A Twist on Time (Smoking Pen Press June 2025)

This book is part of the publisher’s Read on the Run series of anthologies “with stories that are short enough to finish while you’re going about your daily business, but long enough to tell a good tale.” It’s a wonderful offering for busy readers who might not have the time or attention span for a full novel but still want to enjoy some good fiction.

Just when you thought every variation on the concept of time travel had been done, along come these 21 tales to prove otherwise. In most of these stories, the time traveler is not in charge: they did not build the time machine or even understand how it works; or they are time traveling without warning (or machine); or they have ended up somewhere they did not intend. The stories are all clever and entertaining. I was particularly taken with “Prep. Cook. Serve.” by MD Harrold, in which a food-truck operator is directed by time travelers to poison a politician to prevent a future disaster; “The D. B. Cooper Chronicles” by Edmund Fines, in which we find out what really happened after Cooper disappeared; and “On the Night of the Star Walker” by Laurel Hanson, in which a time traveler accidentally portals into a fantasy world.

Highly recommended for all fans of time-travel fiction.

Full disclosure: this anthology includes my most-submitted, most-rejected short story, “FuturePast Associates”. I was astonished and delighted to find it was the first story in the anthology!