinner) it was what song would you Karaoke and no one had heard of Patsy Cline and really boys? I am so done with all of you, including my boss. I quit about six months later, and that was one solid reason.
Men can be so totally clueless sometimes. Like, “Congratulations, you are a white dude, pretty much any time in history would have been cherry for you. I, on the other hand, don’t want to die in childbirth, be burned as a witch, or have no rights. Thank you for playing.”
How does anyone not know who Patsy Cline is?!?! That’s like not knowing who Janis Joplin or Dolly Parton is.
how could they keep arguing, WHAT WAS THEIR ARGUMENT? “Don’t you want to wear a fancy dress???”
It’s usually something along the lines of “but there were so many things being invented all the time! Like, you might have been one of the women who didn’t have that happen to them, you don’t know, stop pretending feminism has legitimate points, you’re ruining all the fun.”
Even aside from the oppression of women (and, like, that is an ENORMOUS aside), duh I would rather travel to the future. I know what happened in the past! Learning new details could be cool, obviously, but I’ve got the gist. I wanna know what’s coming next.
Seriously, I’m a Jewish woman who really likes showers and is prone to sinus infections. Now is fine, thanks.
EXACTLY. My go to response to this query is “I’m an italian jew who is constantly mistaken for being hispanic due to my skin color. NOW IS GREAT FOR ME THANKS”
I believe my response to the question of what I’d do if I went back in time to the middle ages is, “Run like hell south to Islam-controlled Spain (or points further south, depending on the year), where I might not have the best life but at least I wouldn’t get burned at the stake for being Jewish and being able to read.”
Right? I mean, I could see a short vacation, but living there? Noooo.
Although my if-I-totally-had-to-choose would be “a P.G. Wodehouse novel”, which totally counts as its own time period and I will fight anyone who says differently. Far enough back to get cool clothing and cocktails, but also they had indoor plumbing and people bathed and at least I could vote. The abject lack of birth control would be somewhat less of a problem for me than most, these days, thanks to permanent-style surgery. So if I could be a Wealthy Trollop of the Vaguely Before Or After WWII Days, I would take that.
I would much rather live in the age of Internet and dental anesthetic, though.
It reminds me of this one black woman on Twitter who had a time travel poll for her followers that went, “Would you rather go to: (first) the 1920s, (second) the 1940s, (third) the 1960s, (fourth), I Am Not White,” and 94% of voters went with I Am Not White. As a queer with a uterus, I’m not going any further back than 2014.
the “I Am Not White” response is perfect.
Chinese, female, peasant ancestry. Within the last hundred years, the likelihood of me dying in childbirth as a teenager somewhere in rural China is Relatively Probable (although hey, my grandmothers survived). Prior to that, however, age goes down and probability shoots up to Extremely Likely.
It’s like when people enthuse non-critically about steampunk and its costumes (which I do love, but). Oh yes, Victorian-era corsets! Airships! Steam-powered goggles! Constant and excruciating pain from foot binding! Little bottles of opium tincture for my British trade-mandated addiction! Being treated as simultaneously exotic and subservient by imperialistic white men who think my entire culture is irrational, weak and heathen! Colonialism! Colonialism! Did I mention colonialism?
Mixed-race pansexual, polyamorous agender (afab) person with mental illnesses chiming in here! I would be able to pass for white if nobody knew me, but I would invariably be burned/lynched as either a witch or as someone possessed by the Devil. Or like, I would be stuck in a time/place where I would be allowed no profession. Also, I’d be considered way fucking too old and too educated to be marriageable. Or be a servant to, at best, a rich merchant’s wife, but then I’d probably be constantly raped. I wouldn’t be able to strike out on my own and live off the land, cuz A ) mostly nobles owned the land, and they tended to take a dim view of poaching (if we’re talking fuedal Europe*) and B ) I don’t actually know how to do that, or even what farming implements and other tools would look like, much less how to use them. Let’s be real. We’d all die early and gruesome deaths in any given past.
*I actually live on the west coast of the USA, so if I only time traveled, not also traveled geographically, I’d be in the middle of a region of 48 distinct native tribes, none of whom were nomadic in any way, and had lots and lots to eat and not much to want for, but also I would be a mysterious white skinned, red haired, green eyed person coming out of nowhere, and I would absolutely be sold as a wife-slave to somebody, so there’s still rape in that past for me, too. Also, still no plumbing. Also also, no writing of any kind, at all. Rich oral legends though! But always the same ones. From what I, an outsider, gather, they literally bought/won these stories from each other, sometimes through battle, sometimes through marriage, and sometimes, of course, via huge ass trades (or just, I’ll give you my tribe’s story if you give us your’s). You had to have a *right* to tell each specific story, and even to use the animals/characters from it in designs on clothing, architecture, art, etc. Fascinating copy-write law and all that, but not like, a whole lotta new material per year, then. Boredom, at best, is the sich around here for hundreds of years
Where can I learn more about copyright law in pre-colonization West Coast North America? That sounds fascinating!
Shelley Winters, from John Allison’s webcomic, travels back in time twice. In one adventure she’s eager to get back home to showers etc iirc & in the second she goes back on a mission that includes Hedy Lamar. Not horrible at all. No rape attempts.
Shelley Winters might just be the best character in all his comics. Her sister was also the queen of Hell!
I’m delighted to find other Scary Go Round readers here! But, as much as I like Shelley, Charlotte Grote is clearly John Allison’s best character. And she time-travelled with Shauna and Mildred to fix the train accident story line.
Lottie is the one I miss most when we get side stories that don’t involve the Bad Machinery crew. She’s like a noisy Miss Marple.
yes. yes, yes, BAD MACHINERY YES YES YES
ahem. I love them all. I love that they are getting to grow up. I love the boys. I love that the comic is girl centered without being too self congratulatory about it. I think john Allison is in truth Allison John but rearranged so as to avoid trolls.
Did you know he’s nominated for two Eisner awards this year? Yes, Charlotte is best, hands down. Not sure if I would put Shelly or Esther second though.
Fact: Year before last, I bought my boyfriend a hard copy of “Expecting to Fly” and got John Allison to sign and draw a picture of Shelley in the front because, as I said in the request when I bought it, my boyfriend might love Shelley Winters more than he loves me. Charlotte is, obviously, his other favorite.
Also I totally forgot about the train accident story and now I want to reread it instead of doing any work.
SISTERS BEFORE MISTERS 4EVA
Shelly was the best in scarygoround but Charlotte is totally Queen of Bad Machinery.
I just want to know what happens to Kate’s choppy ass hairdo once she goes back in time.
Ugh her hair was so horrible I couldn’t even talk about it
Poor dear obviously got lice. So common.
Or a fever.
THANK YOU.
I imagine that in the Outlander TV show they probably skip the part where Sex Kilt actually beats her for disobeying him (because this is the past and otherwise none of the other men will respect him or her ever again and he feels really badly about it so it’s ok???) and she still chooses to stay there? I doubt that would play well on screen (OR EVER)
And the part where I really enjoyed that book anyways? ehhhh so uncomfortable with myself
oh nope that’s for sure in there
oh. man. I just can’t imagine *watching* it and feeling ok about it after…it was horrible enough to read
It was that ep that made Mr Daki nope out of watching the show with me. And I guess I have to love him for it, but I am so easily beguiled by Sex Kilt and costumes and vistas.
They don’t skip it. It’s in an episode that’s told from Jamie’s POV and there’s really weird musical choices and yeah. It was Not Great.
Yeah, the musical choices make it seem like they were playing it as a comedic scene? Like ‘lol lol look at this hilarious culture clash lol’.
I’m really annoyed that I’m still attracted to Sex Kilt.
One of my FB friends posted a pic of her with Sex Kilt wrapping her up in a huge hug (from some conference she just returned from) and her smile has the light of a million witchfires, and I have fallen again under his sway.
OH NO THAT WAS DEFINITELY IN THERE. Preeeeeeeeeeeeetty horrifying
Ugh, I didn’t even make it that far before deciding that that book was stupid. Like, SHE IS A NURSE and is like “antibiotics? Who needs ’em? Not me, not as much as JAMIE NEEDS ME”.
Also, it was supposed to be this great love story and she has to choose between two mans and BOTH ARE AWFUL. She should better have fallen in love with her witchy friend.
I didn’t even get that far. I pretty much checked out when our heroine, a nurse, is unable to identify blood without the aid of her husband, a history professor.
Bwahahahahahahahaha, I missed that part, thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Witchy friend turns out to be LITERALLY WORSE THAN ANYONE a few books later though, so ¯\_(:/)_/¯
And the comments everywhere I read were full of people defending it because *history* and because what she did was really bad, and history!
Yeah, this was me too. I think it was enough of a disaster I kept reading just to see what other hijinks would come up, and then kind of ended up hooked after book 2.
one of the things i really appreciate about Once Was A Time by Leila Sales is that a) the time traveling character is 10 years old but has definitely thought about some of these things (on a 10-year-old level) and decided NOPE she is not going to have any of it, and b) she travels to the future and not to the past, and it’s really lucky that she can blame a lot of her ignorance on being from Bristol and this is Wisconsin.
the other time travel book I really like that seems to have thought about this kind of thing is To Say Nothing of the Dog which is also one of my favorites. And then there’s the trashy middle school fave that I just can’t quit, Christopher Pike’s Starlight Crystal which probably deserves a presence on this list.
(I guess Summer of Yesterday also tries to be smart about time travel, but the travel device is the MC’s epilepsy which is a bit ehhhhhhhhhhhh and it’s a 30 year jump to the 1980s so kind of low stakes and it’s real selling point is that it takes place at Disney World’s campground, except it gets a lot of things just a little bit off, which is annoying)
Love love love To Say Nothing of the Dog (and also Doomsday Book, although not cheery and fun, but still so so wonderful).
Yes, love To Say Nothing of the Dog. And it’s worth pointing out that they return to their proper time.
Exactly! They had clearly thought about it and realized that Victorian England just wasn’t going to work out (even if the river was charming and doilies were like spiderwebs, or whatever). It reminds me that I need to get around to reading the Doomsday Book, actually.
As someone else who considers To Say Nothing of the Dog a favorite, and who just got around to Doomsday Book: yes, read it, highly recommended, but also one of the most stressful things I have put before my eyes in recent memory.
OH. That must be why my friends steered me towards To Say Nothing of the Dog and gently discouraged me from picking up Doomsday Book. My friends are so good to me and protect me so well from stressful books that will make me cry.
(Well, my bookstore friend especially. I need her to come home from China so she can have regular internet access again and be my personal reader’s advisory. I’m so spoilt.)
Oooh. Would you mind sharing some of your reading list? I also have the Please Help Me Avoid Stressful Books syndrome, and would love recommendations!
(it will make you cry. really seriously ugly cry)
Oh dear. I might have to delay it a little bit longer, then. I mean, not that my miles long TBR had much room to bump it up already. 😉
Another cheer for To Say Nothing Of The Dog! It’s my favorite time-travel book, followed closely by the aforementioned Kindred. I like that both those books understand how terrible time travel would be for anybody who’s not white.
/raises hand/ I love and will always love Starlight Crystal for being one of the truly weirdest books I’ve ever read. “The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman” has nothing on that book.
Yes it is SO WEIRD. It introduced a lot of metaphysical concepts to me, and also (along with the Last Vampire series which omg so fucking racist and misogynist it’s painful to read, even though it’s a “strong female” lead character – I’m afraid to reread Starlight Crystal and see the same) got me thinking about philosophical stuff and religion differently. They honestly helped me learn not to be bigoted to non-Christian religions, having grown up Catholic in a super conservative Christian region.
Wasn’t there a point in the Starlight Crystal where the MC basically stalks herself in one of several overlapping times? because time is a circle apparently and if you go fast enough you can lap yourself. Kind of fucked up. And I adore(d) it.
Once Was a Tiiiiiiiiiime! Not only the time travel thing, but how friendship transcended everything. It’s a middle grade book that morphs into YA as the character ages, and yet, friendship is the prize, not romance. Ugh, loved it so much. Leila Sales is fab.
Dana knows the score. No thinking person who is not a white male with gold bullion in his pocket should ever want to travel more than like thirty years into the past. Hell, I was born in ’80 and I now recognize that the scant remainder of the 20th century was a blighted hellscape. Why would I possibly go back to it?
the two main ladies from Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis and also everyone who ever time travels in any of her works (most of them), listen: i think we did pretty ok studying history without literally almost dying at multiple points during world wars
(I say this as if I wouldn’t 100% jump at the chance to be a historian in a Connie Willis novel)
haha, i referred to her above, too. i think she has a new book coming out in September or something? so excite.
ooohhh really?? I just picked up a special fancy book that has Lincoln’s Dreams and Passage in it. Neither of them are part of the time travel universe but still very very good, of course. I wonder if she will be around promoting the book at all, I would love to meet her.
It’s called CrossTalk and is NOT part of the time traveling universe, I don’t believe. http://www.amazon.com/Crosstalk-Connie-Willis/dp/… – it’s due out in October, and it’s about what happens if you get permanently mentally linked to someone else. (It makes me think it’s a deconstruction of Anne McCaffrey’s Empath series, actually? and other series, but McCaffrey liked to do the mind-link thing a lot.)
Passage scarred me 4 Life.
uh yeah Passages made me feel. . .idk! Like I had to go immediately reread Bellwether and To Say Nothing of the Dog to stop feeling all skin-crawly.
I read Passage on a transatlantic flight. I’m a nervous flyer. Terrible, terrible plan, but I couldn’t put it down.
Love Connie Willis, will never ever read Passage again.
I agree with you and yet Doomsday Book is one of my favorite books of all time.
I confess I haven’t actually read Doomsday Book yet. I started it a while ago but I was just coming off some books that did not make a good transition into her stuff so I just couldn’t get into it at the time. But now I’m reading Passage so maybe after this I’ll pick it up again.
I admit that I got frustrated with the assumptions about history/historiography in Doomsday book and never even made it through, let alone to the WW2 ones — but why would you even need to send historians back in time to the Blitz? What could they possibly “discover” that we can’t get a (better) handle on from the masses and masses of documents and first-hand accounts?
(also: who the hell sends a perky undergraduate into the past anyway and expects that it would end well? (I don’t care how enthusiastically she studied Middle English- it’s not a good idea.)
the books take place in 2060-ish and from what I remember you eventually learn its a slightly altered future where some plague type stuff happened around the early 2000s-2010s (no cats exist in 2060 because they all died out), so a lot of records were supposedly lost.
Okay, but wouldn’t it make more sense to send people back to the 1990’s-2000’s (since surely giant plague + poor early digital storage without hard copy would make that the period where more data is lacking).
(Part of my crankiness about the series might also be that I feel that any use of a time machine that isn’t sending people back with hand scanners to the libraries of the ancient world is a bad use. I mean, you could be using this technology to get the complete works of Sappho and you’re using it to send a college student on study-abroad-with-the-black-death?)
there’s technically no evidence people *aren’t* doing those things, we just don’t see it happen. but the students are all studying the time periods they go to so it’s their choice to go. which doesn’t necessarily make it better but at least its not like these professors are forcing them or anything. and they do also have a rating system for which time periods are safest that is also… usually ignored……….
This might be spoilers, but at the conclusion of To Say Nothing Of The Dog, the time travel scientists make a discovery that indicates they’ll be able to recover a lot more information from the past that we had previously thought was destroyed. They specifically talk about planning expeditions to the Library of Alexandria before its destruction. So, pretty much as soon as they realize it’s physically possible, the recovery of lost ancient literature becomes their top priority.
Wife and I are now discussing the copyright implications of documents brought back from ancient libraries.
No different from the copyright implications of newly discovered papyri, I should think! Someone would own the scanned images (or whatever) — probably the university under whose auspices the project is done, but, realistically in our world, the terrible tech-bro company that produced the time machine technology. One hopes that they would give scholars permission to use those images to establish a text. The copyright of the resulting published text is usually owned by the press imprint; they may give permission for it to be reprinted in commentaries or side by side in a translation or etc.
I love, love, love To Say Nothing But of the Dog and Doomsday – and I 100% agree with this. It makes no sense (except the – because crazy benefactor hand wave does kind of ring true of academia.)
Also “we chose to go back because we’re obsessed and we really wanted to KNOW.”
Safety Not Guaranteed was a gem of a movie, and if they either time traveled or were atomized into a fine mist… and I don’t think the later is a great ending for a rom-com. Also, look at these nerds flirting:
Just watched this on your recommendation and thoroughly enjoyed it! Thanks!
But what about Kivrin who goes back in time to the middle ages in Connie Willis’s DOOMSDAY BOOK? Bad decision. Lots of plague apparently. Amazing book.
Also, Polly and Merope in Connie Willis’s BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR? WWII England during the Blitz. Also questionable decision. Also an amazing book.
Well, I mean, to be fair, in Kivrin’s case she was supposed to be sent back to a time that DIDN’T have Black Plague (one of the in-between years) and instead, because the dude sending her back had some terrible virus, got sent back to 1345 or whatever.
So I mean, yeah, Middle Ages, bad call, but they did at least consider the plague thing! 🙂
She didn’t mean to go to plague times! That was an accident.
Any time-travel where olfactory nerve stunning is offered as a recommended pre-trip service is no time travel for me. I like my stomach contents where they are!
(Amazing book, deeply stressful)
I’ll just leave this here
!!!!!!!
I don’t want to know any more about that because I’m already coming up with amazing stories for it, and yet I’m dead curious how it completely underwhelms on the “timeswept baby” front. I mean, a baby time traveler. How does it even know that it has time traveled?!
How is this a romance???
What.
But yes.
But also…
What?
Wait but also also, wouldn’t the plot of Timeswept Baby just be ‘Baby is transported through time. Continues to be a baby, i.e. creature with memory capacity similar to average frying pan. Is raised normally with no knowledge that it ever traveled through time.’ ?
Someone give me Eugenia Riley’s contact deets. I’ve got questions for her.
that cover is AMAZING. In every detail, from the not-quite-right seeming angles of feet and legs to the exclamation point on “Bestselling Author of Time Travel Romances!”
eta: I don’t like to sound like I just rip on romances, but the summary for this one is delightful.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12304576-times…
”
Timeswept Baby
From #1 Kindle Bestselling Time Travel Romance author Eugenia Riley, author of BUSHWHACKED BRIDE and WANTED ACROSS TIME!
When single mom Emma Fairchild awakens in a Chicago hospital, she is stunned to discover her newborn baby is missing. Then she is presented with the outlandish possibility that the stork panicked in the delivery room and delivered Emma’s bundle of joy to the wrong century! Receiving a bizarre “ticket through time,” Emma tears it up and immediately starts spinning back in time herself!
Meanwhile back in Victorian London, notorious rogue Matthew Weymouth, Earl of Worthing, is trying his best to seduce his reluctant mistress when the two encounter an abandoned baby on the stoop of Matthew’s townhouse. Even as Matthew’s outraged paramour slaps his face and storms off, a gust of wind sweeps over him. Suddenly he is confronted by a beautiful young woman in outlandish clothing who accuses him of stealing her baby.
Even as mother and baby are joyously reunited, sparks fly and romantic complications abound between Emma and Matthew. Emma must come to terms with her amazing journey through time and discover why she and her infant were “delivered” to sexy Matthew Weymouth’s stoop. Matthew feels enchanted by mother and child, and is tempted to give up his rakehell ways. Will Emma find her soulmate here in Dickensonian London—as well as a father for a precious baby who so desperately needs one? ”
eta again: double feature of this book and Pregnesia?
Jesus Christ.
from the comments it sounds like she had a c-section, which definitely sounds fun for running around Dickensian London.
what even. the pollution levels alone.
who wouldn’t opt to raise their baby in a time and a place with something like a 40% risk of dying before the age of 5?
I am SO disappointed at this. It’s so dumb and you’ve got the abuse=love guy as the love interest? heck no. All my imaginations of how the timeswept baby could work were much better. 🙁
I do like that the author bio on the amazon page explicitly points out that she has received “thousands of letters from fans all over the world”. (lololol, non sequitur or what?)
RIGHT?!
And I mean, “rakehell”? This guy definitely has the clap, at least!
“outandish possibility”
That’s one word for it.
(Who presents her with this possibility? If my baby disappeared and someone started spouting some nonsense about confused storks and time travel, I suspect I would be calling the police immediately.)
SEX KILT. I die.
9. Victorian Lady, Real Life / Your Weekend Hate-Reading
My hate will go on and onnnnnn…
(Never forget. Never forget.)
It took me a minute to figure out what this was, and then I remembered, and was like YUP, so terrible.
The most terrible. Whenever I start thinking I’m bad I just remember that couple and I feel like a mothereffing paragon of humanity.
What is number nine in reference to?
The original. http://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9275611/victorian-era…
And The Toast. http://the-toast.net/2015/09/10/2012-era-life/
I just read all of that with my mouth hanging open. It still is. I may need emotional support, or just to sit in a corner and shout “White people!” randomly.
Where do they get the money to live like this? The economics of it baffle me? Are these the children of rich and indulgent parents?
Also why am I not surprised that her husband was home-schooled?
omg this reminds me I went to grad school with the victorian lady’s husband!! As I recall, his prized possession was a delorean that he cleaned with q-tips – a very victorian habit, I’m sure
Of fucking course it was, Gabriel . He is the worst.
Ah! that (almost) answers my question about the money.
Anybody seen Foxcatcher? Don’t upset him, girl!
Wait. So why didn’t he use the delorean to actually go back in time instead of inflicting his Victorian pretensiousness on us in the here and now?
I did not previously realize that I could be with V Mars if I merely built a time machine…
This changes things.
I also remember sorta liking that movie but also being sorta confused as to why. Possibly just Aubrey Plaza being ineffably charming.
We had a meeting of our book club where everyone chose a different romance novel because it was not a genre any of us was very familiar with, and then we reported back on our findings.
I picked a book that involved a soldier travelling back in time to prevent the demon apocalypse that was currently destroying her world, and she ends up working/hooking up with a Sexy Victorian Wizard to take down the Skeezy Victorian Wizard who started this whole thing.
I don’t read much romance, but this was a pretty straightforward time travel demon fighting story, except everyone was getting awkward boners every three pages. Three stars.
No Proper Lady by Isabel Cooper. The author is a net-friend of mine.
Wait, is that the plot?? I have that one sitting on my kindle app right now and can’t remember why i downloaded/borrowed it but there it is. It sounds like it should be fun to read while TS Colin storms overhead tonight.
Hee! I was gonna say: that does seem to be mine, yeah, and yay people buying it! Amusingly, I wrote it on kind of a drunken bet with a friend re: time travel romance and why people would go to the past in the first place, seriously.
(Also, pretty much everything I write that’s romance can be described as “straightforward fantasy adventure of some sort plus lots of boners”, so I love this phrase and may steal it.)
I have read your books (and enjoyed them) so I can testify that the phrase is completely accurate.
Aw, thanks!
I would put that description on my blog/in my author bio, only my mom reads that. (And also? Gave copies of NPL to all my relatives the Christmas it came out, which was simultaneously really sweet and guaranteed to make future holidays extra-awkward. Although she did reassure me that “your grandparents don’t read anything that’s not large-print anyhow,” so.)
the B&N reviewers agree with you, and now I own an e-copy, thank you.
I described the plot of No Proper Lady, by Isabel Cooper, as “Terminator meets My Fair Lady.” It is as awesome as that sounds.
When I read the time travel series by Caroline B. Cooney, I was so jealous of Annie falling back in time and meeting Strat. But clearly, Devonny was totally the smartest character by jumping into modern times and exercising her awesome independence. I mean, it’s because of a dude named Todd, but still!
Also, she ended up going back to her own time. “Oh, this British aristocrat who is just marrying me for my money has been revealed to be not a complete dick, I guess I’ll marry him anyway.”
I definitely read the first two books in this series but I don’t think I ever finished it??? Away to Amazon dot com to scour for a used copy.
i hate the end of Kate and Leopold. Nothing any man has ever possessed could be worth giving up wifi and indoor plumbing and divorce.
I also resent how it feinted toward class consciousness (Kate is all “I don’t have time to live at your genteel pace, I have to work for a living!”) and then just forgot that ever happened and concluded with “let’s be upper class, hooray.”
I just like to imagine their relationship, like, a year after they’re married, and every time she pees into a chamber pot, every time she gets her period and tampons don’t exist, every time she walks past some godawful human rights violation, she’s looking at him and thinking ‘all this for you, you waistcoat wearing fuck’. I want a sequel where all the resentment builds up and she murders him.
I’m crylaughing! I need this in my life.
No man is worth giving up suffrage.
I don’t care how cute his laugh lines are.
Not worth it.
Ever.
Nope.
you’re not wrong
haha Nostalgia Chick has a review of it which always cracks me up (I’ve never actually seen it, so now I mostly have Kate giving up hygiene and basic rights for a man who makes a vaguely eroticized butter commercial.
I saw that movie a long time ago . . . was there a reason why he didn’t stay in the present?
Because it caused all the elevators in the world to start breaking or something, because he wasn’t there in the past to invent them? idk.
I’m not sure that’s how time paradoxes work, but okay.
Remember how Liev Schreiber was also in that movie, acting his face off as a lonely genius who discovered holes in the spacetime continuum, and who barely interacted with either Kate or Leopold at all? I remember that.
I think he was Kate’s ex, actually? And she was really angry that he neglected her for the spacetime continuum or something.
And for people living in New York I remember an awful lot of climbing in and out of each other’s windows.
he was both her ex and her great (great?) grandson! 😀
what?? noooooooooooo
Oh yeah no, he was Kate’s ex, and I suppose the two of them did have a couple scenes together. He just seemed to be in a completely separate, tonally very different film most of the time, giving very heartfelt delivery to speeches about “what if a dog saw a rainbow, therefore please break me out of this mental hospital.”
Women time-traveling in “Doctor Who” do have a wildly uneven time of it, but they do definitely talk about it. Like that time actual trained medical doctor Martha Jones got stuck in 1913 and everyone was like, “How could you be anything but a chambermaid, you are a woman and also black” and she was like, “Fuck you, I’m going to name all the bones in the human hand for you to prove how awesome I am and how much this time period sucks ass.”
THIS IS A GREAT SCENE.
“You just read that in a book”
“NO KIDDING THAT’S HOW DOCTORS LEARN THINGS, LADY”
Ugh, I always felt Martha got a particularly crappy deal (aside from Ten being particularly jackass-y) in having to spend how many weeks as a servant with John Smith and THEN apparently having to work in a shop to support his damn ass while Blink was happening?
I know, right? No wonder she was one of the few companions who left the Doctor of her own volition. “I spent a lot of time with you thinking I was second best. But you know what? I AM good.”
And then the Year That Never Was! That sounded grim.
It drives me mad in The Shakespeare Code when Martha asks if she’ll be safe as a black woman in Elizabethan London, and the Doctor says she should just walk around like she owns the place, because he does that and it’s always fine. Doctor, I get what you’re trying to say here, but perhaps it would be good to acknowledge that a black woman is not necessarily going to be viewed in quite the same way as a white man, and they might not be able to get away with all the same behaviour.
This entire article is a gem most befitting the Last Days of the Toast, and this bit made me giggle out loud:
“Bends the fourth dimension to her will so she can do more homework. This could be the saddest thing in Harry Potter, counting all the deaths and Neville’s mom’s candy wrappers. My god, Hogwarts, get an academic adviser on staff.”
+100
haha that book legitimately gives me anxiety–I feel less like “zomg I am Hermione!” as the books go on, but that one where she’s working herself sick and the boys are jerks (at the same time instead of by turns) and no one is like maybe a hyper-perfectionist obsessive 13-year-old SHOULDN’T be making this decision?
I feel like there is surprisingly little adult supervision in general at Hogwarts??? Either that or all the adults are just like, “Yeah, seems like this 13 year old should be making this decision and I should not help anyone learn the meaning of impulse control.” They’re more worried about students out of bed than students maybe struggling with OCD/ambition paranoia.
I would be SO GOOD at that job.
ALSO, the more I learn about Outlander, the less I want to push myself to keep reading past the second or third chapter of the first book.
I never got past the first or second chapter either and the more I hear about it the happier I am with that decision.
I felt guilty about not being able to get into the tv show,until all of a sudden I was like. . .”nah, I’m good.”
eta: even not watching it, I’m so not onboard for the conversations about it being totally legitimate to *spank* your wife historical accuracy danger tribal heirarchy whatever. Be wish fullfillment porn, fine, but enough with that.
Wise choice.
yeah, we can hang out here in the unpopular opinions corner and think about other things. I have been re-reading Martha Wells Fall of Ile Rein, and I love it all over again, and there is magic and wizards and other wizards, and inter-dimensional travel and love plus friend-ship so, yanno, no dearth of cool things to read.
Thanks for the rec! I may check it out!
OMG they are amazing! Highly recommend! Really, everything by Martha Wells (that I have read. …which is most of them) is amazing. I also highly recommend Wheel of the Infinite, which was how I got into her and features an older WOC reformed villain as the main character. The best!
I forgot I’d read that one and loved it because (this is terrible) there was only one, and I wanted more. I had to go find new N.K. Jemison to read to scratch that particular itch.
My mother-in-law keeps wanting me to read it. She is pushing it on me, bringing it up in nearly every conversation.
We don’t see eye-to-eye on very many things (to the point where I’ve thought back to an interaction and realized that we were having two entirely different conversations between us! “My mother used to dress me and my sister in matching outfits.” “Oh, wow, that sounds extreme.” “I LOVED IT.”), so when she noticed that I’m a Bookworm and she’s a Bookworm, she seized it as something we have in common. But our tastes are sooooo different, and she hasn’t quite realized it yet.
…I made it about 300 pages in, and with 500 still to go, I just gave up.
I also pretty much automatically take authors less seriously when they have meltdowns about fanfic. :/ If nothing else it makes me suspect them of preciousness.
I’m currently reading Deborah Harkness’s All Souls trilogy and (maybe spoilers?) some characters go back to 1590’s England and I was getting so frustrated with how the male characters were treating women in 1590 I almost had to stop reading.
I read the first book in that trilogy and got so pissed off at the vampire’s possessiveness I never went back for the other two books.
I don’t know how far you are in the books, but do you have any thoughts about where the books stand on the whole patriarchy/possessiveness thing? Mathew and so many others are the worst over-protective and controlling patriarchal ass-hats. But since the books are told in first person, I legit can’t tell if the author thinks this is sweet, awful but maybe necessary, or a giant flaw that he needs to get over.
It’s very odd having a love interest who is both portrayed as swoonworthy and very flawed, and a narrator/protagonist who alternatively super cares about said flaws and super doesn’t.
I mean, on the one hand, Diana is constantly balking at Matthew’s protectiveness and disobeying him (or at least doing things she knows he’ll disapprove of). Yet at the same time, there are plenty of times she ignores his behavior or explains it away based on previous trauma in his life.
It didn’t bother me as much in Book 1, since the events in that book have Diana in such dire situations that Matthew’s help is, you know, actually helpful. But in Book 2, I really hate how she kind of laughs off “Oh, look, he’s slipping back into 1590-Matthew! He’s treating me like chattle! How fun!” Diana does bristle and balk at plenty, and she deliberately does things she wants to do that she knows Matthew won’t like, so I think Harkness herself doesn’t subscribe to “isn’t it cute how he protects her.” The most charitable reading, I guess, is that Diana, like anyone in a committed relationship, has to decide which things are with fighting over and which things she lets slide just to keep her own sanity.
Also, since it’s my first time through these books, I’m also reading for plot, so I’ll probably have a better sense of how pissed off I am at Matthew after I finish the trilogy and mull it a little more.
Oh god, those books definitely decline in quality as they progress. I only finished the trilogy because I was hate-reading it through to the bitter end. I think the most frustrating part was that Diana is almost always proven wrong and/or ends up in a terrible spot when she tries to balk at Matthew’s possessiveness, like, “Silly woman, you tried to strike out on your own and see what happened? You should have stayed where I told you to stay and you wouldn’t have been injured/kidnapped/almost killed!” SO annoying.
I turned off Cleopatra over the weekend because it was making me aware that if I’d had to live at any time prior to 1970’s US, I was just going to have to become a master poisoner and poison the sh*t out of everyone.
WAIT what about Susan Cooper’s King Of Shadows, that gorgeous parable about Shakespeare and performance and time and timelessness and loss???
edit: I just got my head on straight and remembered this is a post about WOMEN time-traveling in history, and that book is about a boy. I apologize. It’s still a beautiful book though.
it IS a beautiful time travel book, and my favorite of hers that actually stands up to re-reading, and it could almost work for a pre-pubescent girl as well. Which would also have been cool, but strange and different and then SHE would have been Ariel.
this was my favorite book in sixth grade!
I still don’t quite understand how time travel romances became A THING, but they certainly were a thing in the 90s. Jude Devereaux was the queen of them (I’m looking at you, Knight in Shining Armor)
Oh god, and that Teresa Medeiros one where the French girl who was, I think, about to be hanged as a witch during the Salem Witch Trials travels forward in time to 90s New York City and meets the rich douchebag hero who responds to all of her 17th century weirdness with “I guess France is more rustic than I thought.” Like, he genuinely is like ‘Oh, I thought France had indoor plumbing but I guess not.’
Also, he’s in his 30s and the heroine is 19 or 20.
Also, also, one of the reasons he’s bitter is because of the disappearance of his former roommate and business partner, who actually invented a time travel device and went back in time and is actually the father of the heroine. I think he also threatens to marry her? Because he’s evil for…reasons?
Middle-school CaroWR LOVED that mess.
That is crazy pants.
I still remember the Jude Devereaux where the contemporary heroine had a problem figure and then went back in time to the American Old West and it turns out her “problem” hourglass figure with big soft breasts was very stylish. I don’t remember if she stayed in the past or not.
I control-F-ed ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ in the comments and got NOTHING
GOOD DAY TOAST I SAID GOOD DAY
p.s. re: narnian fratriarchy, the only thing that has ever I mean ever made patriarchy sound like not a bad deal all around is the idea of your lord and earthly master being not your dad but your brother, and not only did god say so but he said so to your FACE. genuinely worse.
edit: man if only C.S. Lewis were here so I could tell him he is the only man who ever made patriarchy seem like maybe I could deal with it if this were the alternative, he would be so pleased
you are right of course, re: Charlotte Sometimes. We have collectively failed. Ditto on Tom’s Midnight Garden.
Also, did anyone else read Switching Time as a kid? A girl from 1890’s and girl from 1880’s switch places, and each ends up in the period-appropriate System. I think the girl from the present just learned Valuable Lessons from her time in the past, but the girl from the past figured out what from her time period was valuable in our time, and when she went back, collected some of it and put it in a safe-deposit box and left it to a friend she had made in the foster-care system in her will. Which I thought was a pretty brilliant (and altruistic) use of one’s time travel experience.
OMG HOW DID I NEVER HEAR OF THAT BOOK? Buying now!
I would have but I was out on a horse and have only just got back!
the only excuse I cannot quarrel with
I … I don’t understand why you’re dragging The Cure into this…
God yes – I always think I’m the only one who’s read these books, and then I go on the Toast… Charlotte Sometimes gave me the impression that either the war or ‘now’ (ie the 60s or whenever it was written) was a pretty average time to be living.
May I recommend Connie Willis for all your time-traveling needs. Thank you.
Seconded!
I just recently discovered Connie Willis and I lurve her so much!!!!! What is your favorite book?
Kindred is such a great book. Dana knows what’s up. I can’t remember reading too many time travel books growing up because of this exact reason – the past was terrible and living there would be the worst.
So good! I think I’m going to reread this one soon, I’ve almost forgotten enough of the story to make it like new again 🙂
And for a YA treatment of similar themes, there’s Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze –teen girl in 1960’s Louisiana finds herself transported back to the family plantation in the 1860’s where it turns out that family, and identity, and race, are more complicated than she’d been led to believe. Sophie doesn’t start out knowing what’s up, but she’s a fast learner.
“There ain’t no such thing as a good mistress, on account of a mistress ain’t a good thing to be. “
Oh man I haven’t heard of it but that sounds awesome. I’m a sucker for YA lit in general, but ones that have, like, real themes and plots are always especially good.
I haven’t read this, but was so thrilled at the description above that I skipped right down to the library to get it. When I got there, there was a big hole on the shelf where it should have been and I was delighted to believe that another Toast reader had beaten me to it, and that she would probably leave a note inside for me to find when I get it next. Thank you, speedy and thoughtful fellow patron!
guys it would be really helpful to me if you’d express more outrage about dude who thought “angrily spoiling GoT to punish a woman for having an opinion I don’t like” was a decent call, other people seem to think I shouldn’t still be upset over some trivial TV thing that happened over a year ago, but those people don’t understand that TV is extremely important and men talking is the worst thing that can happen, emotional validation for this strongly desired
I am actually astonished that there hasn’t already been outrage over this in the comments. That is the most horrifying thing in this article.
thank you all, now my spirit can finally be at rest (but not in a dead way)
Men talking is the worst and I’m sorry you had to go through that. I wish you had been able to smite him where he stood by revealing that his mother preferred their pet iguana to him, or that he’s actually a really terrible kisser and everybody knows it.
You nurse that viper of rage forever and ever!
No that was definitely horrendous. F that guy.
I just assumed that you murdered him on the spot, and we weren’t going to mention it out of politeness.
But no, that guy is definitely The Worst and I hope you’ve never had to be in his awful presence again.
I was surprised at the lack of outrage at first but then maybe we’re all so used to this kind of thing happening that everyone was too jaded to react. Even so, dude is a tool. I hope your mutual acquaintance shunned him for the rest of the evening.
(I’m SO sorry – I misinterpreted it, and thought YOU were fighting back with a gigantic spoiler of some [other] entitled dude’s favorite TV thing.)
Put it this way: would you be still be upset about it if he’d accidentally spoiled it, like he thought you already knew?
Because if no then I’d say it’s not really about the spoiler per se, it’s about him revealing that he’s the kind of shitty person who decided he wanted to “punish” you for not liking a tv show. For revealing he’s That Guy, who would rather women just didn’t talk or have opinions different from his own, and who throws a shitfit when he doesn’t get his way. For trying to create an atmosphere where everyone (or just women? or just you??) has to tiptoe around him and never voice any kind of disagreement on any topic, no matter how trivial.
Seriously, who says that kind of impulse is limited to spoiling tv shows?
Verity Kindle, but only on professional excursions.
eta: so I guess also Kivrin, but that is decidely not fun time travel, whereas Verity’s is at least somewhat fun time travel with cat and sleep-deprived cute boy.
Verity is sleep-deprived quite a lot of the time as well, though, so perhaps it’s less fun than it could be.
A+ snarking. I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Ok yes I agree re:Outlander, buuut COUNTERPOINT:
This is a very good and important argument.
Counter-counter point:
I’d like to note that, at the moment, “Handsome man” and “indoor plumbing” are tied. We are indeed fortunate to live in a timeline that includes both toilets and [the actor who portrays] Jamies.
oh my god this just made me snort aloud in my office.
That looks like an oddly placed toilet that someone decided to add to their living room…
I will gladly take a living room toilet over a wooden bucket.
And not just the bucket. Also toilet paper and/or bidets.
Look I grew up in Alaska I have used nature as toilet paper. It is unsatisfactory.
Definitely here for the Sex Kilt.
http://67.media.tumblr.com/34684260186f7df4003a25…
Yeah, I feel like I’m in the minority with my honest enjoyment of Outlander, based on most of the other comments about it on here. There are a lot of problematic things going on in both the books and TV series that I’m not okay with. Yes, there’s a lot of rape, but my consolation with that is how the books do at least TRY to face and deal with the emotional aftermath for both of the main characters (especially in contrast to GoT and their use of rape as a plot device without examining the consequences). Although I can’t and won’t justify the wife beating on historical or cultural grounds. When I first read it I had to take a break after that chapter. And yeah, Claire does and says some ridiculous shit….
But I can’t help it. Sex kilt. I’m hooked.
http://www.gq.com/story/white-couple-insists-on-l…
Does Cordelia’s Honor count as a ‘time travel’book? Cordelia moves to Barrayar despite it being way behind the times. At least she had the possibility to import modern technology and medicine but even then she left as soon as possible.
WHY NOT. A lot of the tropes are similar. You could totally draw a few parallels here with Outlander: a rape attempt on the female protagonist, implied rape of the male lead, moving to a less advanced place despite opportunities to return for the love of a man. (I, too, would brave neofeudalism for Aral Vorkosigan.)
Of course, I’m sure there are dozens of other books that fit the “living in a less advanced place for the love of a man” trope. Probably lots of uncomfortably-colonial romances. But I’m always happy for any excuse to talk about Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, and her story certainly fits the bill as well.
yes but also her great egalitarian futuristic home planet was about to put her into a very shiny gentle nonoptional psych facility at the moment she decided to leave. If the question is “prison or the past” the bet looks a little better.
Beta Colony is not without its flaws, it is true. (But still, Barrayar is, in many ways, awful.)
It definitely was a consideration for Cordelia that she would be able to have as many children as she’s like to have without needing a permit and being limited to two. Being at the head of the feudal pyramid and being able to simply do things her way because she said so in Barrayar seems to have been a bonus.
I was thinking about Cordelia Naismith – while it’s not actual time travel, it definitely feels like it in a lot of ways. (I wish this aspect had been explored more in the later books. I want to see more of “Barrayar is a horrifyingly unequal feudal nightmare”, not “in the space of about one generation suddenly everything is much more egalitatarian, although basically all our POV characters are Vor so it’s hard to tell”.
Does Cordelia’s Honor count as a ‘time travel’book? Cordelia moves to Barrayar despite it being way behind the times. At least she can import modern technology and medicine.
My personal time travel story: Moving to the US and being unable to vote here for a decade (voting in my country of origin feels somewhat wrong by now). I have not had a work permit for five years for visa reasons and was dependent on my husband and his visa and could not find a sponsor myself due to the sucky economy. Being a stay at home mom was legal since it is unpaid work by tradition but I was lucky with being privileged enough to do that.
Luckily that is working out well, but a lot of spouses in the US in H4 status that end up in a terrible situations because they cannot work legally and would have to leave the US if they would divorce the actual H1 visa holder.
Sharee from Time Traveling Bong
I’m not seeing enough about how time travel reverses sexual orientation. I am disappointed that this is non-Ronbledore-compliant.
oh dang i totally forgot that i had clicked over expecting to be discussing that, then got distracted by pre-Ronbledore/teenage time travel reading memories. Thank you for the reminder.
Maybe because I believe Ron is a time-traveling Grindelwald
#GRINDELRON
(jk, that doesn’t even make sense, obviously Ron is a time-traveling Dumbledore and I’m counting on Margwainnea being queer when she arrives in the future-now)
Household Gods, by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove– L.A. lawyer sent back to a small town on the frontier of the Roman Empire. Really nice worldbuilding, really irritating protagonist, only you sort of get the feeling that she was written to be irritating just to she could Learn A Lesson about how good the modern woman really has it if she’d just quit whining. Also includes the obligatory rape, from which of course she Learns A Lesson.
Having read The Shepherd Kings by Tarr, I can only imagine how she handled the obligatory rape. I picked it up when I was about 13 not knowing anything about the author and was certainly not expecting the story that followed…partially because B&N had (purposely?) placed the price sticker right over the review on the back cover that made it clear the reader was in for lots of sex scenes.
I still love Judith Tarr’s earlier work (and I’ve enjoyed one or two recent things of hers as well), but haaated that one to the point I stopped reading her works for years. Worst protagonist ever.
Related: Has there ever been a story where a woman has a choice between “anything” and “a man” and the man was the better choice?
No.
OK I HAVE A RECOMMENDATION.
The Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde feature time travel AND book travel (like, travelling into books) and Literary Detectives and re-incarnated dodos as housepets, and a Strong 30-Something Female Character, and a thing called a Footnoterphone where they talk in footnotes, and they’re really charming and in the first one they go into Jane Eyre. I might be preaching to the choir, but in case any Toasties haven’t read them, do so.
They’re definitely Light Summer Reading material too.
Nooo i can’t stand it because the first book TOTALLY IGNORES like almost everything that makes Jane Eyre so important and such a strong character and all the feminism. It’s like “oop, this plot point was an accidental mistake of time travel/book travel” or something, but it’s really part of the thematic and structural spine of the novel! And making it an accident removes all the feminist power of Charlote Brontë.
But it’s been 10 years since i read it, so I don’t remember the details exactly, just my severe disappointment and inability to be getting on with the rest of the series as a result. (I did like the Shades of Grey book and have the first nursery rhymes book on my shelf waiting to be read, though!)
Ah, oh, I should have included a “I Read the First One In High School Before I Was Informed About Problematic Things” caveat; it might have problems!
And also that I read Jane Eyre in undergrad and found it an Incredibly Boring Slog and didn’t learn it from a feminist perspective, so there’s that.
I also enjoyed the Shades of Grey book! Definitely an interesting concept; his main strength is in “hey isn’t this a neat idea for a world”.
Oh, yeah, I figure that if you aren’t a fan of Jane Eyre or don’t really mind those liberties, Fforde’s series is delightful! It does have a lot of fun elements.
I just have this pathological need to pipe up with BUT IT RUINS THE BOOK every time I see it mentioned, because I was so disappointed. (Great book concept! which ruins a favorite book. THANKS A LOT, JASPER.)
I read Jane Eyre when I was 12 or 13 the first time around, then several times later, and only really picked up on the feminist elements my senior year of university (so, 11-12 years after the first reading) when I was taking courses on Early Women Novelists and one that was technically Post-Gothic Victorian Novels but looking back was poorly disguised Feminism In Victorian Novels. I had some really excellent professors the last years of English majoring, tbh. (Also, they were all men heavily teaching feminism? which i only realized as I hit edit because I forgot a word for one class description. Yes, I learned a lot from my women instructors, but these three men were the ones who emphasized feminism and anti-patriarchy the most.)
I think the Thursday Next series really takes off in the second book though, as it becomes more about roaming around the back-stage areas of fiction and the world of characters when they’re not being read.
The Cave of Time. AND the Return to the Cave of Time.
I’ve always wondered whether Michelle liked her Big Mac, or did modern food ruin her digestive tract and she died of dysentery, like the woman from Island of the Blue Dolphins?
THANK YOU I have always thought wanting to go back in time was for fools
but also I have a question about “Jon gets Willow’d” because the only Willow I know is Rosenberg and I don’t understand the comparison
i will explain but SPOILERS for season 6 game of thrones
(tho I sort of already spoiled GoT in the article oops, the point is, it wasn’t for revenge)
S6 of Buffy opens with a red-haired witch, Willow, bringing fallen hero Buffy back from the dead.
At the beginning of S6 of GoT, a magical redhead, Melisandre, brings fallen hero Jon Snow back from the dead.
Buffy came first, hence, Jon gets Willow’d.
Resurrected by well meaning if wrong headed friends.
Where are we putting Felicity? I’m torn like Felicity I feel kind of ranks pretty low, but the possibility that she jumped again and is actually ALSO Elizabeth from The Americans has to rank her pretty high.
Related: Has there ever been a story where a woman has a choice between “anything” and “a man” and the man was the better choice?
I’m willing to accept strong counter-arguments on this, but I’m going to start off with a confident “no.”
On a related note: In The Time Traveller’s Wife, the guy jumps around in his own timeline constantly and at one point has a three way with his wife and another version of himself.
When I read that scene, I didn’t know whether to cheer, laugh or shudder. Way to explore the boning possibilities of time travel, I guess?
Tangentially: you know that feeling when you hear a recording of yourself and you’re like, is that really what I sound like? I feel like having a threesome with a version of yourself would be like that but times a thousand, and that is why I would never want to do that.
EXACTLY. Like. . . is that really what my butt looks like during sex? Did not need to know!
I get freaked out sometimes by my own body in the gym mirrors. Lets face it, i think i’m GREAT and yet i still don’t think I’d be down for a threesome in which i take two parts.
Even more tangentially, why is it when threesomes are suggested, the expectation is that there will be one man and two women? What does the other woman do? Her nails?
There was this early episode of Friends when Ross agreed to a threesome with his wife’s friend and ended up feeling very lonely. So…
Is it really a threesome, though? I thought one version of him was asleep. (He does talk about fooling around with his time-travelled self as a teenager, though.)
It’s really not a threeway. His “present” self (who’s been snipped, due to too many miscarriages by wife) is asleep. His past, still fertile self zaps into the bed and has fun, if slightly weird, sex with his past/present wife, which ends in her getting pregnant and finally carrying a baby to term.
Counterpoint: I feel like most literature has taught us that time travel is really only good for boning, though.
Like, killing Hitler (or general past-changery, except for Marty McFly) never works, so you might as well go back to college and fuck all the guys who were really cute and totally liked you in retrospect but you didn’t realize then because you had no confidence, or you were pining over an ex who’s now super jowly and has a bad haircut.
Alternative, if you can change a little bit of the past: take current FB photos of exes back in time, show them to college-era self, point out dodging of bullets.
I may have had a lot of drunken conversations about this with friends.
I’m glad someone else daydreams about showing time travelers from the past around.
(Although I might still be the one who would quarantine them first. SMALLPOX!)
Book recommendations of the person-time-travels-into-the-present variety? For light summer reading, preferably. Not to, you know, “think” and such.
Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Devereaux is kind of the classic 90s time travel romance. I haven’t read it in 20 years so I’m not sure how well it holds up, but it still shows up on a lot of best romance lists. Medieval knight time travels to the present (1990s), falls in love and then goes back to his time. The heroine then travels back to his time, to before he met her.
I’m having trouble thinking of other travel to the present books. There’s a Tamara Allen that also has someone come to the present and then others go back to the past.
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willas has historians from the future travel back to Victorian England and it is so, so much fun.
I haven’t read it, but this ebook is about Captain Oates from Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition. After he said “I am just going out, and I may be some time,” he went out to die and was picked up by time travellers.
That Kindred cover is better than the one I have. The look on the woman’s face has the perfect amount of FUCK, not this again.
I got the major hump with CW's WWII books, though (unadvertised as a two-parter, which REALLY gave me the hump after struggling all the way through the first, to find a frigging "to be continued" message at the end).
It was all very much LOOK AT MY RESEARCH, and way too much of that thing where people failed to convey vital information to each other – over and over again – and kept missing connections to each other by minutes.
It was the annoying parts of To Say Nothing of the Dog/Doomsday Book multiplied to the tune of Yackity Sax, without any humour (Doomsday Book wasn't humorous, but it wasn't SO bad), and way too much flailing around in yet another cathedral.
And Prof Dunsworthy should be fired for utter incompetence.
Hah, I just ranted about those bloated messes above – CW jumped the shark with me there, unfortunately.
I made it to about 100 pages, and, nup.
This is magical. OMG. I love this so much.
Also, can you guys just post all the sexy Outlander gifs, so I don’t have to actually watch the show?
Kate realizes my fondest wish — a Past Traveler joins her in the future-present to sputter in bafflement at her trousers and career! Except it’s not Margwainnea, it’s some white dude (yo, already have my fill of guys grappling with a lost monopoly on privilege, thanks!) and he has to get back to his stupid time or else elevators will kill everyone. But Kate loves him! Oh no! What’ll she do? Live her life, accepting that sometimes the laws of physics don’t serve as our matchmakers? Oh, no! She jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s either “no human rights or hygiene forever” or death. Margwainnea and I are out.
Knowing Kate, she was probably responsible for Leopold becoming a very wealthy man. Women like that in the 19th century existed.
JON SNOW DIES?!
Okay, so I just started watching GoT. Watched the first season a few weeks ago, and have the second ready to go once school is finally over (I’m a teacher). And I’ve been verrrrrrry careful about it: didn’t mention it on Facebook or other social media, and only told a select few of my high school students who I knew could hold their damn tongues and not spoil stuff for me.
And I know, I KNOW, that asking folks not to spoil something that is six years old (not even counting the books) is a little mad, so I’m not actually mad, but omg I can’t believe I just happened upon a spoiler while reading my favorite website of all time. The world is weird.
Also, must add my voice for defending Hermione’s choice, because without that time turner, she’d be stuck following the same schedules the world provides her, which aren’t at all suited to her g. d. awesomeness, and Minerva McG knew it and made sure she had a way to kick the world’s ass. (Obvs, I think those two women can do no wrong.)
I'm also teaching academic writing in Japan! To high schoolers in Kyoto! Woah!
This made me realise that Lucy and Susan Pevensie had to live through puberty with no older women they could turn to for advice and no sanitary products. Shudder.