Someone in Time

The 16 stories in this star-studded anthology, all but two original to this volume, inventively explore the science fictional possibilities of the time-travel romance. Strahan (The Book of Dragons) assembles a stellar lineup of talents who work through the potential paradoxes and syncopations of temporal travel, even as they suggest that love conquers all. Kindred scientific spirits from centuries apart find one another in Nina Allan’s “The Lichens,” while the lovers in Seanan McGuire’s “First Aid” meet when a glitch accidentally deposits a 22nd-century time traveler at a 20th-century Renaissance fair rather than in her intended destination of the Elizabethan era. In some stories, including Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s “Bergamot and Vetiver,” the method of travel is scientifically sophisticated, while others take unconventionally low-tech approaches: a traipse through an individual’s previous lives in Zen Cho’s “The Past Life Reconstruction Service” and an intense memory relived in Jeffrey Ford’s “The Golden Hour.” Meanwhile, both Margo Lanagan in “The Place of All the Souls” and Sameem Siddiqui in “Timed Obsolescence” consider the complications that ensue when characters with partners and families in their own time encounter their soulmates in other eras. This does the subgenre proud. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary. (May)