Currently, I am in throes of writing book #3, THE WITHERWOOD CHOIR, and by #3, I actually mean book #4 (because the first book I wrote, THE LAST GODDESS, absorbed its twin in the womb and popped out with two wobbly heads and a single spine while weighing in at a hefty 190k words). It occurred to me the other day that a particular conceit unites the first and third books, despite the first being a fantasy/romantasy that takes place in Gothic-era Rome, and the third being a magical realism novel set in slightly futuristic Appalachia. I’m also not the first to use this conceit, which I would argue could be classified as its own subgenre.
The term I’ve coined for the subgenre they inhabit is “time capsule.”
Both books riff on the idea of opening a time capsule and drawing out elements of the past into a new time period. With THE LAST GODDESS and THE WITHERWOOD CHOIR, these two books run with the idea of a particular society being dragged forward by several centuries and confronting the unique challenges of that moment in time.
In THE LAST GODDESS, the gods of the Roman Pantheon continued their lineages by birthing new generations of deities, who now rule over 1300s Europe as the bubonic plague chews through mortalkind. Meanwhile, the lazy and irreverent granddaughter of Bacchus (Dionysus) faces her own mortality unless she wins tributes from a dying public, who blame this iteration of the Roman Pantheon for all their boils, fevers, and dead family members. The goddess and her hyper-devoted priest must choose between keeping the old norms of sacred hedonism versus the sacrifice demanded of those in power during times of crisis.
In THE WITHERWOOD CHOIR, the descendants of the Lost Colony of Roanoke have secluded themselves deep in the Appalachian Mountains for the past five centuries, where they’ve been cooking up something deeply occult and world-transforming. That is until, a conspiracy theorist podcaster kidnaps one of their members, propelling her out into the 22nd century world, where she’s forced to confront what she’s spent her whole life summoning.
(In a more esoteric way, my second novel, ALL IS WELL—currently out on submission!—hints at the time capsule subgenre by taking place a millennium into the future, but with a society that’s forced to rebuild from the basics—and those basics look a hell of a lot like our puerile political struggles of today.)
Notably, time capsule stories do not feature time travel; instead, they take alternative history (or myth) and find excuses to propel the outcomes of those events into the future. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle stands out as one of the clearest examples of the time capsule subgenre: it not only explores alternative history (what if the Axis Powers won World War II?) but extrapolates the outcomes into the 1960s, showcasing how the Swinging Sixties would culturally and politically be different and eerily the same. Certain steampunk works come to mind as another example of a time capsule genre. I’m sure there are many more examples, but I confess I cannot think of many that I would call time capsule rather than simply alternative history or time travel (such as the Outlander series).
If you can think of any other examples of time capsule stories, please let me know in the comments below. Or tell me what you think of demarcating a subgenre between alternative history and time travel—is it truly its own thing?