The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance

INTRODUCTION

Love takes its own sweet time … (sigh)

Have you missed your romantic destiny? Were you fated for a lover who lived 800 years before you were born? Or maybe you were meant for a mate who won’t be born until 3,000 years after you’re gone? Ever wondered what it would have been like to pay a visit to the Wild West and meet your perfect cowboy? Spend some quality time with a sexy Highlander? Or be romanced by a technologically enhanced lover from the far, far future? Do you ever feel like a piece of you is missing and no matter how hard you try, no matter how many frogs you kiss, you are never going to stumble upon your true love? How can you possibly meet the man of your dreams when he is living in eighteenth-century Scotland and you are stuck firmly within the confines of Earth circa 2009! It might all seem unrelentingly bleak at times, but don’t despair — the heartbreakingly tragic barrier of time is no barrier at all when true love is at stake — if you read the right books, that is.

Time-travel romance has had a colourful history. But after a torrid heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s, full of Highlanders, pirates, Regency viscounts, and interplanetary hunks, it subsided into the background as edgier, fantasy-based, modern subgenres like paranormal romance and urban fantasy pushed to the fore to blossom into overnight sensations.[1] Suddenly there wasn’t much room left for time travel. It occasionally saw fantastic flights of imagination from individual writers, but more often than not stayed on the sidelines, something of a wallflower, the plain, shy girl at the dance. But while paranormal romance swept the nation, time travel bided its time. And through the looking glass of the paranormal phenomenon, time travel began to develop some (more) paranormal elements of its own.

The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance is just one of many fresh, modern reassessments of time travel romance (think of the current much-hyped release of the film The Time Traveler’s Wife, in cinemas across the stratosphere!). It’s a brand-new beast, this time travel collection, yet with many, many nods to time travels origins. A massively eclectic collection of timeless romances from a diverse range of writers, some old, some new, but all playing with the conventions of genre, and with a paranormal glint in their eye. And while you’ll still find an array of traditional time travel romances here — contemporary women whisked back to earlier historical periods and flung headlong into the waiting embrace of warriors, lords and lairds — this collection brings the time travel romance genre into the twenty-first century (forget simply travelling back in time, the future holds lots of surprises, too!).

From the ubiquitous Scottish glens and Victorian parlours, we incorporate a bit of the manga-influenced futuristic time travel of the fantastic, but sadly defunct, Shomi collection from Dorchester Publishing, and give a friendly nod to the new Time Raiders series from Silhouette Nocturne (created by the fabulous Merline Lovelace and Lindsay McKenna). Using a little (really little) bit of science, and a whole heck of a lot of fantasy, you’ll not only find fish-out-of-water stories here, but everything in between!

The impossibility of getting a double half-caf venti low-fat mochaccino (or a decent sleep on a proper mattress, if you’ve been flung back into the Dark Ages) pales in comparison to the warmth of your true love’s arms (believe me). New, revamped, reinvented, and reinvigorated, time travel is due its renaissance.

Isn’t it about time?