The Trouble with Time Travel and White Dog Poo

Time travel is complicated, even when it exists only on the page.

When I began writing Rocket to the Past: Rainhill, I assumed the most difficult part would be the plot. How to move a character convincingly from 2024 back to 1984 without gimmick or sentiment. That turned out not to be the real challenge.

The real trouble lay in the everyday actions.

In the first few drafts, modern habits slipped in unnoticed. I had my character lowering the television volume with a remote control. In 1984, most households did not have one. You stood up and turned the knob, or if you were a child, you were sent to do it. I also had her watching the news all day, forgetting that rolling news channels did not exist. In the 1980s, when a regular programme was interrupted by a newsflash, the atmosphere changed. It was serious enough for the whole room to fall silent.

I referred casually to A&E when the common term was Casualty. I forgot that shops were closed on Sundays, that pub opening hours were restricted in ways that now feel unfamiliar, that smoking indoors was ordinary, and that a woman ordering a pint still drew comment in some places. Shell suits and perms were not ironic. They were simply clothes and hair.

Writing time travel from a period I remember, but only partly, proved harder than writing about a period I had never lived through. Modern memory prioritises efficiency, and earlier detail is often overwritten. Rough edges are smoothed out. Inconvenience is removed. Those losses matter on the page.

The time machine in the story is Stephenson's Rocket, and that choice was never accidental. Growing up in Rainhill, every child knew about the Rainhill Trials. The village’s place in history was not abstract. It was something you walked past. It influenced how time was understood locally, even if no one would have put it into words. In later books in the series, Rainhill continues to surface, sometimes through well-known events, sometimes through quieter details that deserve the same attention.

What surprised me most was how alien some ordinary things now feel. Dogs roaming freely. Smoke hanging in pubs. Paper directories. My character ends up searching through the Yellow Pages, a task that feels laborious today but was once unremarkable. There is no internet. No instant answers. Gaining information takes huge effort.

I wanted to include white dog poo in the book. Every British child of the 1980s remembers it. As adults, many of us are faintly puzzled by its disappearance, to the point that some have eventually searched for an explanation online. I never quite found a place for it that felt earned rather than gimmicky, but its absence stayed with me.

The trouble with time travel is rarely the major story beats; it is the small assumptions. The habits you do not notice until they are wrong. The things that once existed everywhere and now exist nowhere.

Finally, a word on the cover. Tom McGrath, whom I was fortunate to connect with through Reedsy, took on the design with almost no direction from me. He went far beyond what was required, including visiting Rainhill to study the Skew Bridge so that it could be recreated accurately. That level of care reflects what the book itself tries to do: not to romanticise the past, but to place it correctly.

Time travel fiction lives or dies on those details. Get them wrong, and the illusion fails. Get them right, and the reader steps into a world that feels unfamiliar, recognisable, and quietly unsettling.

That is where the real work is.

Rocket to the Past: Rainhill by S. A. Carmody is the first in a six-part time-travel series, coming very soon. Follow KMCS Publishing on social media or LinkedIn for updates.