It occurred to me that most time travel stories are told from the point of view of the time traveler.
Offhand, I’ve thought of only two counter-examples where the point of view characters are those people who have been living in the era the time traveler(s) have travelled to; Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove and Vintage Season by C.L. Moore (along with its sequel In Another Country by Robert Silverberg).
What are some other examples?
I’m mostly interested in longer works, like novellas, novels, and series.
And I’m looking for works in which the primary characters are non-time travelers. I’m sure there are many works with are primarily about the time travelers but have some secondary non-time traveler characters as well.
“Lost and Found” by Phyllis Eisenstein, where time travelers show up in a college student’s closet. It was made into a short film in the 1985 version of The Twilight Zone. George R.R. Martin adapted the script.
“Dark Interlude” by Mack Reynolds and Fredric Brown sort of qualifies; it’s mostly about how a couple of men in the 50s south react to a time traveler. We do see the traveler’s point of view, but the story is focused on the two men. Pretty intense story.
The Traveler, by our own Stephen Wilk (@CalMeacham), is a fine example of this. The viewpoint character is an urchin in ancient Rome who ends up befriending the titular time traveler, and helping him to repair his machine so he can go home.
Spider Robinson’s “Time Pressure” is a novel about a hippie in the early 1970s who meets someone who turns out to be a time traveller (this is actually a specialty of Robinson - he’s got several stories about people from the present as main characters meeting time travellers)
The title is a dead giveaway. The Time Traveler’s Wife qualifies. It’s written in alternating first person between the time traveler and…you guessed it.
Would it be fair to say that THE TERMINATOR is more about Sarah Connor dealing with time travelers than, uh, some time travelers dealing with Sarah Connor?
Looper sort of counts ish, maybe? The protagonist and hero/antihero (let’s not get into that discussion again ) is young Joe, who is definitely not a time traveller. The antagonist who he’s attempting to track down and kill is a time traveller though.
Where it gets tricky is they are the same person and he’s trying to track down and kill himself from the future
Not an answer to your question, but Vintage Season is by Henry Kuttner and his wife C L Moore, who frequently wrote in collaboration and often under a pseudonym, most commonly “Lewis Padgett”. Vintage Season is one of the most beautiful time-travel stories – and indeed among the most beautiful sci-fi stories of any kind – ever written. Kuttner died tragically of a heart attack at the young age of 42.
In the case of Vintage Season the pseudonym used was Lawrence O’Donnell. And while it’s true that Kuttner and Moore used it as a joint pseudonym, in the case of Vintage Season it’s believed that Moore wrote the story.
That may well be. Not to sound sexist, but Kuttner tended to be the one who contributed hard-edged science and cynicism to their stories, while Moore contributed the emotional element, which is why their collaborations worked so well. Vintage Season is overwhelmingly emotional and about the psyche of the inhabitants of the distant future (how did time travel actually work? Who cares!), and I can well imagine that Moore had a major part in its creation.
The movie Time Bandits starts out like that. Kevin is an ordinary kid in 80s England until the time travelers almost literally fall into his lap. He thereafter gets dragged along on their time-traveling adventures and becomes a time traveler himself. But at the end, the adventures conclude and Kevin goes back to not being a time traveler. And the movie more or less sticks with him as the point-of-view character.
It doesn’t fit the model entirely but it’s sort of a cousin, I think.
) is young Joe, who is definitely not a time traveller. The antagonist who he’s attempting to track down and kill is a time traveller though.