Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
You have your time machine. You have, presumably, a good idea of when and where you want to go with it. You have, presumably, not just switched on the machine and hurried right off1.
It’s a good thing you didn’t. You wouldn’t want to go on a regular transcontinental trip on the spur of the moment, would you? You would have lots of preparations to make beforehand, starting with travel reservations, lodging arrangements, your passport and visa. A tourist’s guide to your destination would be very useful, as would a phrasebook for the local language, unless you took a course in that language instead. You’d want to be certain you had enough funds for your planned activities and for contingencies; you’d want to be sure you brought enough clothes, and a reliable supply of any medicines you take.
You won’t need to use that admittedly less than exhaustive list when you go traveling in time. Your list will be much longer.
There will be lots of work involved in being relatively safe and functional in the society you visit. Getting exposed as a time traveler is a concern, but it’s not the greatest one. If you don’t fit in well enough, you could provoke ridicule, revulsion, or outright rejection of your presence, quite possibly violent. Short of that, you might cause simple incomprehension, and subsequent exclusion from any of the normal activities you hoped to participate in.
You will be facing a different language2, different laws (within a different system of law), different customs and cultures, a different way of seeing the world. It will be so different that you would need to travel great distances in your own era to experience the like. As a time traveler, you may not have to move an inch.
If you get in trouble, there will be nobody to help you. There’s no embassy or consulate you can visit in an age when your nation doesn’t yet exist. Should you be robbed, or injured, or injured while being robbed, there will be no emergency services you’d consider worthy of the name to aid you. Even if you’re visiting the future, you may not be recognized as somebody eligible to receive help, or worthy of getting it3.
You may instead visit some event not requiring much or any human interaction. This doesn’t change the need to prepare, though it changes the form. Your preparations will be narrower but deeper, centered on personal safety. One can compare it to a trip through the wilderness, only with no GPS and no phone to call for emergency help. You are still, in different ways, on your own.
All of this sounds like discouragement. It is, for those who would take time travel frivolously or carelessly. For others, those who will listen to a word from the wise, it should act instead as a bracing caution. There are hazards, but they can be met with intelligence and foresight. To partake in the tremendous rewards of time travel, you should be willing to make a down-payment in preparation, the same way you made the investment of time and resources into building your time machine. This section of the handbook will help you do that.
The Three Example Eras
Most of your travels will be to inhabited places and times. (I will suggest a few that are not, much later in the book.) There will be many common factors facing you in figuring out how to pass through the society without becoming grit in the gears. While I seek to pass on general principles, using specific examples will help illustrate ideas and train you in the flexibility of mind that will be a core skill in being a successful time-traveler.
I have chosen three such eras to be my examples. They are well separated from each other in either time or space, to provide different angles on the principles at work. They are also fascinating and tempting destinations for time-travelers, meaning you may use the specific advice rather than the general lessons being taught. This is certainly all right, with the caveat that others will have the same idea, and you might encounter more fellow tourists than you were expecting, and that brings its own complications.
The examples I will use are:
Rome -- Late Republic/Early Empire; 1st century BC – 1st century AD
The ancestor to much of what we call Western Civilization was soaring toward its greatest power, and at the same time tearing itself apart. The buckling of the Republic produced some of the greatest grand-scale dramas of history. Out of political intrigue and civil war, Julius Caesar rose to unimaginable power, then fell in one shocking moment. From renewed civil war, Augustus Caesar emerged to restore order, at the price of monarchy replacing liberty. The early Empire alternated stability and grandeur with despotism and appalling scandal, all while continually expanding its borders -- most of the time.
There is spectacle galore to be experienced, from the military to the political (when they aren’t the same thing), from the high-brow culture of theater, art, and letters trying to match the glory of Greece down to the lowbrow culture of knockabout farce, dirty poems, the racecourse, and the gladiators’ arena. It is indispensable to the student of history for how much of our world today springs from it, alien as some aspects are, or as we wish they were. Come for those spectacles, but look around and see how much of it endures, and how much has vanished4.
England – Elizabethan Era; mid-16th – early 17th century AD
A peripheral power of Europe in apparent decline, England was really building itself up toward a centuries-long rise that would see it become the largest empire the world has ever known. Religious schism from its break with the Roman Catholic Church brought internal turmoil and repression, and drew the eye of revanchist powers ready to lay the fractious island low. It responded by proving itself under fire as a naval power, a course originally spurred by the untold promise of a New World across the ocean. Under a queen who had survived punishing political intrigue to reach the throne, England was forming itself as a country and empire, not least through a playwright and a translation of the Bible that would come to define the very language they would spread across the world.
Tudor England arguably has everything a time tourist could want. There’s the pageantry of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, the dramas of religious politics, court intrigues and high-stakes naval rivalry on the high seas, the rise of trade making London an economic and cultural crossroads, and the rise of literacy flowing from the printing press that made it possible for back-country William Shakespeare to become the cornerstone of modern literature. If you can’t find multiple compelling reasons to come here, you aren’t trying very hard, and maybe you’re better off staying home.
Japan – Sengoku Jidai Era and aftermath; 16th – early 17th century AD
It was the Age of the Country at War. A unified Japan fell apart into dozens of squabbling statelets, which began re-consolidating only through decades of near-constant battle. Plots, betrayals, and constant jockeying for political advantage were rife, and the samurai warrior caste began its rise into not mere power, but legend. As events built toward a final decisive battle to reunify the nation, new visitors from far-off Europe -- explorers followed by merchants and missionaries -- opened a window to the wider world. Tokugawa Ieyasu would soon control not just his homeland, but its response to the outside world that would set Japan on a fateful solitary course.
This is the era whose drama and romance Akira Kurosawa made world-famous with his films, and which other movie-makers would gladly borrow5. Many familiar elements of Japanese culture did not yet exist, from the geisha to kabuki theater to the ninja, but these were the years that would produce them. A rich culture evolving fast from strife and the pressures of strange visitors, and the compelling tragedy of internecine war, make Sengoku Japan one of the great destinations of history.
A Reminder
I will cover plenty of ground in the upcoming chapters, warning you about lots of pitfalls and pointing you toward numerous opportunities. I hope this will be a firm foundation for your adventures.
What it is not is comprehensive, or constraining. There are sure to be difficulties I won’t cover, and with some luck there will be boons for you to grasp that I haven’t thought of. The key to finding both of these will be your own experience. You’ll be the one on the scene. You will see, hear, and learn things I have not. If you’ve absorbed the underlying lessons, you’ll be able to meet those new situations confidently and make the best of them.
There’s the classroom, and there’s the real world. Acing the classroom is good, but the real world is the true test.
Still, acing the classroom helps. So let’s begin.
Footnotes:
If you did, the fact that you’re reading this afterward is proof that your escapade wasn’t too much of a disaster. You still may want to look over my advice here.
Even if it’s your language. See an upcoming chapter for details.
I must be careful here. My own travels, and those of others, have given me significant knowledge about future times, but spreading it widely would be dangerous. I need to be vague, speaking in generalities that can serve as guidelines but not give away exact events or trends. When you see specific examples in the text, some of them are factual and some are not. You may be able to tell which is which if you’re sharp enough, and that’s as far as I dare to go.
It has survived better than Ozymandias, but it still makes you ponder.
It does sound better than “steal.” But the old vaudeville principle applies: if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.
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