51 pages • 1 hour read
Emma StraubThis Time Tomorrow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Emma Straub and Peter Straub
Straub is the daughter of author Peter Straub. Her literary inheritance influences her own work, though she and her father write within different genres. Peter Straub was a famous writer of supernatural and horror stories. His most successful novels are Ghost Story, Julia, and The Talisman, the latter of which he cowrote with the iconic horror author Stephen King.
Ghost Story, published in 1979, became a bestseller and was adapted into a popular film, cementing Peter Straub’s reputation and fame. In This Time Tomorrow, Alice’s father, Leonard, is a science-fiction author whose success mirrors that of Peter Straub’s with Ghost Story. Twice, Peter Straub won the esteemed Bram Stoker award. At the time of his death in 2022, Peter Straub was a legendary supernatural and horror writer. Leonard’s novel, Time Brothers, is also a bestseller that is popularized through a successful and long-running television series. Thus, Straub models her character’s literary success on that of her father’s.
Straub has written about how, as her father was dying in the hospital, she took comfort in his novel The Talisman, in which a boy is afraid of his mother dying. Her fears about her own father’s mortality inform This Time Tomorrow, in which the central protagonist, Alice, uses time travel to try to save her father from dying. This Time Tomorrow is a fictionalized memoir of Straub’s own experiences watching her beloved father die and a celebration of the bond between father and daughter.
Straub’s exploration of time travel in This Time Tomorrow is a departure from the rest of her novels, which are contemporary pieces of fiction about family, suburbia, and marriage. Though she grew up with a horror writer for a father, Straub’s novels are more realistic images of contemporary American life; the twist of time travel in This Time Tomorrow emphasizes the novel as an homage to her late father.
Literary Context: Time-Travel Fiction
This Time Tomorrow makes several allusions to movies about time travel, highlighting the ongoing interest in the concept. Because the awareness of human mortality makes people question the value and authenticity of their lives, the idea of time travel has long engaged society as an imaginative way of becoming different—ideally better—versions of ourselves.
Charles Dickens popularized the trend of time travel in literature with his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, in which ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future take the miserly creditor Ebenezer Scrooge on a journey through time to confront the realities of his past in order to be a better person in the future. His odyssey gave currency to the idea of examining one’s past to understand the development of personality.
Mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court uses time travel to investigate the clash between science and superstition by way of transporting a 19th-century engineer to sixth-century England, using then-modern knowledge to expose the fraudulence of sorcery and the injustice of the feudal system.
In 1895, H. G. Wells published The Time Machine, launching an entire genre of science fiction in which a device makes consistent time travel possible and coining the phrase “time machine.” The protagonist’s journey—during which he witnesses the disintegration of Earth and society 800,000 years into the future—provides a social critique about humankind’s ability to destroy the planet. The Time Machine combines time-travel fiction with dystopia.
Once 19th-century novels popularized the idea of time travel, it became a common trope in science fiction and fantasy. In the 1980s, the massively popular film franchise Back to the Future borrowed ideas of time travel from The Time Machine. Written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale and starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, Back to the Future throws teenager Marty McFly back in time to 1955. He inadvertently prevents his parents from falling in love, which threatens his own existence. Back to the Future uses time travel to highlight the idea that seemingly small events can lead to larger consequences in the future.
This Time Tomorrow is not necessarily a science-fiction novel, but it borrows the trope of time travel from the genre. As in the novel’s science-fiction predecessors, time traveling allows Leonard and Alice to experiment with the events of their lives and get to know themselves in deeper ways. Leonard is a science-fiction author of two pieces of time-travel fiction, connecting Straub’s novel to the philosophies of imagination and liminality that characterize science fiction and time-travel fiction.
