84 books like Up the Line

I was a foreign correspondent seven time zones from home when my father died of a sudden heart attack. My grief mixed with guilt for never having sat down with him to unravel his vague vignettes about life and loss in the Holocaust. I wondered, how did he survive when so many perished? How much depended on resilience, smarts, or dumb luck? As reporters do, I started digging. I uncovered a Nazi paper trial that tracked his life from home, through ghettos, slave labor, concentration camps, death marches, and more. The tattered documents revealed a man very different from the quiet, quintessential Type-B Dad I knew…or thought I knew. 

I've been an avid reader of SF in general, and its sub-genre of time-travel, for most of my life, and have tackled this topic in my own writings as well. Time-travel tales often deal with inherent paradoxes, such as the Grandfather Paradox, which asks: If you go back in time and kill your grandfather, would you then never be born and therefore never commit the murder? If so, then your grandfather lives and you were born and . . . Such paradoxes boggle the mind and provide fascinating territory for SF authors to explore. 

For many people, reading has been a lifesaver for their mental health. I didn't begin reading until my 20s. But I wish I had had those windows into other realities when I was younger. Having a difficult childhood molds our adult lives, and therefore we can still be haunted by childhood memories. Reading can help us see other worlds and other people, and it can ignite our imagination. Growing up in a small fishing town in Scotland is the perfect backdrop for imagination, with coastlines lined with dark, boisterous waters and castles steeped in battles, folklore, and intrigues of the past. All this has given way to my writing. 

At one time, whenever I heard "science fiction," my mind would jump to spaceships, aliens, and dystopian worlds. So, when it came to categorizing my time travel novel, I was surprised to learn that I’d unwittingly penned a sci-fi book. I initially resisted this classification since my story has more of a domestic thriller vibe, and the characters only travel a few years, not centuries, through time. However, I’ve since accepted that time travel is science fiction. The books on my list prove that sci-fi doesn’t necessarily mean hardcore science. It can have a more universal appeal, exploring themes of love, loss, and destiny without a time machine or extraterrestrial in sight.

I’ve been fascinated by science and space since I was a child and naturally gravitated toward science fiction. In many respects, it was a form of escapism, as I didn’t enjoy school. I always preferred escaping into another world or being taken on a journey to another world. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized that most great science fiction is a commentary on our own world and the issues we face daily. Science fiction, more than any other genre, does a better job of exploring and dissecting aspects of our world, which in turn helps us better understand our world and our relationship with it.

My great interests have been ships and space travel, and if one takes time to consider the similarities the parallels stand out. Ships, especially submarines, travel in a medium and through an environment that is hostile to human life. In space travel, the ‘ship’ becomes the only habitat in which we can survive for any extended period, leaving it without a space suit is a fatal move. I cannot claim to be an expert in closed environments, but it's a subject that has fascinated me throughout my life. Every ‘biosphere’ is unique and incredibly complex and depends on the symbiosis of an enormous number of living creatures right down to bacteria and even viruses. 

I am an author of science fiction, as well as nonfiction, a singer/songwriter, and a Professor at Fordham University, and time travel has played a role in all of these endeavors.  I’ve written four novels and numerous stories which feature time travel, several songs (for example, “If I Traveled to the Past”), and talk about it in my classes.  The opportunity of going back in history and stopping a bad thing has always intrigued me, as has traveling to the future to see how things turn out. The paradoxes that can get in the way of that make thinking and writing and talking and singing about it even more fun.

I’ve always believed a story should be world changing and epic on some level. Perhaps on a personal level, perhaps in the actual sense of world changing. Whether it’s for my readers of a short story, the players in a tabletop role playing game I’m running, or the arc of a novel. Some of these books help form that idea, and others supported it later in my life. I love it when a tale shakes my world—in addition to the world of the characters—and makes me question what I believe. With a doctorate in metaphysics and a love of fantasy and sci-fi, I’m always looking for ways to shake up my worldview!

Every morning when I sit at my computer, I’m reminded by a post-it note stuck to my monitor that my self-ordained purpose is to “bring readers joy.” Like many, I escaped into books as a child, and I’ve been seeking out stories that encapsulate wonder, delight, and, most importantly, love ever since. I began my self-publishing journey in 2020 and am thrilled to have found my place in the fantasy romance genre, writing romcoms with a heaping spoonful of ridiculous magic. I’ve written a number of standalone novels as well as a (sub)urban fantasy series, Vacancy, and a traditional fantasy romance series with a satirical twist, Villains & Virtues.

Science fantasy uniquely combines elements of science fiction (advanced technology, futuristic settings) with those of fantasy (magic, mythological creatures, and supernatural elements). This fusion creates rich and versatile storytelling that often comes with a deep sense of mystery beyond what science fiction or fantasy achieves on their own.

This blend also requires greater “buy-in” from the reader to believe in the world we’re being presented. As readers, we often accept dwarves in fantasy with little to no explanation. We do the same with spaceships in science fiction. But dwarves in spaceships require truly creative storytelling to achieve a much higher buy-in threshold. The author who can pull this off has my attention.