I’ve always felt that time travel narratives only work at shorter length, because there’s little that can happen that you can’t go back and repair if you have a time machine. So it becomes a question of creating an illusion, and hoping the reader doesn’t notice the problems with logic.
Writers establish all kinds of rules to get around the issue. Sometimes the time travelers aren’t allowed to appear in the same time zone as their earlier, or later, selves. Sometimes, if they violate cause and effect, the time/space continuum goes berserk and the lights go out. (That was what I did in the novella.) Sometimes you just create an alternate time stream. Which, in my view, kills whatever might have been on the line in the first place. I swore off the notion of ever attempting a novel-length time travel tale.
Then two things happened. Barry Malzberg had very kind things to say about the novella. And I came across the Robert Dyke indie movie TimeQuest. The film left me intrigued with what could be done with time travel, and Barry left me with the desire to try it. So I did.
The first thing I did was to modify the rules from the original version. There would be no penalty if you changed the past, because the past was immutable. If something was known to have occurred, and you tried to rearrange things, bad stuff happened to you before you could act. If on the other hand you went back and watched a Greek play, nothing basic changed, you were always there, and, had Early Athenian TV been on hand to record who was in the audience, you would have been in the pictures.
Once that was settled, I used my original plot as a kickoff point: One of the time travelers violates the agreement he has with his partner, goes into the near future, and discovers that within hours after he returns, his house will burn down with him in it. He is dead. Thus, the book starts with the character attending his own funeral. (I’d had a different launch point in mind, but Bob Dyke warned me off. ‘Open with the funeral,’ he said. I did.)
Contrary to the popular fiction that writing is brute work and you need a bottle of whiskey in the side drawer, I’ve always enjoyed myself at the typewriter or, in recent times, with the computer. But never like this. The opportunity to go back and sit down over lunch with Aristarchus on the waterfront near the Library of Alexandria, or to corner Shakespeare outside the Globe after the original performance of Hamlet (in which he played the ghost), and shake his hand-- Yes!! It was exactly what I’d want to do if I had a converter.
There’s something else I should mention. I had a close friend during the mid-60’s. Her name was Joyce Barrett, and she was as heroic as anyone I’ve ever known. She belonged to Fellowship House in Philadelphia, and she went regularly into the South with the civil rights demonstrators. She took her chances, and she spent a lot of time in assorted jails, and though I knew she’d have liked me to join her, I never did. When she and her friends were at Selma in 1965, I was vacationing in Mexico. I was too busy. Or maybe I lacked the courage.
Anyway, this was my chance to at least recognize what John Lewis and his friends had accomplished. And, on a lighter note, to drift through the Yukon with Robert Service, stop by Harry Truman’s haberdashery, and toss down a whiskey with Wyatt and Calamity. How could I not enjoy that?