Jessica M. Goldstein on the Inherent Optimism of Time Travel

Do you ever feel like everything was better before? Actually, does anyone not feel this way? We’ve all got a different “before” in mind—before the pandemic, before 2016, before the internet, before the atom bomb, and on, and on—but the consensus on this front seems to be near-universal. We are all Tony Soprano, trudging to the foot of the driveway, scooping up The Star-Ledger (RIP print edition, 1832-2025) and thinking: lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.

Article continues after advertisement

It was late 2021 when I started writing what would become my debut novel, Retro, and I was alternately seduced and repulsed by how inescapable nostalgia had become, from pop culture to style to politics. Every movie was a sequel, every TV show a reboot, every fashion trend a revival. While the far-right peddled this insidious fantasy of the so-called good old days—before such pesky innovations as civil rights and women’s lib—even my most progressive friends felt the future looked ominous and uninviting, an AI-saturated wildfire-scorched hellscape where our every move would be surveilled, gambled on, and monetized; where everything we could buy would be both terrible and diabolically expensive, sold to us via a subscription model, the price of which would increase with each passing month, until we all were dead.

Even while time travel plays around with nostalgia, as a genre, it is fundamentally optimistic about our future.

In my novel, a start-up called Retro promises an escape from the underwhelming present and unappealing future. Retro is a time travel agency that takes wealthy tourists on vacations to the past. Bachelor parties at Woodstock! “’20s for your twenties” birthday bashes at Prohibition-era speakeasies! Concerts, sporting events, inaugurations, assassinations: Bygone America is just a Retro Metro ride away. My protagonist, Ash, is a struggling (read: failed) actress. Recently axed from a going-nowhere office gig, she lands a job at Retro as a Time Travel Agent, chaperoning one-percenter explorers on their voyages to the Before.

Soon enough, Ash finds herself totally immersed in Retro’s dazzling offerings. It is fun to galivant around the past, to get all dolled up to drink five-cent sodas at drive-in movies, to log off and loll around in America’s staggering natural beauty before it was defiled by colonization and industry, to smoke cigarettes literally anywhere and everywhere all of the time. Given how bleak her future looks, the past is all too inviting.

Time travel stories, especially anything about going to the past, seem to speak exclusively to our collective despair about what’s ahead, our shared certainty that things were better before. And some things really were! I want cars without touchscreens and childhoods without iPads; I hate QR code menus and dating apps and how you can’t meet people at the airport gate anymore to hug them as soon as they get off the plane. Every time I hear someone extol the supposed virtues of AI I want to scream forever and ever and ever.

Part of the pleasure of writing Retro was indulging that fantasy and escaping to the past, at least in my imagination. It was a means to visit the one place I could never go in real life: The glory days of yore. At times, I was enchanted by the past’s superficially-quaint charms. I luxuriated in it all, even the things I actually experienced and, at the time, found deeply annoying, like dial-up internet and T-9 text messaging.

But as I wrote, I found myself coming around to an unexpected idea: That even while time travel plays around with nostalgia, as a genre, it is fundamentally optimistic about our future.

Retro has a mantra: The Timeline is resilient. It’s a balm over the most obvious worry any time traveler would have: that if you go to the past, you will irrevocably alter the course of history. Multitudes of time travel stories use this threat as the stakes: We’re convinced that if we went to, say, 1773 and so much as sneezed on a colonist, we’d change everything. Quite the contrast with our beliefs about the present, in which it often feels like nothing we do—organizing, protesting, fundraising, voting, boycotting, withholding federal taxes, whatever—makes any difference whatsoever. Which is the more powerful belief: That nothing we do matters, or that everything does?

Ash is convinced of—and at times takes comfort in—her cosmic irrelevance, occasionally self-soothing by telling herself that even if the future does arrive (she’s not holding her breath), “it would be in some form unrecognizable to her presently—e.g., on a charred, uninhabitable Earth—and none of her choices, or her abstinence from choice-making that at a certain point not too far from today would become the functional equivalent of having made a choice, would make any difference whatsoever.” She knows, or thinks she knows which things really matter in the grand scheme, and those things don’t include her: “Real history was about what men did in public: inventing factory equipment, crashing the stock market, killing each other.”

The alternative to this defensive crouch is, for Ash, emotionally unbearable. To let herself, even for a moment, entertain any other possibility feels too risky. Hope invites disappointment, faith is just a jinx. Instead, she gives in, slowly and then completely, to Retro, where she can forget about the future and instead spend her Saturday nights dancing the pain away at Studio 54 in 1978, high on that good coke from before it was laced with fentanyl.

It’s impossible to tell a story involving time travel without grappling with the genre’s fervent belief in our ability to change our own lives and the lives of everyone around us.

I found Ash’s perspective extremely relatable and in many ways, I still do. But my time in Retro has given me a different point of view. I think it’s impossible to tell a story involving time travel without grappling with the genre’s fervent belief in our ability to change our own lives and the lives of everyone around us.

Often, time travel stories present this promise as a warning. The Ray Bradbury classic, “A Sound of Thunder,” which popularized the notion of the butterfly effect, hinges on a careless time traveler stomping off the proscribed path in his brutish attempt to see a dinosaur up close. He returns to the present by the skin of his teeth to find that his recklessness scrambled the English alphabet and upended democracy, changing the outcome of an election.

I was drawn to a story about traveling to the past in part because of my own nostalgia, my yearning for the way things were. But the expansiveness of genre fiction helped me see things differently. Freed from the constraints of literal reality, I found myself considering some less self-evident truths. Because it does feel outrageous—the height of narcissism with a heavy dose of delusion—to think that every little thing we do affects every other thing. But there must be a reason we keep telling time travel stories this way, that we return to this notion that everything we do can be meaningful, despite how much present-day evidence suggests otherwise. I cannot believe I am asking this, but I am asking anyway: What if we’re all more hopeful than we think we are?

The present can be excruciatingly isolating, by design. All our social platforms have been built by virulently anti-social people; the insidious insertion of AI into everything is perpetuated by those who would insist that we’re all better off without each other, and that an ideal day would be one in which a person need not speak to or even encounter another soul. But time travel insists upon our profound interconnectedness. It contends that we matter to each other whether we want to or not, whether we believe it or not.

_______________________________