Do you ever feel like everything was better before? Actually, does anyone No feel this way? We all have a different “before” in mind — before the pandemic, before 2016, before the Internet, before the nuclear bomb, and so on, and so forth — but the consensus on this front seems to be almost universal. We’re all Tony Soprano, moving down the driveway, moving up The Star-Ledger (RIP print version, 1832-2025) And thinking: Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’ve finally arrived. the best is over.
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At the end of 2021 I began writing what will be my first novel, retroAnd I was alternately seduced and repulsed by how inevitable nostalgia had become, from pop culture to style to politics. Every movie was a sequel, every TV show was a reboot, every fashion trend was a revival. While people on the far right were promoting this insidious fantasy of the so-called good old days – before annoying innovations like civil rights and women’s empowerment – even my most progressive friends thought the future looked ominous and uninviting, an AI-saturated wildfire-scorched inferno where our every move will be monitored, gambled on, and monetized; Where everything we could buy would be both terrifying and devilishly expensive, sold to us through a subscription model, the price of which would increase with each passing month, until we were all dead.
Even though time travel as a genre plays with nostalgia, it is fundamentally optimistic about our future.
In my novel, a start-up called Retro promises salvation from a disappointing present and unpleasant future. Retro is a time travel agency that takes wealthy tourists on vacations to the past. Bachelor Parties in Woodstock! “’20’s for your twenties” birthday celebrations at Prohibition-era speakeasies! Concerts, sporting events, inaugurations, murders: bygone America is just a retro subway ride away. My heroine, Ash, is a struggling (read: unsuccessful) actress. Recently fired from her go-nowhere office gig, she gets a job as a time travel agent in retro, traveling one-percenters to the past. Used to guide the explorers.
Soon, Ash finds himself completely immersed in Retro’s dazzling offerings. it Is Wandering around in the past, being willing to drink five-cent sodas at drive-in movies, taking in the amazing natural beauty of America before it was desecrated by colonization and industry, and smoking cigarettes anywhere and everywhere all the time. Considering how bleak its future looks, the past is also very fascinating.
Time travel stories, especially about anything going Looking back, it seems to specifically reflect our collective despair about what will happen next, our shared certainty that things were better before. And some things really were! I want cars without touchscreens and a childhood without iPads; I hate QR code menus and dating apps and now you can’t meet people at the airport gate and hug them as soon as you get off the plane. Whenever I hear someone extolling the supposed virtues of AI I want to scream forever and ever.
Part of the fun of writing retro I was indulging in that fantasy and running towards the past, at least in my imagination. It was a means of going to a place I could never go in real life: the glory days of old. At times, I was mesmerized by the superficial-weird charm of the past. I enjoyed it all, even the things I actually experienced and found very annoying at the time, like dial-up Internet and T-9 text messaging.
But as I wrote, I had an unexpected thought: Even though time travel as a genre plays with nostalgia, it is fundamentally optimistic about our future.
Retro has a mantra: The timeline is flexible. It is a balm on the most obvious worry of any traveller: that if you go back in time, you will irreversibly change the course of history. Many time travel stories use this threat as a stake: we’re convinced that if we went to, say, 1773 and sneezed so much on a colonist, we’d change everything. That’s a stark contrast to our beliefs about the present, in which it often feels like nothing we do — organizing, protesting, raising money, voting, boycotting, withholding federal taxes, whatever — doesn’t matter. Which is the more powerful belief: that nothing we do matters, or that everything matters?
Ash is convinced of his cosmic irrelevance – and sometimes consoles it, sometimes self-soothes by telling himself that even if the future does Reach (she’s not holding her breath), “It will somehow be unrecognizable to him in the present – for example, on a burnt, uninhabited earth – and none of his choices, or his abstention from making a choice, which will become the functional equivalent of making a choice at a certain point not too far from today, will make no difference.” She knows, or thinks she knows, what things really matter in the grand scheme, and those things don’t include her: “The real history is what men did in public: inventing factory equipment, crashing the stock market, killing each other.”
The choice to bend this defensively is emotionally unbearable for Ash. It seems too risky to allow myself to entertain another possibility even for a moment. Hope invites disappointment, faith is just an illusion. Instead, she slowly and then completely succumbs to retro, where she can forget about the future and instead spend her Saturday nights dancing the pain away at Studio 54 in 1978, on that good Coke, before it was laced with fentanyl.
It’s impossible to tell a story involving time travel without grappling with the genre’s fervent belief in our ability to change our lives and the lives of everyone around us.
I found Ash’s perspective extremely relevant and in many ways, I still do. but my time retro Has given me a different perspective. I think it’s impossible to tell a story involving time travel without grappling with the genre’s fervent belief in our ability to change our lives and the lives of everyone around us.
Often, time travel stories present this promise as a warning. The Ray Bradbury classic, “A Sound of Thunder”, which popularized the notion of the butterfly effect, depends on a careless time traveler who goes off the beaten path in his cruel attempt to see a dinosaur up close. He returns to the present and finds that his carelessness has destroyed the English alphabet and subverted democracy, changing the outcome of the election.
I was drawn to a story about traveling to the past because of my own nostalgia, my longing for the way things were. But the breadth of genre fiction helped me see things differently. Freed from the constraints of literal reality, I found myself contemplating some less self-evident truths. Because it seems outrageous – the height of narcissism with a heavy dose of delusion – to think that every little thing we do affects every other thing. But there must be a reason we keep telling time travel stories like this, that we return to the notion that everything we do can be worthwhile, no matter how much current evidence suggests otherwise. I can’t believe I’m asking this, but I’m asking nonetheless: What if we are more hopeful than we think?
Depending on the design the current can vary painfully. All our social platforms are created by extremely antisocial people; The insidious penetration of AI into everything is fueled by those who insist that we are all better off without each other, and that an ideal day would be one in which a person would never need to talk to or even encounter another soul. But time travel emphasizes our profound interconnectedness. It argues that we matter to each other, whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not.
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retro by Jessica M. Goldstein is available from Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
