The Time Travel Diaries
A humorous and sometimes romantic series of time-travel storiesA 21st-century science lecturer from Chichester.
A Victorian Cambridge graduate living in the Sussex Downs.
They meet by accident at a cricket match in 1873.
A Meeting That Should Never Have Happened
James Urquhart was not attempting to alter history.
He was photographing a butterfly on a hot summer’s day.
Elizabeth Bicester was not expecting visitors from the future.
She was watching a cricket match at Hamgreen, deep in the Sussex Downs.
Their meeting was brief, awkward, and socially disastrous.
If you encounter a Victorian lady at a cricket match,
it is best not to ask how many petticoats she is wearing,
nor remove your jacket, sit at her table in a T-shirt,
and help yourself to a cucumber sandwich.
James did all three.
A Phone That Shouldn’t Exist
In the confusion, James left his smartphone behind.
Recently repaired in a questionable Magic Shop in Charing Cross,
The phone turned out to be connected not only to the past, but also to the future.
This allowed Elizabeth, a Mathematical Tripos graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, to make contact.
Yes, even Victorians can learn to use a smartphone.
(And no, attending science lectures was not, as James insists, a means of meeting men without a chaperone.)
Love, Time, and Unintended Consequences
It took time, patience, and a great deal of discussion about manners before James and Elizabeth realised they came from different centuries.
It took longer still for them to fall in love.
Left alone, they would much prefer a quiet life
reading, watching television,
and avoiding unnecessary paradoxes.
Unfortunately,
their curiosity repeatedly draws them into adventures
involving misplaced technology, alternative timelines, the occasional Martian,
and an alarming tendency for H. G. Wells to appear
offering advice they didn’t know they needed.
The Discovery of the Diaries
Nothing would have been known of these events had Professor Rolleston
not discovered James and Elizabeth’s diaries clasped together
in the attic of Elizabeth’s home at Hamgreen.
After years spent deciphering them,
when he was not hunting fairies,
he compiled the entries into a narrative
that allows James and Elizabeth to tell their own story.
Begin the Diaries
The Time Travel Diaries
of
James Urquhart and Elizabeth Bicester
are available in
paperback and Kindle on Amazon
You can also explore:
- the books in reading order
- essays on time, Wells, Tesla, and Victorian science
- how the stories were developed and written
Begin your journey here:
- Start with Out of Time
- Meet James & Elizabeth
- Writing the Time Travel Diaries
Author
Bruce Macfarlane is the author of The Time Travel Diaries, shaped by a lifetime of scientific work, a love of early science fiction, and a nagging suspicion that time is up to something.
