10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 s usanne r eichl No Time Like the Present: Tracing 19 th -century Ideologies in 21 st -century Time Travel Adventures Introduction: Edith Nesbit’s Little Would-be Conquerors and 21 st century World-savers In one of the earliest time travel adventures written explicitly for children, The Story of the Amulet (1906), Edith Nesbit constructs a charming mock-imperialist confrontation in Egypt “eight thousand years ago” (50), with four children from Edwardian London - “where nothing now surprises anyone” (61) - who have just employed a charm and the help of a sand-elf for their first time travel adventure� Feeling uncomfortable about being marvelled at by Egyptian villagers, the eldest of the children, Cyril, takes the lead� Remembering an article in the Daily Telegraph, he announces: “we come from the world where the sun never sets� And peace with honour is what we want� We are the great Anglo-Saxon or conquering race […]” (ibid�)� He considers for a moment and then hastens to add, “[n]ot that we want to conquer you”, suggesting a milder version of subjectification instead: “[w]e only want to look at your houses and your - well, at all you’ve got here, and then we shall return to our own place, and tell of all that we have seen so that your name may be famed” (61-62)� In true imperialist fashion, Cyril does not consider that the neolithic Egyptians do not need to have their name famed in early twentieth-century England� Even though they - miraculously - understand him (it is fantasy after all), they are not particularly impressed with his speech: little wonder, given that the British Empire is still some thousand years in the future� Though politically engaged, Edith Nesbit has not gone down in history as an outspoken critic of the British Empire, but the irony in this passage suggests at least mild criticism� 1 Cyril, a boy of middle-class standing in Edwardian London, would have been a reader of nineteenth-century adventure tales for boys, which were strongly intertwined with the mindset and the rhetoric of Empire, and would have understood himself as part of the colonialist enter- 1 Edith Nesbit was a member of the socialist Fabian Society, as was H� G� Wells who, in The Story of the Amulet, features as a revolutionary socialist who is revered in the future� See Frank for an appraisal of the political and literary connections between Wells and Nesbit� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 90 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 prise (Butts, “Birth” 449)� He displays a clear sense of superiority over the Egyptians, whom he mistakenly interprets as British imperial subjects, and instantly applies the metanarrative of the British who bring peace and progress to the far reaches of the Empire� Being a mild-natured child, however, he instantly relents and joins in the hubbub that ensues when the Egyptians curiously inspect the children’s clothes� Anthea, the second eldest, picks up on Cyril’s superiority discourse and assumes “the tone of authority [towards the Egyptians] which she had always found successful when she had not time to coax her baby brother to do as he was told� The tone was just as successful now” (Nesbit 62)� When Robert later wonders aloud, along the same lines, “what a lot we could teach them if we stayed here” (64), Cyril responds that the Egyptians could teach them something, too, thus introducing a more respectful tone and a more reciprocal perspective� The authorial narrator’s subsequent summary deflects any imbalance in the conversation between the Egyptian and the English children: “It was like when you come back from your holidays and you want to hear and to tell everything at the same time” (ibid�)� This encounter turns into a wholesome learning situation for the Edwardian children, who are beginning to understand “how very few of the things they had always thought they could not do without were really not all that necessary to life” (65)� Nesbit’s meandering between a distinctly imperialist ideology on the one hand and a focus on the children’s experiencing a wondrous adventure on the other is not surprising: Victorian adventure stories traditionally lent themselves well to imperialist doctrine (Grenby 187-189)� Moreover, since her target group were child readers rather than teenagers or young adults, an elaborate reflection on the ideologies of imperialism would have been out of place here� Instead, Nesbit’s young time travellers enjoy their historical adventure despite being uneasily caught up in the paradoxes of the here and now of time travel: “‘It isn’t eight thousand years ago,’ whispered Jane� ‘It’s now - and that’s just what I don’t like about it� I say, do let’s go home again before anything more happens’” (66, italics in original)� Evidently, it is in the nature of adventures that things do happen, and when the children finally go home, in a temporal and spatial sense, Cyril sums up: “My hat! […] that was something like an adventure” (83)� Since at this point the reader has only come to the end of chapter five out of fourteen, their adventures are rightly expected to continue� Curiously, though, after their return from Egypt they find that no time has passed while they were away and they are squeakyclean, even though they got themselves very dirty on their adventures and must have spent roughly twenty-four hours away� “Then all that adventure 91 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures took no time at all” (84) and had no effects on their primary world: even “[t]he buns [were] quite soft still” (83)� Roughly one hundred years later, young time travellers are still implicated in essentially the same structures: they enjoy their adventures, lose little time in the past, and arrange their regular exploits around supplies of food usually provided by the adults involved� Since Nesbit, time travel adventures, or, as Bradford calls them, “multi-temporal fantasies” (42), have evolved and merged with other genres and media (Ederer 3): computer and live action games, picture-books, feature films and TV series, transmedia franchises, graphic novels and anime, all those make time travel stories available to readers of all ages. Self-publishing, online publishing, and fan fiction mean that the market for adventure stories today is even broader and less organised than before but also that there is no end to the creative impulses that drive the generic and thematic evolution of adventure stories in general and time travel in particular� Out of this diverse offer of contemporary time travel adventures I have selected three British series for children and young adults published since 2010, to try and track the evolution of Nesbit’s firmly Anglo-Saxon attitudes of British hegemony into a twenty-first-century ethics of adventure. I will investigate the genre’s structural affordances and their ideological implications to find out what we can learn about adventure stories through time travel narratives and the other way around. I will also consider the significance of serialisation and the rhythms of adventure which time travel stories exhibit within, but also across, the individual parts of the series� The adventures I will be looking at are Alex Scarrow’s nine-volume series TimeRiders (2010-2014), Carl Ashmore’s The Time Hunters (six volumes to date, 2012-), and Damien Dibben’s The History Keepers series (three volumes to date, 2011-)� 2 While TimeRiders came to an end with volume 9 (2014), volume 3 of The History Keepers leaves the ending open with the abduction of the protagonist� The recently published volume 6 of The Time Hunters series (June 2020) prepares the ground for more adventures after seemingly bringing the story of Becky and Joe to a close with the reunion of the family in volume 5 (2015)� All three series, like Nesbit’s time adventures, are episodic in nature: in each volume, there are several journeys into (mostly, but not exclusively) the past, and while the young characters become more mature as they face physical and ethical challenges, the structure is circular rather than linear� 2 Henceforth, Scarrow’s Time Riders is shortened to TR in in-text citations, Ashmore’s The Time Hunters to TH , and Dibben’s The History Keepers to HK , with the added numbers indicating the corresponding volume of each series� 92 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 Old Wine in New Bottles? Adventure and Generic Structures Although the adventure story is as old as storytelling itself, the most concise and helpful analyses of the genre for children and young adults come from studies of nineteenth-century adventures� In the early nineteenth century, boys began to feature as heroes in adventure stories, either on desert islands, after the fashion of Defoe, in the historical past, following Sir Walter Scott, or in exotic frontier regions, echoing James Fenimore Cooper (Butts, “Birth” 447-448). Each of these settings can be related to the twenty-first-century time travel adventure� I will therefore resort to this kind of research in order to draw parallels, find analogies, and identify in how far contemporary time travel adventures contain traces of nineteenth-century adventure stories as well as twenty-first-century developments. Nineteenth-century adventure books, as Dennis Butts points out in his entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, are usually composed of the following plot elements: • a fairly ordinary but bright hero supported by a faithful companion or friend • absent parents, a domestic crisis or a family secret • a journey to an exotic setting • obstacles and dangers: hostile natives, wars or shipwreck, reflecting ethical and moral challenges • a blend of realistic and extraordinary events • a happy and successful return with material rewards for the hero (“Adventure Books” 14) 3 It is possible to identify each of Butts’s features in time travel adventures, though of course transformed to accommodate almost two centuries of literary and historical development� In the following, I will analyse in how far plot structures of nineteenth-century adventures have been adhered to and / or transformed in contemporary time travel stories� By focussing on genre, I am not so much interested in the structures themselves as in what they are able to reveal about the ethics and ideology of time travel fiction in the 2000s. To talk or write about adventure as a genre is not a straightforward affair� Matthew Grenby, in the context of children’s literature, claims that “[t]he adventure story, it might be argued, is not really a genre at all, but rather a sort of flavour or colouring, used to give an appealing taste or appearance to works with other agendas” (173)� 4 If we pursue this line of thought, adventure emerges as a pleasant packaging for particular ideologies or teachings, 3 For similar summaries, see Butts, “Birth”; Baldick; Hanke et al� 4 See also von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 5� 93 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 much like the sugar that helps the medicine go down� Grenby has a point: especially nineteenth-century stories for boys quite openly promoted ideals of muscular Christianity and imperialist superiority, remnants of which we can trace in Nesbit’s Edwardian adventure sampled above� On the other hand, it would be flippant to read the nineteenth-, twentieth-, or twenty-first-century adventure as no more than a glossy veneer engineered to brainwash readers into more easily accepting hidden messages behind otherwise largely insignificant stories. This would be an unacceptable overgeneralisation of the variety of stories on offer and of the equally diverse range of reading positions that afford more or less resistance to the doctrines of the day� The same resistance to generic labelling can be found in discussions of the fantastic or the science fictional. Farah Mendlesohn has claimed that science fiction writing does not merely fulfil certain expectations as to plot and tropes but constitutes “an ongoing discussion” (“Introduction” 1)� Mendlesohn also points to the overlap in children’s and young adult literature between science fiction and fantasy, criticising that too often science fiction texts for children underestimate their readers’ intellect by blending technology with the supernatural, thus blurring the boundaries between the possible and the impossible (“Is There” 284)� Maria Nikolajeva, equally distrustful of generic boundaries, reflects on fantasy in Tolkien’s sense as “a feature rather than a genre” (Magic 9) but then does continue to refer to it as a genre throughout the book� Rather than rejecting genre altogether, my understanding of generic features is based on family resemblance and schema theory, following Derrida’s notion of texts participating in rather than belonging with genres (qtd� in Kearns 202)� I would suggest that texts which participate in the genre of adventure writing, just like fantasy or science fiction, can be rewardingly analysed with a view to recurring thematic concerns, narrative structures, audiences, and speaking positions� This does not suggest that adventure stories constitute uniform text types or formula fiction featuring flat characters: on the contrary, the thematic diversity, complex character development, and the cross-genre and cross-media potential are extraordinary� Thinking through adventure in generic terms helps us to compare, contrast, and say something meaningful about a range of texts beyond their individual significance, but without losing sight of their very individual properties and without metaphorically squeezing round building blocks into square holes� Normal Kids and Absent Parents: Gender and Genre While the hero of Victorian adventures was often on his own, maybe with a loyal sidekick, the protagonists in contemporary adventures are often part of No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 94 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 a team� This is especially true of TimeRiders, which employs what Nikolajeva refers to as a “collective character” (Rhetoric ch� 4): rather than a single protagonist who drives the adventure on and functions as the narrative centre, the novel implements three equally important main characters with different talents and characteristics each� These characters are also focalisers and provide a multi-perspectival narrative, often separated by various historical epochs� Other series feature teams of siblings (The Time Hunters) or colleagues who eventually become friends (The History Keepers), and values such as friendship, trust, and loyalty are clearly crucial in these teams� Like the heroes of monomyths in ancient mythology and medieval quests, but also in fantasy epics like Harry Potter, the hero of time travel adventures is often a very “normal” young person (Butts, “Adventure Books” 14) whose special talents only emerge in the course of the adventure� While the characters seem unassuming and unimpressive at the beginning of the series, they turn out to be ‘chosen ones’ - either through family connections that only slowly come to the surface or through the possession of a particular supernatural power that only manifests gradually, such as Becky’s telekinesis in The Time Hunters� As Grenby states, an adventure is a “fantasy of empowerment” (174), and unlike in ancient, medieval or even most nineteenth-century adventures, which adhered very closely to traditional gender norms, the empowered hero can of course be a heroine, and this in itself is a significant departure from nineteenth-century fiction. Even in twenty-first-century adventures, however, male and female characters are not exactly equal, which in our examples is reflected in their stance towards the term ‘adventure’, among other things� In The Time Hunters, Becky tends to refer to ‘adventure’ in connection with its pleasures and its perils: “She longed for another adventure, but she also knew the dangers involved” (TH2 loc� 1227)� As the older sister, she is more careful and more empathetic than her rash little brother, and when Joe sketches an apparently easy plan of how they will proceed on their trip to El Dorado as a “piece of cake”, Becky counters: “Nothing is ever a piece of cake with our adventures” (TH5 182)� Crucially, the success of their adventures typically hinges on a combination of both Becky’s telekinetic powers and Joe’s physical prowess and dexterous handling of weapons, but Joe is usually more caught in the momentum of adventure than Becky� In The History Keepers, Jake Djones, who is more of an individual character if not a monomyth, does not have a big sister to balance his masculine reactions� He is frequently labelled as an adventurer, and his own sense of self evolves accordingly as the story develops� As early as page 10, “the adventurer in Jake [is] intrigued” (HK1 10) by the mystery that his abduction throws him in and he very quickly grows into this role: at first, like an actor on a stage, 95 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 performing his identity as an adventurer in Erving Goffman’s sense, he tries to “remember some lines from his favourite adventure films” (HK1 115) when he does not want to be left behind on what becomes his first journey through time. When he later tries on a sixteenth-century outfit, “his new adventurer’s clothes” (HK1 150), and looks in the mirror, he sees “a bold adventurer staring back at him” (HK1 148). Later in the first volume, when he reunites with his parents, his father “proudly” notices that he “look[s] every inch the adventurer” (HK1 382) while his mother is more worried than proud, reportedly having lost one son already to the dangers of time travel� In both series, the young male time travellers tend to be the rasher and more hot-headed ones, testosterone-driven and physically involved� The protagonists in The History Keepers and The Time Hunters return home alive and without any major injuries, looking back fondly on their adventures and excitedly planning the ones that lie ahead of them. By contrast, in the first six out of the series’ nine volumes, the TimeRiders are so busy rectifying historical contaminations and reinstalling correct timelines at great danger to themselves that they hardly have an opportunity to enjoy their adventures - in fact, the word ‘adventure’ is hardly ever mentioned� It is only in volume 7, TimeRiders: The Pirate Kings, that there are plenty of references to adventures� Liam and Rashim, who are stranded in the seventeenth century and transported to the Caribbean on board a pirate ship, experience an adventure that is not enabled by sophisticated displacement technology but by very archaic pirate ships� While they are busy fighting and building up a flourishing business as privateers and pirates, they do not think of it as their adventure either� It is the girls in the team who, frantically trying to locate them in the past from their late nineteenth-century base, imagine the appeal of the adventure and the freedom it might bring for the boys, specifically a freedom from the constraints of time travel: “[Maddy] could imagine how appealing that might be for them, particularly Liam: a wide-open horizon full of adventure and the freedom to sail off in any direction he chose” (TR7 loc. 2349). Sal, too, later reflects on the opportunities of escaping the infringements of time travel with a view to the freedom that adventures bring - by imagining the Wild West: “‘Cowboys and Indians, huh? ’ Sal could see the appeal of that� Wide-open prairies, crisp blue skies and rocky mountain skylines� A largely undiscovered frontier world full of adventure and all manner of possibilities� ‘Nice idea� I like it�’” (TR7 loc� 3050)� While girls and boys are equally indispensable for the successful outcome of the team’s endeavours, it is entirely in keeping with the gender structures of traditional adventure stories that the girls should be the ones hankering romantically after the fantasy of adventure while the boys are experiencing the ‘real thing’� No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 96 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 The heroes and heroines prove themselves by passing the trials and tribulations the past or the future confronts them with and that often concern domestic crises, like a father (TH) or a brother (HK) who are believed to be dead but turn out to be alive and held captive somewhere in time� In the series I have selected, the protagonists turn out to be gifted to excel in their tasks, either in terms of character traits or particular skills and knowledge� They usually have a flaw, however, that puts them in positions they might have wanted to avoid. These flaws, such as Becky’s stubbornness and Joe’s testosterone-driven impulsiveness (TH), Jake Djones’s need to prove himself before his love interest (HK), Maddy’s doubting her leadership skills or Sal’s homesickness and dark moods (TR), are offset by their strengths: either technological or historical knowledge, a special talent for sifting through data, physical strength or emotional intelligence, or classical virtues such as bravery, friendship, loyalty, or selflessness. Twenty-first-century adventures, unlike their historical predecessors, allow for those skills and virtues to be distributed relatively equally among female and male protagonists� In The History Keepers, for instance, the team in volume 3 consists of two boys and two girls, and the girls are fighting just as fiercely as the boys� Their historical and linguistic knowledge is equal, too� There is, however, one competence that is left to the male gender, and that is science: while in The Time Hunters Becky and Joe are equally uninformed about the science of time travel, which reinforces the power distribution between children and adults, none of the female characters in The History Keepers seem to have any knowledge about the physics involved in time travel, not even those who are regular time travellers� Rose does not even try to explain “the science” to her nephew Jake, referring him to her male colleagues instead: It all sounds ludicrous, I know� And don’t ask me to explain the science of it, I’m useless at it� Jupitus would do a much better job� Or ask Charlie Chieverley - he’s a real scientist� It’s all to do with our atoms� They possess this memory of history - every single moment of it� (HK1 49) Aunt Rose also refers to the process of time travelling as “unforgettable” and “the best rollercoaster ride ever” and daintily points out a “little machine [that] is called the Horizon Cup” (53). After this altogether unscientific and rather juvenile discourse she hands over to Charlie, who, as a teenage genius, manages to explain almost everything, while Jake observes Jupitus, an adult male, “carefully mov[ing] the device’s gauges and dials to precise settings” (ibid.). Charlie explains the procedure in (pseudo-)scientific language, almost ironically so - “an incredibly specific ratio” (ibid.). The gender divide is evident: the female discourse is about sensations and emotions, whereas the 97 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 male discourse about science is marked by more formal lexical choices� Similarly, the female teenage protagonist, Topaz, after trying to explain the system to Jake, ends on: “I know it all sounds mad, but somehow it works” (HK1 81), in lieu of a more convincing and informed explanation� While the female agents in the society of The History Keepers are entirely capable of speaking a stunning variety of languages, retaining minute details of history in their memories, fighting enemies with a vast array of weapons, and saving the world every so often, they have no scientific prowess and cannot ever be seen to explain time travel to anyone� Children’s literature research has repeatedly pointed out how children and teenagers in fiction can only experience empowerment in the absence of their parents (Nikolajeva, Power 10)� For a thrilling nineteenth-century adventure in an exotic setting to happen, the absence of parents (if not of adults altogether) is an essential condition� The same is true of many twentieth-century adventurers� Reading Enid Blyton’s Famous Five in the early twenty-first century, for instance, one cannot but wonder where the parents are: from a presentist perspective, the Blyton parents are neglectful, representing the exact opposite of today’s 24 / 7 surveillance and helicopter parenting� As one of the readers who could never have gone on an adventure herself (seriously lacking private islands, adventurous cousins with dogs, and non-intrusive parents), the striking absence of parents has always seemed fortuitous to me: it clearly enables the children to go on their adventures in the first place. How, then, can contemporary children or teenagers go on an adventure when parental supervision is so tight and parental fear for their offspring’s safety so acute these days? Or, in Julia Eccleshare’s words: “how can you go on an adventure in a yellow safety jacket? ” 5 How are twenty-first-century time travel adventures even possible? Of the three series I have selected for this contribution, each solves the problem of parental interference with adventure very elegantly� In TimeRiders, the protagonists are three teenagers who are allegedly saved a moment before their certain death: from a burning building, a sinking ship (the Titanic, no less), and a crashing plane (TR1 1-19)� Their families and friends think they are dead, so they can easily embark on their time adventures without being missed or worried about: they have been given extra lifetime� The protagonist of The History Keepers, Jake Djones, finds out to his great surprise that his parents do not just run a boring shop for bathroom appliances but are actually very capable time travelling agents� 5 This was a question raised by Julia Eccleshare in her keynote lecture with the title “Abandonment and Adventure: How Contemporary Jeopardy Fits into the Traditional Themes of Children’s Literature”, presented at the IRSCL Congress 2015 at the University of Worcester� No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 98 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 Time travel, then, becomes something of a family business, which makes the intergenerational scruples and confrontations a little easier� Finally, Becky and Joe in The Time Hunters experience time travel under the supervision of their uncle, without their mother’s knowledge, while they spend their summer holidays in his supposedly peaceful country estate� The all-important “time away from the parents” (Ederer 142), then, is rendered relatively unproblematic� 6 In both cases of family-friendly time travel, though (The History Keepers and The Time Hunters), the young protagonists at some point need to break the rules so they can time travel without their elders and betters: those are their moments of agency and power, and they always return victorious from these adventures� ‘Out there’: From Exotic Places to Exciting Times While adventurers of the nineteenth century ventured to the frontiers of unknown territories and unchartered terrains, later adventure stories stick to the same principle but extend the scope of this urge to push at boundaries to other domains� As the ultimate demarcation line to our powers of mobility in the world as we know it, transcending time is quite as daring and adventurous as a journey into central Africa was in colonial times� The difference is one of dimension, not of principle: while Ulysses and Gulliver travelled by sea, many nineteenth-century adventurers travelled first by ship, then by train, finally by foot, and every now and then acquired faster and more innovative means of transport such as camels or hot air balloons, which broadened their scope of action� In the course of the twentieth century, aviation adventures developed, the most popular in the UK probably being W� E� Johns’s Biggles series from 1932 to 1968, revolving around pilot James Biggleworth, nicknamed “Biggles”, whose ability to quickly fly across the channel made him go further faster than other adventurers of his time (Butts, “Adventure Books” 16)� Fast cars and planes, and spaceships and rockets in science fiction, pushed twentieth-century adventurers onwards and upwards: “out there” (n� p�), as Rigby points out, which used to be synonymous with empire, meant outer space in the twentieth century� Time travel adventures add the fourth dimension to the mobility of its heroes and heroines, once again pushing the boundaries of how far adventurers can go� In this sense they are a logical continuation of the nineteenth-century conviction that no place on the map should remain white, no corner of the Empire unexplored� The temporal dimension is not one that is artificially added to the adventure story: the Empire is understood both as 6 See also Nikolajeva, Power 10� 99 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 a place and as a time� Conceptually, Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (15) applies as much to a nineteenth-century adventure in the South Pacific as to a time travel adventure in medieval England: the space that is explored, however timeless it might appear, is “charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (ibid�)� In time travel adventures, the temporal qualities are simply more salient and therefore often commented on� In both time travel and more traditional adventures, ‘getting there’ is not merely the way into or towards the adventure: it is already an intrinsic part of the adventure� With time travel stories, of course, the novum (in Darko Suvin’s sense) for readers is to find out how time travel is possible on the story level, through fantastic or scientific means. In the three series under investigation, both modes can be observed� I would suggest conceptualising this issue as a continuum between the poles of ‘fantastic / magical’ and ‘realistic / scientific’. While TimeRiders is clearly closest to the realistic end of the spectrum, with the description of chaos space and time waves being the only vaguely supernatural elements in the otherwise very technology-focussed series, The Time Hunters is closer to the fantastic pole with its combination of a high-tech laboratory, quirky time machines, and ancient mythology and its reliance on Becky’s telekinetic and Joe’s physical prowess, both of which verge on superpowers� The way time travel works in The History Keepers is probably the most fantastic of all: while there is a sort of pseudo-science involved, similar to The Time Hunters, which links chemical compounds and the alignment of the planets, the sensations that Jake experiences and the notion that big historical ships can jump through time without a trace of modern technology position the series on the fantastic side of the spectrum� Instead of exotic places, then, the time travellers go to exciting times, usually the past: in The History Keepers and The Time Hunters, travelling into the characters’ future is not even possible according to specific time travel laws so that the adventures are exclusively historical ones� In TimeRiders, historical journeys dominate but the time travellers also travel into various versions of the future to see for themselves the consequences of their actions in the past and the present� However, since the future is more malleable than the past, these trips resemble reconnaissance missions rather than extended journeys� The link between present and future is generally much tighter in the narrative of TimeRiders than in the other series: while the chronotopic home base is New York in 2001 or, from volume 6 onwards, London in 1889, there are frequent prolepses into the future (without anyone actually travelling there) which serve to explain how time travel was implemented, abused, and banned but No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 100 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 also to illustrate the dystopian dimensions of the twenty-first-century human exploitation and destruction of the planet� Another connection across the epochs is the fact that each of the main characters comes from a different time and place, from Ireland in the early twentieth century (Liam) to the US in the 2000s (Maddy), India in the 2020s (Sal), and the US again in the 2060s (Rashim, from volume 5 onwards)� Giving each time traveller a different chronotope of origin broadens the spectrum of knowledge of history and popular culture and enables a varied historical appraisal of the times that the teenagers find themselves in: Liam, for instance, compares the poverty he sees in medieval England to the one he witnessed in his “old life” in early twentieth-century Ireland (TR3 145), and Sal keeps conjuring up her memories of a polluted and congested Mumbai in the 2020s (TR7 loc� 363)� It also complicates the otherwise relatively easy categorisation of past, present, and future� The TimeRiders’ base for the first 6 novels, an archway in New York programmed to reset around the days of September 11, 2001 in a seemingly endless cycle, constitutes the distant future for Liam, the present (plus a few years) for Maddy, and the past for Sal and Rashim, i� e� before either of them was born� Time is shown as contingent and relational rather than objective� This is in accordance with the malleability of past, present, and future for time travellers, which is an important precondition for the cycles of adventures of the series� The adventure of ‘getting there’ is followed by the adventure of surviving there and fulfilling whatever task the time travellers have been set or set themselves, from simply surviving to saving the world single-handedly� While H. G. Wells’s first intentional time traveller in The Time Machine (1895) was driven by his intellectual curiosity to travel far into the future, contemporary teenagers usually travel into the past to “fix it” (TR3 198)� Both teams in TimeRiders and The History Keepers have made it their mission to protect historical timelines and reverse any contaminations� In The Time Hunters, there is the aim of historical education - “I suppose it may benefit your education to see Victorian England” (TH1 87) - but they also rescue other time travellers, debunk historical myths, and solve quest-like mysteries� Intellectual curiosity is there to some degree but these modern time travellers are largely driven by duty, loyalty, and a spirit of adventure rather than scientific interest: “We put our lives out on a limb to save history” (HK1 105)� It is only later in TimeRiders that the sense of duty is overruled by a sense of adventure and curiosity, when Maddy suggests enjoying time travel for the diversions it might bring: Explore a little� Not too far back in time� And not too far away in distance� I mean, just think of all the things we could get a look at without pushing the displacement machine to its limits: the coronation of Queen Victoria, the execution of Charles I, 101 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 the first stone of Westminster Abbey being laid. Shakespeare? How cool would that be? Meeting Will the Quill, giving him some story ideas? (TR7 loc� 415) However, their first attempt at time-travel tourism goes horribly wrong and they end up in grave danger in the middle of the Great Fire of London in 1666, losing Liam and Rashim, who are then transported to the Caribbean and have to be rescued by the rest of the team� Stop and Go: The Rhythm of Adventure Adventure stories follow a certain rhythm of activity and rest: after the adventurer has spent some time fighting or running from dangerous people or animals, they have to rest and eat or sleep� Periods in which the adventurer needs to solve mysteries or develop plans interrupt the “speed and urgency” (Hanke et al� 6) and constitute an “enforced physical immobility” (Rigby n� p�)� Twenty-first-century time travel narratives, too, follow a rhythm of contemplation and action, of stop and go: phases of travelling, fighting, and rescuing alternate with phases of reflection, dialogue, and rest. They are episodic adventures adhering to the basic home-away-home structure so prevalent in children’s literature (Nodelman and Reimer 197-203), ‘home’ here in both a temporal and spatial sense, with the ‘home’ phases tending to be quieter and more reflective and often connected with food: while in The Time Hunters the adventurers have lush picnics or return home to lavish feasts, the TimeRiders seem to live frugally on ordered pizza, coke, and coffee� It is often food and other practicalities that establish a balance between the extraordinariness of the adventures and the realism (Butts, “Adventure Books” 14) needed to enable young readers to identify or empathise with the teenage hero� The serialisation of the adventures means that this structure is repeated several times in each volume, which provides more occasion over the course of the series to include protagonists’ long-term developments� This echoes Georg Simmel’s definition of adventure in that each individual trip into the past “revolves around its own center” and is still part of a larger structure, “a segment of a life-course” (231)� The means of time travel determine the narrative pace of the adventure to some extent: travelling from one epoch to another and back again in the milkfloat, the campervan, and other high-speed time machines in The Time Hunters takes no time at all, whereas time travel on historical ships across oceans via horizon points (The History Keepers) makes for fairly heavy-handed and slow progress and leaves plenty of time for reflection and even for romantic relationships to blossom� TimeRiders has the most scientifically plausible means No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 102 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 of travel: displacement technology, which needs plenty of coding by the AI that has been sent back from the future, a sophisticated appliance involving water tanks, and a great deal of energy - which becomes a major issue when the team relocate from the twenty-first to the nineteenth century. Generating this energy and calculating the time coordinates takes some time so that in this series, too, there is a great deal of waiting in between fast-paced action which the characters spend on eating, discussing their next moves, or reflecting on their situation and their identities� The rhythms of activity and waiting which result from the affordances of the time machines seem to replace the more traditional rhythms of day and night, of waking and sleeping, in nineteenth-century adventures� A topos of adventure stories in the popular nineteenth-century Robinsonades is the shipwreck (Butts, “Adventure Books” 12). In twenty-first-century time travel adventures this often morphs into characters being stranded in time without the power or equipment to go back (or forward) and waiting to be saved by fellow time travellers� Waiting for a rescue team can turn into an opportunity to reflect on the epoch the protagonists are stranded in and a detailed comparison with their chronotopic homes: Rashim, for instance, while stuck on a pirate ship in 1667, has an opportunity to discuss his feelings about returning to his native 2060s with Liam while looking out on the “beautiful unpolluted colours that seemed to belong to another planet entirely” (TR7 loc. 2138): “The twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in the hands of a smarter species than humans, could have been remarkable� […] Instead, we just thrashed our planet� Rendered it inhospitable” (loc� 2152)� The contrast between his essentially uninhabitable ‘home’ and the unspoilt nature surrounding him could not be greater� Another kind of reflection takes place on board the Escape, the time-travelling ship in The History Keepers, which moves so slowly that Jake can engage with a whole list of things as they are approaching land: At the prow of the Escape, Jake waited patiently� Gradually he started to discern the faint outline of land, shrouded in early morning mist� Then, directly ahead, he spotted a faint triangular shape outlined against the rocky coast� […] But as he looked more carefully, he realized that it was an island […]� He […] examined the curious triangle in more detail� […] She [Topaz] was eating one of Charlie’s almond and chocolate croissants� French people always ate their pastries with such panache, Jake reflected, and Topaz was no exception� Even the simple action of catching crumbs and tipping them into her mouth he found inexplicably dazzling� As the island continued to materialize out of the mist, Topaz told Jake all about it� (HK1 81, my italics) 103 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 The highlighted lexical and grammatical choices and the detail of observation here reflect the slow pace at which the ship moves, which enables Jake to observe the coastline and indulge in his love interest, not without a little stereotypical observation, while Topaz tells him the history of the headquarters of the History Keepers� Even in an otherwise action-packed adventure, there is time for all this� Good or Bad Times? Appraising History In these reflective pauses, what do the time travellers think about the epochs they have just encountered? There are two attitudes for young characters to respond to past periods: nostalgia, i� e� the uncritical longing for a simpler version of the world, and presentism, i� e� stereotypical ascriptions of historical epochs as inferior to the present� Both attitudes can occur in the same novels and be performed by the same characters so that a general diagnosis of one series or one character as presentist or nostalgic would be simplistic� Instead, it is more interesting to identify which particular aspects or periods of history are met with presentism or nostalgia, or a combination of both, and to what end� Both attitudes can be explained with a lack of knowledge: while travelling to the past is comparable to going to exotic places, the ‘knowability’ of these times and places is similar, too� Adventurers to the outposts of the British Empire were equipped with limited knowledge and plenty of prejudices about these places, and while historical knowledge is available to today’s time travellers, it is often patchy and just as biased� This becomes especially noticeable in connection with the Middle Ages, a time that has traditionally been constructed as the temporal Other of modernity (Bradford 1, 7)� Bradford identifies two types of representation of the Middle Ages in children’s literature: “a romanticised pre-industrial and pre-technological world whose inhabitants lead simple, wholesome lives; or as a primitive time / place permeated by filth, disease and superstition” (7). Both can be found in the selected series� In TimeRiders, the Middle Ages receive a more nuanced treatment: before Liam’s journey to late twelfth-century England, medieval times are thought of schematically as dark and dangerous - “Just remember, guys … it’s January 1194� Dark times” (TR3 85) - and compared unfavourably to the romantic portrayal of Robin Hood in early twentieth-century films: “Nothing at all like the films, I’m afraid. No men in tights, or maidens with golden locks waiting to be rescued from Disney-like castles� It’s a dark and brutal time” (ibid�)� The conviction that the Middle Ages are a dark time is even articulated by a medieval ‘native’, Sébastien Cabot, a Cistercian monk, who explains that No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 104 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 in “[d]ark times as these […] [e]vil stalks these woods, stalks this country” (TR3 98) and that in these “dark, troubled times” (TR3 110) especially the poor would easily believe in supernatural stories� While the darkness and the fear the monk expresses can be explained with the political situation in England at the time, five months before King Richard’s return from the crusades and his captivity, the utterance still sounds like an echo of the historical presentist stereotype� However dark it might be, the longer Liam stays in medieval England, the more appealing it seems to him, and he starts to be critical of his own time: “It’s a crowded world,” he [Liam] replied. “That’s what I find. A crowded world full of noisy fat people�” [Cabot: ] “Fat? ” He nodded� “As plump as the lords and barons� Everyone, even the poorest, lives a lord’s life by comparison to the people here� Everyone eats more than they need� Everyone has more things than they would ever need�” “’Tis a good time that ye come from, then�” He shrugged� “It should be�” Cabot’s eyes narrowed� “But ye do not miss it? ” (TR3 229) From Cabot’s perspective, a time in which everyone is well-fed is clearly preferable to his own times� Yet, Liam is not altogether in agreement with Cabot’s positive appraisal of the twenty-first century, which might have to do with the fact that he has developed a penchant for the lifestyle in medieval England� But the passage also reveals a rather slanted perspective that his ‘home’ in the early twenty-first-century US gives him: evidently, not everyone in the twenty-first century is richer and better off than the medieval English� There are plenty of poor and homeless people living in the US, and of course there is a whole world of poverty outside the US, too, which Liam might not be aware of� What he also fails to mention are the dangers of terrorist attacks such as 9 / 11 (which is close to the team’s home base in New York), the pitfalls of modern technology, the lethal consequences of environmental destruction, or the horrors of modern warfare, all of which become very real in the course of the series as the travellers develop an understanding of the planet’s future� Rather than a self-assured time traveller who is confident about the worth of the twenty-first century, this is a doubting, insecure character, but one who is clearly beginning to see the Middle Ages in a different, and altogether brighter, light� The attraction Liam feels for the pre-industrial landscape and society in 1194 - “he’d miss rising each morning with the sound of cockerels stirring and the distant ring of a blacksmith’s hammer, the smell of woodsmoke and unleavened bread baking in hundreds of clay ovens” (TR3 228) - gives us an 105 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 idea of the nostalgia that accompanies such a view: he does not consider the blacksmith’s hard work or the bakers who have to get up before the break of dawn, so the material basis for Liam’s stimulating sensations is invisible� Liam is fascinated by the lifestyle of the upper classes of the twelfth century, which he participates in, and becomes a little class-blind as a consequence, in the same way that he is rather selective about his assessment of the twenty-first century. Although nostalgia is a sentiment that is felt for former times, a retrospective emotion, the time travellers feel it at the very moment in which they experience the former time� Their lived experience of both times enables a direct comparison� The enchantment with pre-industrial landscape is echoed in other time travel series: When Jake sees the Egyptian pyramids in 27AD, he is overawed: As he gazed at the ancient structures, serene and alone in the vast landscape, utterly untouched by the modern world, he felt a sudden surge of emotion� His heart swelled and a tear came to his eye� “History is amazing …” he whispered solemnly� “Just amazing! ” (HK2 199) Again, there is no consideration of the human toil that has gone into the pyramids; Jake perceives them almost as if they were natural wonders, in the same way that Becky responds to the mythical El Dorado in seventeenth-century Guyana: [S]he was astounded by what she saw� All around, the dark, dank rainforest had been replaced by a very different scene. Flowers flourished in every colour, sunlight burst through a copse of trees illuminating a wide pool of the bluest water� It was like they’d stepped into another world entirely - an enchanted world, one flushed with boundless beauty and magic� (TH5 211) The theme of an “overcivilized society regaining contact with nature through the adventure of the individual” (Rigby n� p�), which can be found in nineteenth-century adventure stories, applies here, too, and seems to trigger a sense of the sublime in the face of the wonders of preindustrial, sometimes even prehistoric, landscapes� When Uncle Percy takes the children back to the Ice Age and they witness what he calls “Mammoth Gorge”, Becky is overcome with awe and starts crying (TH1 72); when she encounters medieval England, she appreciates the lack of any “marker of civilisation […] something that evinced so called progress - electrical pylons, motorways, cars zipping down country lanes, planes soaring overhead� Here there was none of it� And she liked it� She liked it very much” (TH4 150)� Similarly, the TimeRiders enjoy every moment spent in preindustrial settings and outside cities, whether in the sixteenth-century Caribbean or in medieval England� No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 106 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 The positive appraisal of past times in time travel series goes beyond the individual periods and extends to history as such, endowing history with an ontological status� Frequently, history is “amazing” (HK1 303), “magical beyond belief” (HK1 454), “awesome” (TH5 276), and seen as predominantly positive, almost naively so, as a passage from The History Keepers shows: That blue planet had been home to all those epochs and their glories - their art and learning, their progress and invention; their kings, conquerors and despots� It was a moment of profound wonder that Jake knew he would never forget� (HK2 137) Jake mentions the despots almost in passing but does not linger on the negative sides of history: it is the “glories” and the “progress” he sees in the past of the planet, despite the fact that on his adventures he has encountered some of the vilest fictional characters created in the genre, such as the crudely named Prince Zeldt and Mina Schlitz� Despite the nostalgia, the awe, and the occasional temptation to stay in the past, all the young time travellers return to their home times and places, sometimes out of a sense of duty, sometimes to be with their loved ones� In the case of Becky, we can actually witness a self-aware maturation process: “I mean, we’ve got some awesome things - the net, mobile phones, laptops, hair straighteners, pot noodles - […] but you end up taking it all for granted� I know I did� I s’pose one thing I’ve learnt from travelling is not to do that so much� Uncle Percy never takes anything for granted�” (TH3 193) This relativism does not override the certainty that the best time to live is the present, whenever that might be� In the case of TimeRiders, after relocating their headquarters to Victorian London, Maddy considers moving to a different epoch to spend her life there, in a quasi-dialogue with herself� “Hey� Look at me, eh? Just like someone picking out a holiday online�” Because that’s how she figured she must appear to anyone looking on: some college kid picking out a gap-year tour of exotic places to visit� Ancient Rome? Nah, been there, done that� Egypt in the time of the pharaohs? Too hot� Tudor England? Too much beheading going on� Elizabethan England? Too much Catholic-burning going on� Renaissance Italy? 107 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 Hmmm … She rather liked the fancy clothes and the idea of looking up Leonardo da Vinci and maybe posing for a portrait or two� But then decided that the poor sanitation, plague and a little too much zealous persecution of heretics was somewhat off-putting� (TR7 loc� 4759) This ironical assessment of past epochs asserts Maddy’s conviction that, if they cannot move to twenty-first-century New York for reasons of personal safety, they might as well stay in Victorian London� ‘History is sacred’: Free Will and Determinism If we try and trace family resemblances from nineteenth-century adventure stories to twenty-first-century time travel adventures, then what are we to make of exotic adventures asserting British superiority and strengthening readers’ belief in England as the best place to be? Rigby defines as the central paradox of adventure stories that “[a]dventure happens ‘out there,’ but its meaning is found at home” (n� p�)� In other words, the adventures serve to underpin domestic values� For time travel adventures this could suggest that the journeys into historical epochs have the main function of asserting the belief that the present is the best time to live in or even that the present is superior to the past� As my examples above have shown, this is not always the case: there is a sense of nostalgia through which historical epochs are often idealised uncritically, and the lack of technology or of any signs of industry is often held to be an advantage over the dirty, crowded cities of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The time travellers’ enthusiasm is often offset by the horrors and the villains of the past, and an appreciation of modern conveniences, as Maddy’s assessment above suggests� What is equally striking is the attitude towards changing history: notwithstanding the evil characters and atrocities that history is made of, it must be kept on course as a basic rule of time travel� As Galliana Goethe, the head of the History Keepers, explains this rule to Jake at the very beginning of his adventures, […] once it has happened, we must never try to change the past� We cannot, and do not, bring people back from the dead, or stop wars or undo catastrophes once they have existed� We cannot and should not stop the Great Fire of London or the sinking of the Titanic, no matter how we feel about those events� […] History is sacred� The past may be littered with horrors, but remember, Jake, that those horrors could be a million times worse� (HK1 121) No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 108 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 For readers familiar with mainstream time travel narratives in popular culture, not just those in young adult fiction, this decree comes as no surprise: whether their generic roots are in science fiction or in fantasy, time travel stories have in common that history must not be meddled with� Instead, its course needs to be protected and repaired from all contaminations� This time travel law is a useful trigger for characters’ moral and ethical conflicts: despite the fact that they know they must not interfere with history, Joe and Becky save a child from a burning house when they travel to the Great Fire of London in 1666 (TH6 73)� In the other two series, the rule is more fervently defended: History is seen as inviolable and immovable� There is no other option: the modalities used in the quotation above point to the inability (“we cannot”), to the moral implications (“we should not”), and to an unquestioned practice that seems to forbid even thinking about an alternative (“and do not”)� There is an underlying determinism here that history is the best sequence of events available and that every endeavour to change it for the better can only result in a corrupted, a ‘bad’, timeline� This is an echo of time travel stories such as Stephen Fry’s Making History (1996), in which the plan to avoid Hitler being born results in a fascist world in the twentieth century, and a faithful execution of the time travel directives in “Sound of Thunder”, Ray Bradbury’s influential science fiction story of 1966 about a time traveller stepping on a butterfly in the past and thus changing the future for the worse. The plot development of the first volume of TimeRiders is a radical version of this: with Hitler not invading Russia, Germany wins the Second World War, which results in a German New York controlled by a “Greater Reich” in 2001� After an attempt by the TimeRiders to change this development for the better, New York in 2001 is hit by nuclear disaster and ravaged by murdering mutants� The implications here are clear and do not leave the reader much room for dissent or resistance: even though it might be bloody, atrocious, and injust, the history we know is still its best available version� It seems that if the past as we know it is immutable, it is a firmer foundation than a potentially changeable past� In other words: we can only believe in our identity if our history is accounted for� In TimeRiders volume 3, a change in history results in a much more peaceful timeline and the USA being French, and a short argument among the team reveals deep-seated beliefs about national identity: “My God! ” uttered Maddy� “Then there’s no America either! ” “There is,” said Sal, “but it isn’t English, that’s all�” Maddy shook her head� “Hey! It’s not the same, Sal� It’s not America if it isn’t, you know, if it isn’t English! ” 109 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 Sal shrugged at that� “I would still be Indian, English empire or not� You are the soil you are born on, not a flag or a language. Well, that’s what my old ba used to say�” “Well,” Maddy continued, muttering under her breath still� “I wouldn’t call this place America without the Stars and Stripes� Just isn’t right�” (TR3 197) Even though this alternative timeline looks more sustainable and peaceful, the TimeRiders follow their principle and restore history back to the Anglo-American version they know and feel comfortable with� Within this predetermined universe, however, the characters can still execute a modicum of free will and break the rules� As the longest and most complex series, the last three volumes of the TimeRiders series engage with this in great detail� The protagonists discover that their initial instructions to protect history as it is lead to an annihilation of the human race from the planet: humans have wrecked the environment, incited oil wars, and eventually set loose a deadly virus� With this knowledge, the rule to never allow any changes to history is slowly replaced by a new conviction: that they must try and change its course. This is presented as a long and difficult argument among the protagonists, leading to a surprising turn of events that involves an encounter with Jesus, a plan to rewrite the Bible, and the mission to change history for the better� To save the world, free will has to rule over historical determinism� As the only completed series, TimeRiders traces the most complex development of characters and their attitudes towards time travel and the mission they are on� With the other series still open-ended, the verdict is still out on whether the dictum that history remain unchanged prevails� Conclusion: Echoes of Nineteenth-century Adventures in Twentyfirst-century Time Travel Series Maria Nikolajeva is fairly critical of Nesbit’s adventures in time, referring to them as “time picnics” (Mythic 154) and critiquing the stories (and other fantasies, such as C� S� Lewis’s Narnia tales) for the fact that the children’s adventures have no impact on their lives after the adventure and that they return home unchanged� With regard to Narnia Nikolajeva claims that, like in computer games, the children can easily escape from their adventures “when things become too scary and complicated” so that the whole adventure becomes a “time-out” (Mythic 128): “in most quest stories for children […] the protagonists, unlike the hero in myth (or a novice during initiation), are liberated from the necessity to suffer the consequences of their actions” (125)� Does this ethical judgment of Nesbit’s time travel adventures apply to more recent examples? I would argue that the seriality of the novels is indeed an in- No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 110 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 trinsic structural guarantee that the protagonists will survive the dangers, but their experiences in all three series complicate the idea of an inconsequential ‘picnic’� While the children almost always return physically unharmed from their travels, they do experience loss and pain, and they go through changes in their personalities� Becky and Joe have to witness the death of their great friend and mentor Will Shakelock (TH 4), something that affects them deeply in the subsequent volumes, and in The Time Hunters 6 they have to save their parents and their friends while risking their own lives� The TimeRiders, too, lose friends and members of their team, but the effect time travel has on their sense of self is even more profound: in the course of the first six volumes, they have to come to terms with the fact that they are clones, “meatbots” (TR6 loc� 2470), as they call them, with at least partly engineered memories� As if to demonstrate their inviolable humanness, they react to this discovery with very strong emotions, from rage to depression, to the point of Sal considering suicide� The fact that these characters are also internal focalisers adds to the strength of representation of these emotional upheavals and shows that they are far from having an inconsequential picnic or wearing a safety jacket� Twenty-first-century time travel adventures raise a number of ethical questions, from what is human to equally complex issues of what constitutes a peaceful and just history� Dealing with each in detail would go beyond the scope of this contribution, so instead I would like to revisit the ethics and ideologies that nineteenth-century adventures have been attested with and try and identify what they have developed into more than 100 years later� Does Cyril’s assumed imperialist superiority, however ironical, still surface in the twenty-first century? Obviously, twenty-first-century adventurers would look rather ridiculous and pompous if they assumed an air of British imperialism, and the series are explicitly anti-racist and anti-slavery, which becomes evident in Liam’s treatment of run-away slaves in their Caribbean adventures (TR7 loc� 2883) or in Jake’s furious reaction to seeing slaves in 27 AD (HK2 148)� But there are social structures the time travellers are oblivious of, and they suggest that the adventure format might not lend itself to a complex ethical engagement of slavery and other historical atrocities� Despite Jake’s impulsive response to the slaves sold in the streets of Messina, he fails to see them in another situation: As Jake steered the Conqueror on towards the harbour of Messina (he was increasingly enjoying navigating), he noticed another ship approaching from the other direction, her two dozen oars moving swiftly and perfectly in time� He gaped in awe as she sped past them, decks teeming with activity� […] At the stern, under an 111 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 awning, an imperious-looking couple reclined on a large velvet divan� An attendant was fanning them with peacock feathers� (HK2, 143) Jake sees the ship and is overawed by its splendour and activity, not stopping to think who it is that makes the oars move so “perfectly in time”, who is responsible for all the activity, and what the social role of this “attendant” is - in all likelihood a slave� Similarly, when Becky encounters poverty in Victorian Oxford - “[d]ozens of people trudged the long, bustling road, some in formal attire, others wearing little more than rags� A red-haired woman with a dirtstained face shivered on the street corner, clutching a bucket brimming with wilted flowers” (TH1 93) - she does not stop to question or comment on what she sees� The poverty becomes part of a scenery, a schema for the Victorian age she may be familiar with but which she does not inquire into� Becky is otherwise a rather empathetic teenager, so it is a little out of character for her not to notice, and my explanation is that there is simply not enough time to discuss poverty� At this point, they are just on their way to the Ashmolean and rather pressed for time to proceed with the next step of their adventure� On the whole, most characters are quick to point out social injustices but to fully dwell on the social inequalities of the various historical periods would seriously slow down the pace of the adventure� The Time Hunters series does point towards imperialist ideology still inherent in contemporary adventure series, however� The children’s Uncle Percy, despite his characterisation as a near-saint with the best of intentions, collects animals from different times, bringing them back to his estate to keep as pets, and builds houses on supposedly uninhabited islands� While the series vindicates his activities by a display of how well the animals are cared for, some even being released back into their natural habitat, and due to the fact that no one is disturbed by his appropriation of far-flung places in the past, Percy still poses as a colonial collector and settler� Of the three series, The Time Hunters is the one in which time travel is most often undertaken for the sake of education, fun, and relaxation; in the latest volume the children even travel back in time to escape the danger of a COVID-19 infection� The entitlement at the root of this often leisurely travelling through time is based on Percy’s riches: again, every attempt is made to characterise Percy as a modest character and to downplay his wealth, but the cars he drives, his mansion, grounds, and lifestyle do not entirely back this strategy� Adventure for adventure’s sake, the motivation that generally makes nineteenth-century adventurers embark on their travels, is not entirely gone or transformed in twenty-first-century time travel: Jake Djones in The History Keepers is the character most obviously driven by a sense of adventure and No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 112 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 curiosity, and his fascination with historical times and places is set out right at the beginning when he has a good look around the London office of the History Keepers and the reader is filled in on his character: “He was intrigued by history; by the type of powerful, mysterious people in the murals he had just seen - rulers and emperors - but sadly his history teacher was not one of the interesting ones” (HK1 18). This masculine and glorified version of history that Jake is fascinated with and his strong sense of himself as an adventurer is what motivate him to fight for his right to time travel. When Rashim, in his seventeenth-century pirate adventure (TR7), refuses to stop fighting for even more money and gold, he appeals to Liam’s “sense of adventure”, claiming that the “even bigger win […] out there” is merely waiting for him “to go and grab it” (TR7 loc� 3366)� Our contemporary time travellers seem to have adopted the imperial gesture of entitlement to whatever is ‘out there’� This, to me, is a watered-down continuation of nineteenth-century imperialist entitlement� Time travel in TimeRiders, by contrast, is associated with a sense of burden rather than entitlement, and the teenagers battle with the consequences of what they experience on their travels: “monsters, mutants, dinosaurs, hominids, Nazis, eugenics […], time waves, churning storm fronts of infinite realities, […] chaos space haunted by ever-encroaching apparitions” (TR7 loc� 4462)� The awareness of physical dangers to themselves and the ongoing conflict between their official agenda and their own desires add to their daily worries and leave no doubt that these adventures are anything but a picnic� The TimeRiders go through a development in which they first time travel out of a duty that is largely extrinsically motivated, then assume agency and try to establish their own agenda, before eventually being certain about the ethically correct way of saving the planet, and this is where the series ends� In the introduction to a recent collection of essays on adventure, von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher set up a dichotomy of “Abenteuerlust oder Lebensnot” (5) as the poles that motivate adventures, and while TimeRiders is closest to a life-or-death necessity, Jake in The History Keepers is closest to the thirst for adventure when it comes to his reasons for time travelling� While the TimeRiders decide for themselves when and where to travel, Jake and Becky and Joe are not free to go� In both cases, adults control access to time travelling devices, and the question of whether or not they can travel gives rise to a number of confrontations and broken rules� While the parents might not be present, there are other adults who control the freedom of their movements, possibly in their best interest but annoyingly so nevertheless, and the intergenerational conflicts in both The History Keepers and The Time Hunters revolve around keeping the children safe or involving them in dangerous missions� While on the story level the teenagers often throw ethics overboard and de- 113 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 cide to break the rules by time travelling without permission, the structural dynamics of adventures demand that they go: the alternative would be to put on their metaphorical safety jackets and wait at home for the return of their friends, and that, as we know, does not constitute an adventure� While the selection of destinations in nineteenth-century adventure stories was in accordance with the imperialist mental geographies at the time and focussed on unexplored territory that was still part of the British Empire, the time periods selected in twenty-first-century adventures are closer to home: while all three series span the globe and a number of centuries, the destinations in TimeRiders are selected with a clear Anglo-American bias, either because they are set in the US or the UK or because they are tightly connected with US or British history� Clearly, history as we know it needs to be upheld, and while The Time Hunters humorously debunks myths like the Argonauts and the Minotaur, the TimeRiders and The History Keepers series for the most part are concerned with making sure nothing changes from what it says in the history books� In The History Keepers the team is an international and intertemporal one, the agents coming from a variety of chronotopes, and in The Time Hunters we encounter a similarly international community of time travellers, but in TimeRiders, saving the world lies firmly in the hands of an American-based team predominantly concerned with saving US-American history� This cannot only be explained with a lack of creative imagination on the part of the author: to me, it also indicates that there is a clear representational hierarchy in the history of this world� The TimeRiders travel to various periods in American, European, and South American history but never to Asia, Africa, Australia, or the Pacific region. This problematically translates a popular nineteenth-century view of colonised places as places without history or identity into the twenty-first century: places that do not appear to be of primary concern or of foundational significance for Western civilisations do not only receive less media attention, they also feature less in fiction for young readers. Despite the genre's tendency to push at boundaries, some perceptual and ideological boundaries are still firmly in place in the twenty-first century. Finally, a kind of historical imperialism can be traced in the insistence on history as we know it as the best version available� Our historical past is the basis for the way we live now and, even as a thought experiment, an altered past would seriously shake the foundations of how we define ourselves today. Making sure history is not changed therefore affirms our identity and our modernity� As Clare Bradford argues for the representation of the Middle Ages, the “weirdness” of the past “testif[ies] to the solidity and reliability of the present” (55)� The past is the Other, but as long as it is a knowable Other, it reaffirms the present in its conviction that it is at its pinnacle of material and No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 114 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 moral progress� More than a century after the height of the British Empire, this echo of imperialist ideology is still present in the narrative structures of adventure stories, and with the increasing popularity and diversification of time travel adventures we can also expect it to remain with us for some time to come� Works Cited Ashmore, Carl� The Time Hunters. Addlebury Press, 2010� eBook� [ TH 1] ---� The Time Hunters and the Box of Eternity. Addlebury Press, 2011� eBook� [ TH 2] ---� The Time Hunters and the Lost City� Addlebury Press, 2015� eBook� [ TH 5] ---� The Time Hunters and the Spear of Fate� Addlebury Press, 2012� eBook� [ TH 3] ---� The Time Hunters and the Sword of Ages� Addlebury Press, 2014� eBook� [ TH 4] ---� The Time Hunters and the Wraith’s Revenge� Addlebury Press, 2020� eBook� [ TH 6] Bakhtin, Mikhail� “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics�” Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, edited by Brian Richardson� Columbus: Ohio State UP , 2002, pp� 15-24� Baldick, Chris� “Adventure Story�” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 4 th ed� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2015� eBook� Bradford, Clare� The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature� London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015� Butts, Dennis� “The Birth of the Boys’ Story and the Transition from the Robinsonades to the Adventure Story�” Revue de Littérature Comparée, vol� 4, 2002, pp� 445-454� ---� “Adventure Books�” Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, edited by Jack Zipes, vol� 1� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2006, pp� 12-16� Dibben, Damian� The History Keepers: Circus Maximus� London: Random House, 2013� eBook� [ HK 2] ---� The History Keepers: The Storm Begins� London: Random House, 2012� eBook� [ HK 1] Ederer, Petra� The Empowered Child: Discourses of Childhood in Time Travel Stories for Children and Young Adults� 2019� University of Vienna, PhD dissertation� Frank, Cathrine� “Tinklers and Time Machines: Time Travel in the Social Fantasy of E� Nesbit and H� G� Wells�” Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults, edited by Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry� New York: Routledge, 2003, pp� 72-88� Goffman, Erving� The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life� Garden City, NY : Doubleday, 1959� Grenby, M� O� Children’s Literature. Edinburgh Critical Guides� Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP , 2008� Hanke, Veronica, et al� “Adventure Stories�” The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, edited by Victor Watson� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2001, pp� 6-9� Kearns, Michael� “Genre Theory in Narrative Studies�” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al� London: Routledge, 2005, pp� 201-205� Koppenfels, Martin von, and Manuel Mühlbacher� “Einleitung�” Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� Leiden: Brill, 2019, pp� 1-16� 115 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 Mendlesohn, Farah� “Introduction: Reading Science Fiction�” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2003, 1-12� ---� “Is There Any Such Thing as Children’s Science Fiction? A Position Piece�” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol� 28, no� 2, 2004, pp� 284-313� Nesbit, Edith� The Story of the Amulet, illustrated by H. R. Millar. 1906. London: Puffin Books, 1996� Nikolajeva, Maria� From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature� Lanham: The Children’s Literature Association and The Scarecrow Press, 2000� ---� Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers� New York: Routledge, 2010� ---� The Magic Code: The Use of Magical Patterns in Fantasy for Children� Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1988� ---� The Rhetoric of Character in Children’s Literature� Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2002� Nodelman, Perry, and Mavis Reimer� The Pleasures of Children's Literature, 3 rd ed� Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003� Rigby, Nigel� “Adventure Story�” The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, edited by Rosemary Herbert� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2005� 10�1093/ acref/ 9780195072396�001�0001� Accessed 1 Aug� 2020� Scarrow, Alex� TimeRiders. London: Puffin Books, 2010. eBook. [ TR 1] ---� TimeRiders: City of Shadows. London: Puffin Books, 2012. eBook. [ TR 6] ---� TimeRiders: The Doomsday Code. London: Puffin Books, 2011. eBook. [ TR 3] ---� TimeRiders: The Pirate Kings. London: Puffin Books, 2013. eBook. [ TR 7] Simmel, Georg� “The Adventure”, translated by David Kettler� Partisan Review, vol� 26, no� 2, 1959, pp� 231-242� Suvin, Darko� Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP , 1979� No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures