Emily Blaisdell Sent Us All Back in Time and Took Our Present to the Brink.  It was ‘Just for Fun.’ 

 In an e-mail interview, the debut novelist shared how she imagined a coming dystopian future and linked it to the recent past. Your TimeLiner is boarding now!

What books are on your nightstand?

The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli — It’s a masterful explanation of quantum thinking about time.  I keep going back to it, hoping I’ll understand more.  I usually don’t.  Then I have Fear Stalks the Land, a great collection of writings and sketches by my faves — Radiohead.  And Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, the latest history of my new hometown.  Oh, and always one Harry P. book or another, which I read all cuddled up and missing my childhood.

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

My next novel.

What made you write TimeLiners?

This is a familiar story now that the book is doing well, but here I go again.  I was at 37,000 feet, flying home from the Bay Area, when I thought, “What if, instead of flying to LaGuardia, we were all on a plane to 1975?  And we had to change in 1992.”  And from there, I ran with it, just for fun.

What three time travel books do you recommend?

Time Travel: A History, by James Gleick is a wonderful survey of the genre.  My dream is to have Gleick do a sequel and include TimeLiners.  Of course, A Wrinkle in Time is the best intro for teens.  Just swept me away.  And then there’s The Time Machine which no one reads anymore but they should because honestly, how many books have single-handedly jumpstarted a new way of looking at something so primordial as time?

How do you organize your books?

Chaotically.  They’re strewn from one end of my apartment to another, with rearrangement to make space for Octavia and Ottessa, my beloved cats.

Describe your ideal reading experience.

On a train riding slowly through somewhere I wanted to go but turned out to be kind of boring. So I have nothing else to do but read.

What kind of reader were you as a child?

Voracious.  The Momster, as I call both my own mother and the mother figure in my novel, could hardly keep up with my steady diet of the printed word.  Libraries helped some.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

Easy.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  I got it at 15, exactly the right age to move beyond Harry P and it took me straight into the past, into an idyllic yet troubled life. And of course, into Brooklyn.  It’s probably why I live here now and not back in the Bay Area.  It’s probably also why so many characters in TimeLiners visit Brooklyn in the past.

What’s the last great book you read?

Also easy.  Swann’s Way.  Haven’t read any other Proust but he had me from “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”  And the end, where he goes back to Paris and sees for himself how time has changed — and spoiled — everything.  That sure stuck with me.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party.  Which writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

H.G. Wells, of course, because I simply have to know how he came up with THAT idea.  Does Einstein qualify as a writer?  He did pen a brief explanation of relativity and I want to watch him linger over the hors d’ouevres while I summon the nerve to ask him whether he can really “run like the wind” as I joked in TimeLiners.  And finally, just for fun, Oscar Wilde.  Or Dorothy Parker.  Wait, how about Vonnegut?  Ottessa Moshfegh?  No, she wouldn’t be any fun at all.  So maybe, time traveling again, myself as a ten-year-old? I promise to behave.