Maybe Time Travelers Are Stealing Our Stuff

If time travel is possible, why haven’t we been visited by tourists from the future? One possibility is that time travelers keep a low profile in order to avoid changing the past. But if they can’t change history, why would they even want to come here? Well, maybe they’re stealing our stuff.

It’s an idea Wesley Chu explores in his new novel Time Salvager—currently being adapted into a film by Michael Bay—about time travelers who visit the scenes of famous disasters and salvage materials that are destined to be destroyed anyway.

“The number one rule for time travel should be that you don’t change the timeline,” Chu says in Episode 160 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “But if you jump to moments before a disaster, you can cover your tracks.”

If it’s actually possible to make money from time travel, hordes of people would likely jump at the chance, which is why the idea features prominently in science fiction.

“What do you do with time travel?” says Chu. “You either kill Hitler, prevent Yoko Ono from breaking up the Beatles, or make a lot of money.”

Time Salvager was inspired by a dream in which Chu was sent back in time to steal a diamond from the Titanic. He found it unsettling to know that everyone he spoke with would soon be dead, and that helped shape his novel.

“Time Salvager is a time-travel book,” he says, “but it’s also about PTSD and the effects of depression, and knowing that you’re leaving people to die, and how does that affect you over time?”

Inhabitants of the present can take comfort in knowing that even though time travelers may be stealing our stuff, they’re probably not enjoying it. Spending all your time in history’s worst disaster zones probably exacts a heavy toll.

“The problem with this job is that you experience the last terrible moments of all the victims, and you can’t do anything about it,” says Chu.

Listen to our complete interview with Wesley Chu in Episode 160 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Wesley Chu on his first novel:

“I was lost and searching, so I dug deep and asked myself what makes me happy, and I remembered that I used to love to read. So that’s when I basically dropped everything, I dropped all my martial arts, most of the acting I was doing, and I went straight into writing. I wrote a terrible first novel. It was a 180,000 word monstrosity. It didn’t go anywhere, but it was probably the most important book I ever wrote, because I learned all my valuable lessons about what not to do with a book. … It was self-indulgent. I think I had fart jokes in there. It was just really badly written. I read Wheel of Time—I was one of those guys who waited in line for Wheel of Time—and I read all the Dragonlance books, so I think in that novel I had a lot of walking. My dudes walked around a lot. They walked around a lot, they told fart jokes, they got drunk at taverns. It was basically like Dragonlance fan fiction without the cool dragons.”

Wesley Chu on The Lives of Tao:

“Every bookstore I stop at, they keep telling me that my book is a regular seller. It’s yellow, it’s easy to sell, and a lot of people like it, so I’m hoping it’s one of those books that five or 10 years from now will still be on bookshelves. … Every writer, when they think about their first book, or they see the cover art—we dream about art, we dream about having this beautiful, artistic painting or scene for our book cover. And when I first saw Lives of Tao, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting, but it’s not art.’ But if I walk 20 feet away from the book and look at it, I can see it. If I put that book on a bookshelf filled with beautiful books that have [traditional] art, it stands out. The point of a book cover is to attract the eye and sell you books, and it does a fantastic job. I think Angry Robot just hit it out of the park when it came to the cover design.”

Wesley Chu on book titles:

“Time Salvager was the original name I had for this from the get-go. My editor and I—my editor at Tor—we played around with some other options, and at the end of the day we settled back on Time Salvager. We’re about to settle on the title of the second book, and it’s probably going to be Time Siege. Titles are hard, man. When Angry Robot first bought The Lives of Tao, my editor was like, ‘You know, I could see The Lives of Tao as a really good name for the series, but not for a book.’ So we spent three months going back and forth, just picking out all these names. I had a list of like 150 really terrible names. At the very end he sends me an email and he’s like, ‘I’ve got a title for the book for you. What do you think about The Lives of Tao?’ And I’m like, ‘All right. Good.'”

Wesley Chu on parents:

“When I was 16, back in the early ‘90s … I actually told my father, ‘Hey dad, I’m going to be an English major just like you, and I’m going to write books for a living.’ And then my dad basically said, ‘No, son. Your life will suffer.’ … My dad is my biggest fan, but he also knows how tough being a writer is, and how hard it is to make a living in the industry. So up until April, he would sometimes email me like, ‘Hey, I got you an interview at Chase Bank, son,’ or ‘I know somebody who is a headhunter who may help you find a job.’ So it took both my parents quite a while to accept that this is my full-time job and I am not going back to a cubicle ever, ever again. I am officially unemployable from this point on by any major corporation. So this is it. This is my end game.”