How Author Audrey Niffenegger Predicted The Future With Her Sequel To The Time Traveler’s Wife
As – the follow-up to Audrey Niffenegger’s global 2003 bestseller, The Time Traveler’s Wife – is published, the author reflects on how the events she wrote in the future-set book came to pass in real life.
Art feels like the time in which it’s made. Even a novel set in the future has a strong flavour of the present; I knew this before I began writing , just as I knew I couldn’t predict the future and therefore I was doomed to watch my book become ever more wildly incorrect as time passed. Strangely, the opposite happened: I wrote things and watched in horror as they occurred in real life.
I began writing in November, 2012. It was going to be a dystopian time travel novel, set in the past and the future, featuring Alba DeTamble, daughter of Henry and Clare, the titular characters of my first novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife. I finished it thirteen years later, and it did turn out to be all of those things, though not in the ways I’d expected.
At the end of 2012, when I started to imagine Alba’s life, my own mood was rather cheery; I had just met my future husband, Eddie Campbell. The zeitgeist then was a great deal less glum than it is today; Barack Obama had just been re-elected and good things seemed possible. But when I tried to envision the future, climate change was the only obvious inevitable, the thing that will shape everything else. I felt timid. Everything I wrote seemed overly pessimistic.
Alba was born in 2001, a few days before 9/11, so when I started to write her book she was a child, only eleven years old. I had never meant to write a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife; that was Clare and Henry’s story and it was complete in my mind. In that world, time travel is a genetic disorder. Time travellers lose their grip on the present and find themselves in another, random time, naked because nothing that is not part of their body can travel with them. I worried that a defenceless young girl traveling naked, randomly, would probably just disappear forever. I didn’t want Alba to be a victim. I had to give her shelter, a place that was hers, a house that would be there across decades of increasingly dire weather that she could travel to and be safe. Once I had invented Alba’s Yellow House, it was easy to give Alba two husbands (one in her present, one who is a time traveler) and a chosen family of musicians, political activists, artists, hackers, and assorted oddballs.
The book opens with a Boxing Day party. Alba and her friend Nadia are rushing to get to the party; this fictional Chicago is under curfew, and it becomes evident that there’s conflict between the city and federal governments, and that Alba and her friends fear the authorities; the real purpose of the party is to trap neo-Nazis who have been protected by the police. I wrote this in 2013, and was startled in 2017 by the rise of the far right, in 2020 by the City of Chicago using police to kettle protesters, and then again in 2025 when ICE was illegally detaining and disappearing both citizens and residents without cause, on a massive scale, in Chicago and Minneapolis and elsewhere. When I wrote this scene I thought, it can’t happen here, but alas, it can, and it’s trying to.
I did not see the pandemic coming, but when it did I realised that my story had a pandemic-sized hole in its timeline; COVID slotted in easily. I spent those years sitting at home, working on the novel, grateful to be forced to think about what would come afterward, how people would be affected by so much death. Much of my work has to do with love and loss, and parts of this book follow Clare and Alba as they grieve for Henry, who died at the end of The Time Traveler’s Wife. Time travel can be like memory. Because time travel distorts the finality of death, Alba is sometimes able to see her father in the past, but Clare finds herself alone for the first time in her life. My own father died in 2016, and I found myself in the depths of missing him as I wrote Clare and Alba missing Henry. Nothing happens in a straight line, everything is an echo.
There is a character in who is an AI. I created this character in 2015, and happily plunged into reading science fiction and papers by computer scientists about how a plausible AI might be constructed. Everyone seemed to agree that AI was decades away from being useful in ordinary life – but recently AI has become unavoidable, annoying, even frightening, and no matter how much I wish it would go away it only gets bigger. The AI in is an ideal version, though still terrifying. She is trying, with her machine compassion, to save the world.
Because I spent such a ridiculously long time writing more of the future had time to become the past, and I could incorporate it into the plot and take out things that weren’t working. In the book, Joe Biden never becomes president (I don’t name many real life politicians, so this may not be easy to spot). There are other small discrepancies, but I wanted to maintain a useful mix of the fictional and non-fictional. Alba and her family and friends live in a world where time travel is real, fascism is a looming problem, and being able to travel to the future is not going to solve climate change because it is already too late.
Throughout the book, people fall in love, make music and art, help each other in ways large and small, have children, and hope for the future. It’s a long book, full of beauty and devastation, surprises and promises kept. I mean for and The Time Traveler’s Wife to be one entity, not a before and after, but an all-at-once.
When I began writing I could not have predicted the world we find ourselves in today. It would have seemed mean and absurd to punish real people with a worldwide pandemic, fascists, Trump, AI that uses enormous amounts of energy and steals people’s jobs, etc. I was hoping for a cure for cancer, cold fusion, and dogs and cats that live as long as humans. Maybe I can bring all that into being by working it into my next book. Or maybe I’ll just write about peace, love, and understanding. I’m not asking for much.
Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger is published on 13 October by Jonathan Cape
