There’s a unique thrill in taking a well-known historical era—say, Ancient Greece—and bending it through the lens of speculative fiction. In Jake the Time Jumper, I wanted more than an educational time-travel detour. I wanted to crack open the marble shell of the past and find strange new light inside.
But fictionalizing history isn’t just about swapping togas for time portals. It’s about reimagining what could have been if something—someone—had arrived too soon, or too late.
Take Ancient Greece, for example. We picture symmetry, logic, philosophers in sunlit courtyards. But what if that version is just one timeline? What if, in a fractured stream, Athens fell too early or never rose at all? What if a traveler—someone like Emma—arrived centuries ahead of her own time, leaving behind not just relics, but ripples?
That’s where parallel worlds come in.
To build an alternate Greece, I started with the real: dialects, weaponry, terrain, politics. Then I fractured it. A missing king here, an oracle gone silent there. Small changes that spiral into large-scale rewrites of history. Suddenly, Sparta isn’t just militaristic—it’s paranoid, ruled by a regime that fears gods who no longer speak. Temples flicker with forgotten tech. The myths still live, but now they glitch.
Jake’s journey through this altered world isn’t just an exploration—it’s a confrontation. He’s forced to ask: what is history when time can be rewritten? What is legacy when the past is unstable?
To sell these divergences, I rely on two pillars: sensory realism and emotional consistency. Readers need to feel the weight of stone amphitheaters, the dry wind off olive groves, the burn of volcanic ash in the sky. They need to smell charred parchment, hear distorted war chants, taste dates gone sour with age. But more importantly, they need to believe in the people.
Even in altered timelines, the fears are familiar. A mother afraid of losing her child. A leader questioning his purpose. A teen caught between duty and identity. These emotional throughlines ground the world—even as time unravels.
And then comes the fun part: layering in evidence of interference. A traveler’s signature hidden in code. A bronze coin that shouldn't exist. A story whispered in a ruined temple about a girl with fire in her hands. Hints that this world isn't quite right—and maybe never was.
Ancient civilizations and parallel worlds give us more than just narrative playgrounds. They ask what happens when memory, myth, and manipulation collide. They allow us to bend what’s known into what’s possible.
Because sometimes, the ruins we walk through aren’t echoes of the past—they’re warnings from futures that never were.
And in stories like Jake the Time Jumper, it’s not enough to ask when we are.
We have to ask: which version of the past are we standing in now?