A #SciFiSundays Anthology Spotlight | “Someone in Time” (Tales of Time Crossed Romances) edited by Jonathan Strahan

Posted Sunday, 29 May, 2022 by jorielov , , , 0 Comments

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Hallo, Hallo dear hearts!

Welcome to my tour stop for “Someone in Time”! I am a reader who appreciates finding Speculative Fiction anthologies – especially when they are curated anthologies which focus on a particular theme or subject inclusive to all the stories in a collection. I have the tendency of reading more Fantasy anthologies than Science Fiction which is why when I saw this collection was going on a blog tour – I was most excited! Especially as the concept behind the theme was the intriguing concept of time travelling or time shifting – one of my favourite subniches in literature to chase after as there are numerous ways in which time can become ‘bent’ into a story.

The trifecta of time which I regularly have featured on Jorie Loves A Story are the following: time slip, time shift and time travel narratives as each of them holds a different key of entrance for the reader. The trickiest ones of course are the time slip stories wherein your generally slipping in time between two distinctive timescapes whilst each of those eras hold their own secrets and their own timeline of the story as you move betwixt and between their parts. When it came to the concept for this collection – I was hoping the stories wouldn’t be as soul-crushing as “The Time Traveller’s Wife” but would instead be a bit more hopeful and inspiring.

I had fully planned to read through the collection this month but as the hours went forward these latter weeks of May, I realised I needed to push my review into June and spotlight the collection for the blog tour. Between work and my health, I was just stretched a bit thin and this past weekend I’ve been working through a low-grade migraine which hasn’t been the easiest either. Therefore enjoy the extract I’ve chosen to share today and return next month as I expand my thoughts into the collection of stories themselves and see where “Someone in Time” takes me as a reader. Meanwhile, if you are a ready reader of time narratives – I encourage you to share your favourite time bending stories with me and see if perhaps I’ve read or heard of some of them, too!

Whilst you might have noticed I’m focusing on Fantasy throughout the month as well – as I’m co-hosting @WyrdAndWonder. There will be loads of new content featuring those stories as well as we move into our final week and a half of the event. Everyone has been gracious providing content for everyone to enjoy this year across socially bookish channels and we’re all delighted to see the event grow into such a larger and expansive community; similar to how Sci Fi Month found its own wings to fly several years ago.

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A #SciFiSundays Anthology Spotlight | “Someone in Time” (Tales of Time Crossed Romances) edited by Jonathan StrahanSomeone in Time
Subtitle: Tales of Time Crossed Romance
by (Editor) Jonathan Strahan
Source: Publisher via Lola's Blog Tours

Even time travel can’t unravel love

Time-travel is a way for writers to play with history and imagine different futures – for better, or worse.

When romance is thrown into the mix, time-travel becomes a passionate tool, or heart-breaking weapon. A time agent in the 22nd century puts their whole mission at risk when they fall in love with the wrong person. No matter which part of history a man visits, he cannot not escape his ex. A woman is desperately in love with the time-space continuum, but it doesn’t love her back. As time passes and falls apart, a time-traveller must say goodbye to their soulmate.

With stories from best-selling and award-winning authors such as Seanan McGuire, Alix E. Harrow and Nina Allan, this anthology gives a taste for the rich treasure trove of stories we can imagine with love, loss and reunion across time and space. 

Edited by Jonathan Strahan and including stories by: Alix E. Harrow, Zen Cho, Seanan McGuire, Sarah Gailey, Jeffrey Ford, Nina Allan, Elizabeth Hand, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Catherynne M. Valente, Sam J. Miller, Rowan Coleman, Margo Lanagan, Sameem Siddiqui, Theodora Goss, Carrie Vaughn, Ellen Klages

Genres: Anthology Collection of Short Stories and/or Essays, Short Story or Novella, Science Fiction, Time Travel Fiction



Places to find the book:

Add to LibraryThing

ISBN: 978-1786185099

Published by Rebellion Publishing

on 10th May, 2022

Format: Paperback Edition

Published by: Solaris Books
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing (@RebellionPub)

Converse on Twitter via: #SciFi, #ScienceFiction & #SomeoneInTime

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Enjoy this extract from:

“Someone in time” tales of time-Crossed Romance

Edited by Jonathan Strahan © 2022

Jonathan Strahan. Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing

INTRODUCTION

Jonathan Strahan

TIME TRAVEL. AS The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction rightly says, it’s a great narrative device. It allows a storyteller to pick a point of view and move it backwards or forwards in time, forking alternate histories, asking and answering ‘what ifs’, and just exploring endless possibilities. It’s not surprising it’s irresistible to writers and to readers. Which may be why we seemingly have an infinite-seeming supply of time travel stories and endless ways to travel through time. Up until the 1900s the favored method was by dream or a nightmare, as in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or Poe’s ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’, but as the 20th century dawned the means of travel became more mechanical, more ‘scientific’. Wells’s time machine moved its narrator through time in a ‘machine’, as did an increasing number of the time travel stories that followed. Most famously, perhaps, in the early 1960s the BBC put a man in a blue box, gave it a technical-sounding name, and pushed him off through time and space. There have been more—perhaps too many more—till you get to the point now where we have superheroes travelling through time by running really fast and spaceships warping or folding or something to do stuff and travel in time. Very sciencey. Very timey-wimey.

So, there are a lot of ways to travel through time, and a lot of famous time travel stories. Some of them are hard science fiction, some of them are fantasy, some of them are horror, and some of them are, well, romances. Someone in Time has its origins in two stories, neither of which appear here for reasons of length, but both of which I’d recommend to you. About four years ago I edited Passing Strange, a long story by Ellen Klages about two women living in San Francisco, one a famous pulp artist of the time and one not. They were both very much in love, but being queer in the 1940s was a fraught and difficult thing, and being together was even more difficult, if not almost impossible, and certainly dangerous. The story moved through time, from present day San Francisco and back to the ’40s, giving us an overview of how their relationship developed and evolved, how the world responded to it in different times, and whom it affected. It was, and is, quite marvelous. And then a year or so later another, not completely different story came across my desk. Ian McDonald’s Time Was

is the story of two men during World War II who fall in love but, following a military experiment gone awry, are left falling through time. They leave messages for one another in books, meet up years apart in strange ways, and are ever lost. Both of these stories left a nagging feeling in me. There were more stories to be told, more romances to be allowed to unfold. And the more I thought about it, the more great stories and movies came to mind that sat in exactly this space. The film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic Bid Time Return, Somewhere in Time, had something of the right feel, and inspired this book’s title. So too Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time, the perennial classic Groundhog Day, and books like Robert Nathan’s Jennie, Ken Grimwood’s Replay, and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander. So, I did what I tend to do in these circumstances. I reached out to writers around the world and asked them for their time travel romances, their stories of love lost and found as time slips away.

And I was not disappointed.

Someone in Time features sixteen stories, fourteen original to this book and two that are long-standing favorites of mine. Ellen Klages’s ‘Time Gypsy’ was published in a landmark book of queer science fiction, Bending the Landscape, back in 1999 and was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and long-listed for the Tiptree, so I knew it belonged here. Elizabeth Hand’s ‘Kronia’ is something else again, a short tale that takes a romance and shatters it through time around the events of 9/11. These two wonderful tales are joined by stories of scientists falling forward and backward in time, using both elaborate machines and something not a lot unlike the dreaming of those classic tales of the 19th century to visit alternate versions of the past, to touch people who would otherwise be out of reach, and to join them together. Some of the stories are funny, some are sad and poignant, some are tales of fresh love and some of love forever lost, but they all are rather wonderful.

No editor should single out favorites, and I won’t do that here, but I was honestly delighted as the stories came through, one by one, over a series of months through our pandemic year of 2020, and was able to fall back in time to ancient England to see a heart broken, and then could fly far forward in time to see love blossom anew. Romance itself is something that’s open to interpretation. There are straightforward matters of the heart and there are literary and scientific romances of many kinds. What you will mostly find here, sometimes unexpectedly and delightfully, is a mix—matters of the heart blending with matters of the world, as they do.

For the most part, though, I think you will find, as I did, stories that delight. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Jonathan Strahan

Perth, Western Australia

May 2021

I selected this particular extract because of how it gives you a wonderful overview of the collection whilst dipping into discussing the types of stories you’ll find inside “Someone in Time”. It is a wonderfully lovely cross-section of time narratives and I am hopeful to find myself able to enjoy each of them for the message and story they convey once I move into reading them next month after Wyrd And Wonder.

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This blog tour is courtesy of:

Someone in Time blog tour banner provided by Lola's Blog Tours and is used with permission.Be sure to click the banner to visit the rest of the tour route!

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I enjoy being a hostess for:

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 I look forward to reading your thoughts & commentary!
Be sure to leave a comment for the author as well.

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NOTE: Similar to blog tours wherein I feature book reviews, book spotlights (with or without extracts), book announcements (or Cover Reveals) – I may elect to feature an author, editor, narrator, publisher or other creative person connected to the book, audiobook, Indie film project or otherwise creative publishing medium being featured wherein the supplemental content on my blog is never compensated monetarily nor am I ever obligated to feature this kind of content. I provide (98.5%) of all questions and guest topics regularly featured on Jorie Loves A Story. I receive direct responses back to those enquiries by publicists, literary agents, authors, blog tour companies, etc of whom I am working with to bring these supplemental features and showcases to my blog. I am naturally curious about the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of stories and the writers who pen them: I have a heap of joy bringing this content to my readers. Whenever there is a conflict of connection I do disclose those connections per post and disclose the connection as it applies.

Fun Stuff for Your Blog via pureimaginationblog.com{Sources: Book Cover for “Someone in Time”, synopsis, author biography and photograph (of Ren Hutchings), the extract from “Someone in Time”, blog  tour banner and host badge were provided by Lola’s Blog Tours and are being used with permission. Post dividers by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Tweets were embedded due to codes provided by Twitter. Blog graphics created by Jorie via Canva: #SciFiSundays banner as well as the Comment Box Banner.}

Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2022.

I am socially bookish and tweet my readerly life

About jorielov

I am self-educated through local libraries and alternative education opportunities. I am a writer by trade and I cured a ten-year writer’s block by the discovery of Nanowrimo in November 2008. The event changed my life by re-establishing my muse and solidifying my path. Five years later whilst exploring the bookish blogosphere I decided to become a book blogger. I am a champion of wordsmiths who evoke a visceral experience in narrative. I write comprehensive book showcases electing to get into the heart of my reading observations. I dance through genres seeking literary enlightenment and enchantment. Starting in Autumn 2013 I became a blog book tour hostess featuring books and authors. I joined The Classics Club in January 2014 to seek out appreciators of the timeless works of literature whose breadth of scope and voice resonate with us all.

"I write my heart out and own my writing after it has spilt out of the pen." - self quote (Jorie of Jorie Loves A Story)

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Posted Sunday, 29 May, 2022 by jorielov in #SciFiSundays, Blog Tour Host, Book | Novel Extract, Book Spotlight, Lola's Blog Tours, Science Fiction, Space Opera




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