There is no single archetype of the female time traveler. She may be a young newlywed on her honeymoon, or a septuagenarian acting as a secret government weapon. She is black, or white, or from a future less concerned with skin color (but concerned with plenty otherwise). She is a writer, a river rehabilitator, a veteran of a World War. And no two travelers make the same passage through time and space: each of these intricate tales are brought about by everything from futuristic machinery to nanotechnology to magical stones.
Join us under the cut to meet six timestream-hopping women who have left their mark on history!
Note: We’re limiting this list to lady time travelers found in the pages of books—between the Doctor, River Song, Missy, and a delightfully long role-call of companions, we wouldn’t have the time or space for anyone else!
Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser (Outlander by Diana Gabaldon)
While on her second honeymoon in the Scottish Highlands, British Army nurse Claire hears a strange buzzing at the standing stones at Craigh na Dun. When she touches one of the stones, it sends her back in time 200-odd years, from 1946 to 1743. As a woman traveling through an unfamiliar time and land alone, Claire has it pretty good as a nurse (and later doctor)—her hard-won skills on the front translate well to saving Jamie Fraser and other Highlanders from what could be fatal injuries, and earn her some measure of respect and worth within her new family. However, standing out like that also gets her branded a witch, kidnapped more times than we can count, and in constant danger of being sexually assaulted. And yet, she lives to save another life.
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Outlander
Alice Payne and Prudence Zuniga (Alice Payne Rides by Kate Heartfield)
Alice Payne Arrives introduced readers to two very different time travelers, separated by a century. In 1889, Major Prudence Zuniga has spent ten years attempting to change the murder-suicide of Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf and his lover—71 attempts at one small triumph in the time war between the “Farmers” and “Guides” in 2020. But she will need to stop obsessing over single points in history and instead consider a strategy that will eliminate the tug-of-war altogether… and that strategy means a new player, in the form of 1788 highway thief Alice Payne, a.k.a. The Holy Ghost.
Then again, considering that Alice’s adventures open the second installment with a kidnapped Arthur of Brittany and smallpox in 1780, and Prudence scrambling to keep these weapons out of “Misguided” hands in 2145, guns-blazing Alice may wind up changing the course of history more than Prudence ever suspected. Then again, while their approaches to time travel vary drastically, Alice and Prudence are surprised to find enough in common with one another that one has to wonder just how tangled up their timelines are…
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Alice Payne Rides
Dana Franklin (Kindred by Octavia E. Butler)
It’s not a machine that transports young writer Edana from 1976 Los Angeles to an 1815 Baltimore slave plantation—nor secret technology, nor the magic of standing stones. It is simply the pull of the past, in the form of dizzy spells that transport her, again and again, into key points in the life of a boy (and later man) named Rufus; and which also serve as her way back, as each encounter turns increasingly dire. Each jump into the past is an opportunity for Dana to save Rufus’ life—from drowning, from a fire, from malaria—in order to ensure her own existence in the present. But the price for each act of mercy grows increasingly steep, as Dana herself becomes enslaved and must weigh how much to meddle in the life of Alice Greenwood, a free black woman and her ancestor, as Rufus morphs from innocent child to sadistic master. While Dana has little control over what keeps sending her back, she takes control of her past, changing it from something that happens to her and her ancestors, to something on which she exerts influence instead.
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Kindred
Valentina Lidova (Permafrost by Alastair Reynolds)
Don’t let anyone tell you that time travel is a young woman’s pastime; Valentina, a seventy-something schoolteacher futilely teaching Earth’s final generation of children, joins project Permafrost, a group gathered to gamble humanity’s future on one last-ditch experiment. As the daughter of famed (and then infamous) mathematician Luba Lidova, Valentina had a front-row seat to her mother’s audacious discoveries about what would come to be known as Luba Pairs, twinned electrons able to connect over time and space. As it turns out, her mother was on the money: in 2080, Valentina and the other Permafrost “pilots” willingly allow neural nanotechnology into their brains and send time-probes into unwilling hosts in the past—hoping to take over host bodies in 2028 in order to make one small change that will save their bleak future. Becoming time-embedded is not for the feeble-minded.
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Permafrost
Minh (Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson)
For Minh, a “plague baby” who repairs rivers for a living in 2267, time travel is a whole bunch of tourism nonsense that stole all of the funding for her projects meant to save the world—the planet that she and her generation left their underground bunkers to try and return to its former condition. But once the Temporal Economic Research Node (TERN) was established, people in Minh’s time stopped caring about reversing their present ecological collapse, when instead they could distract themselves with trips to the glory days of the past. Minh sneers at time travel… until TERN becomes her source of funding, offering up the opportunity to survey the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers themselves… back in 2000 B.C.
Minh and her team’s exhaustive drafting of proposals, slashing through bureaucratic red tape, and dismantling of intimidating NDAs finally pays off with the kind of research project that she could never have dreamed of, but she’s too busy thinking about the rivers to consider what impact their job has on the people of Mesopotamia. That definitely wasn’t covered in the proposal, but this scientist is nothing if not adaptable. Oh, and did we mention that Minh is 80 and has prosthetic legs—six tentacle-like ones, to boot? That’s one badass time traveler who won’t be forgotten soon.
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Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach
Who are your favorite female time travelers?
All of Connie Willis’s time traveling historians are stone cold badasses. Nazi bombs exploding all over the place, business as usual.
Connie Willis? I mean, I’m glad there were a couple I hadn’t read yet, but why leave her amazing works out?
How about Alyx- from Joanna Russ’ Picnic on Paradise, etc.?
https://www.tor.com/2011/06/28/reading-joanna-russ-the-adventures-of-alyx-1967-1970/
Outlander, or as my coworker brands it, the “adultery fantasy.”
Eleanor Louise Jackson of Mary Robinette Kowal’s story “First Flight” definitely qualifies as badass female time traveler who gets the job done.
https://www.tor.com/2009/08/25/first-flight/
I’m rather fond of Madeline Maxwell from Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St Mary’s series, although to be fair she does try not to leave too much of a mark…
Kage Baker’s Mendoza. Despite being sidetracked she always has her work to fall back on, even when exiled Way Way Back. Have another theobromos bar.
I’ll put in a good word for Carol McCullough, from Ellen Klages’ “Time Gypsy”. Talk about a slow burn!
Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series ….. the heroine mostly jumps in and out of books but in some key instances she is involved in time travel . And it is a truly wonderful series.
Shannon Moss from The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch is a total badass. She’s NCIS and investigates crimes committed by Navy personnel who are assigned to a covert time travel project. She uses the same time travel technology to jump back and forth from her present to the past as the investigation goes on. Oh, and the case she’s working may hold the key to an extinction event that the covert time travel project is trying to understand/prevent, which is moving closer and closer to Shannon’s time.
Kivrin Engle of Doomsday Book fame, although she was basically covered by some of the previous commenters. Hallie Angelopoulos from Paris Adrift by E.J. Swift. Wanda Tamberly of the Time Patrol, who was a total badass even as a mere (kidnapped) civilian in The Year of the Ransom.
John Birmingham’s A Girl in Time series is a lot of fun. It does have its faults, such as dated slang, or incorrect assumptions about what Cady McCall does for a living (she’s a punk rock app developer), but the stories themselves are a lot of fun and Birmingham has prior experience writing bad-ass female time-travelers in his Axis of Time trilogy.
Rebecca Carnes, from “Arc Riders” and Arc Riders: Fourth Rome” by David Drake and Janet Morris. Carnes is an alternate history Vietnam-era medic plucked out of her time line, who joins a team of time traveling anti-revisionists. The other two women on her team kick ass too.
David Drake has his particular style, but I think his two novels with Janet Morris add additional dimension that make them some of his/their best work.
When I think about time traveling women at all realistically, I get depressed. It’s hard enough for a guy, to keep from being enslaved or (depending on the type of society he lands in) thrown in the booby hatch. On the other hand, a woman is less likely to be killed out of hand — though she may wish she had been.
I was going to cite a particularly interesting novel about a woman who lands in 16th century Spain, but I haven’t been able to find the author or title, so far.
While I was looking for it, however, I turned up this authoritative disquisition on the subject:
“4 Ways Time Travel Sucks For Women (You Never Realized)” http://www.cracked.com/blog/you-cant-bring-tampons-girls-guide-to-time-travel
No-one has mentioned Miriam Beckstein from the Merchant Princes series?
British Arny chrononaut Hilary Bond, in Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships (a sequel to The Time Machine) is horribly burned and stranded with her command tens of millions of years in the past. The colony she founds eventually grows into an interplanetary civilization; and (the result of a midnight dalliance) she has billions of descendants.
How about Lunzie Mespil from Anne McCaffrey’s Ireta series? Lunzie is less a time traveler than an unfortunate user of suspended animation but what’s the difference? Lunzie’s a cerrified badass and as hard as acclimating to all those changes are, she never gives up.
Also, Marygay Potter from Joe Haldeman’s Forever War should qualify. An elite genius soldier at the beginning, she and Mandela are the only two to survive the due to their brains, guts, ability to adapt, and unshakeable love for each other. Marygay is no Mary Sue and remains a hardcore soldier. Her love for Mandela makes her makes her tougher and stronger; no shrinking violet, she.
@4/Austin – yes, that sounds a pretty accurate high concept. I’ve never read the books or watched the series because I know I’ll find it hard to sympathise with someone who’ll abandon their marriage vows. I’m sure there’s a suitable amount of angst before she gives up on her husband in favour of Jamie, but all the synopsis mention that she’s not just on holiday, but on honeymoon when she’s sent back.
Akalya from Shanna Lauffey’s Time Shifters series is definitely my favorite. She’s intelligent, independent and she makes use of her time shifting abilities in ways I would. Plus her caring side comes out, especially in the later novels and makes her an easily likeable person I could identify with.
The new Bill and Ted film is supposed to feature their daughters (which made me realise the Little Bill and Little Ted in the last one are only genderised by their nick names). Hopefully they’ll join the others mentioned here.
Louise Baltimore?
@21: … of John Varley’s “Air Raid”, and the book and movie Millennium that followed. I actually started to put that in, but it was erased in a glitch and I never put it back again.
@20: No doubt, this time around, the dudettes will kidnap Cleopatra, Margaret Thatcher, and Hildegard of Bingen. And they’ll play mahjong with Mother Nature …
Don’t forget Una Persson, the ultra-cool time traveling adventurer-agent-revolutionary who shows up in quite a few of the multiverse stories of Michael Moorcock — the Cornelius books, the Dancers at the End of Time series, the Oswald Bastable trilogy, and more.
@22/taras – I can’t argue with those selections, though Margaret Thatcher being included as a historical figure makes me feel old… :)
Which reminds me…
An obscure UK TV children’s sitcom called Palace Hill featured a teenage time-displaced Margaret “Maggie” Thatcher as a main cast member from the second season. Made in the 1990’s, it was set in a contemporary high school full of anachronisms. Maggie (as befitting the label her older self earned as the “Iron Lady”) was a no-nonsense, take charge scientist.