R.F. Kuang, Olivie Blake contemplate time travel in new stories
If “Katabasis” author R.F. Kuang could time travel, she’d want to be 18 years old at a Beatles concert.
Living in the ’60s is an enticing idea for Kuang, who’s known for fantasy books “Babel” and “The Poppy War” and dark publishing satire “Yellowface”. “I just think culture was better then,” she tells USA TODAY.
It’s a question I pose to both Kuang and author Olivie Blake, who is fresh off promoting her new cannibalistic romp “Girl Dinner.” Blake says she’d like to write some Federalist Papers.
We’re contemplating time travel just days after singer Janelle Monáe made headlines for claiming she could travel back to the 1970s to see David Bowie perform. It’s timely in other ways – Kuang and Blake are two of the contributing authors on “The Time Traveler’s Passport,” a new Amazon original short story collection out now.
Why time travel fiction is hot right now
The pair couldn’t have written more different stories for this collection, but that’s the beauty of a work so wide-ranging. Kuang’s story, “Making Space,” is a quiet meditation on motherhood and societal expectations of young women, sparked when a childless couple takes in a mysterious child. In Blake’s “All Manner of Thing Shall Be,” a group of vampire roommates, young and old, bicker and time travel via flamingo pink bus.
Time travel is the great equalizer, says Kuang – it levels the playing field between generations. Like “Back to the Future,” where else could you go back in time and see your parents when they were your age?
Kuang herself dreamed up “Making Space” after she got married, suddenly inundated with questions about when she planned to have kids. She doesn’t typically write short stories, but the short format gave her enough to “get it out of my system and then be totally unbothered by parenthood angst.”
She used to Christopher Nolan movies like “Interstellar,” “Inception” and “Tenant” as inspiration, but cites the “brilliant” Ray Bradbury as her primary inspiration. She admires his technique of using domestic dramas as a vehicle for bigger science fiction topics.
It “seems like it’s about the future, but rather is about fairly universal and timeless dynamics, little really geometric dramas that are going to be with us forever,” Kuang says.
Science fiction ‘feels like the most power we can grasp’
For Blake, who has explored time travel in other novels “Atlas Six” and “Alone With You in the Ether,” it’s all about her obsession with time loops. She thinks it’s an apt trope to explore the “sameness of culture” in the US.
“Is anything actually changing? Is there anything that we can aim for that is not capitalism? Is there anything that isn’t just the accumulation of aesthetic things?” Blake says. “If it just goes on forever, does it end up feeling like the most boring version of a (TikTok) ‘for you’ page?”
Science fiction, dystopian and fantasy are the genres often best suited to interrogate these big questions. They imagine how the world could change or, more often, how it could get worse. Blake finds an “inverse catharsis” in science fiction writing.
“We can see the writing on the wall. We are witnessing atrocity in real time, with no ability to do anything about it. And so it seems like the one thing that we can do is narratively hold someone accountable via thinly veiled allegory,” Blake says. “I need someone to acknowledge that all of this is wrong, and on some level, I want to see people fight back. … It feels like the most power we can grasp, the best we can do is make art about it.”
Kuang echoes the sentiment.
“You could end so many forms of preventable death and suffering like with the snap of these (billionaires’) fingers, and they don’t, because they’re so invested in a vision of the future that is accessible to a very select few,” Kuang says. “Everyone’s thinking right now about whose future matters and who takes responsibility for the present.”
R.F. Kuang teases ‘Babel’ sequel
Blake isn’t done with time travel any time soon, and already has a 2027 dystopian satire about meme archivists in the works.
Kuang is also game to write about time travel again, but in her sequel to “Babel,” her 2023 bestseller about Oxford, language and colonial resistance. She’s been thinking about it since she visited Pompeii last summer, struck by how well preserved the architecture and mosaics were. It’s given her a lasting “temporal vertigo.”
“I felt such a weird sense of disorientation, like if I just tried hard enough, I could reach out and touch somebody who was there,” Kuang says. “It’s so weird to me that time doesn’t function like distance. You can’t just cross it to touch somebody else. So I am sitting on this idea of talking back through time through the archives, because archives are time travel, right? Somebody writes a letter that’s not meant for you in the 1700s, you read it in 2025, you make meaning with it. That meaning has traveled across time, and it’s just insane that it just can’t happen the other way. You can’t send a letter to the past. I think you should.”
Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at [email protected].
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