Down & Out in Time & Space

Stories and Poems of Time Travel

What happens when the most practical of limitations—time—is overcome? The time traveller faces one of the most difficult challenge: the temptation within. Stories of time travel revel in the impossible, visiting alternate pasts, and reveal the uncannily familiar, like warnings from your future self.

Introduced by Mike Chen, author of Here and Now and Then, this issue of the London Reader travels through time with the stories, poetry, and ideas of twenty different writers and artists, and it examines our humanity through the portholes of their time machines. Find out what makes time travel writing really tick in our interviews with award-winning author Audrey Niffenegger of The Time Traveler’s Wife and co-authors Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland of The Rise and Fall of DODO. Next, explore love lost and love found, the horrors of the past and the horrors of the future, and even a mission to kill Hitler in the short stories of BH Birtwhistle, Arthur M Doweyko, Jess Flarity, Robert L Kaspar III, Veronique Kootstra, Guy Prevost, AB Quinn, and Graeme K Talboys. Experience meeting your mother or yourself in another time and meet the quintessential 20th century time traveller themself in the poetry of Lana Hechtman Ayers, Matt Bryden, Sarah Law, d’Ores&Deja, and the author of the popular TEDx Talk “Everything You Need to Write a Poem (and How It Can Save a Life)”, Daniel Scott Tysdal. Finally, enjoy the accompanying visual art recreating time’s anachronistic ages from Maroula Blades, Emilie Oblivion, and Artem Mirolevich.

Whether you travel in a blue police box or a gull-winged DeLorean, settle in and allow these stories from across time—from these writers’ pasts transported to your reading present—to carry you into a future yet to be written.

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