Jessica M. Goldstein’s Novel Is a Fashionable Tackle Time Journey

Jessica M. Goldstein didn’t imply to jot down a time-travel novel. For years, the DC journalist (a Washingtonian contributing author) constructed her profession reporting on the true world, not imagining alternate realities. But after the pandemic, Goldstein discovered herself preoccupied with the way in which Americans appeared determined to return to the previous—or some form of fantasy model of it. “I was having a hard time being hopeful about the future,” she says. “I was watching nefarious forces weaponize nostalgia to inspire fear, hatred, and cruelty.”

Those ideas slowly advanced into Retro, Goldstein’s enjoyable and considerate new ebook a couple of struggling actress named Ash who takes a job at a high-tech time-travel firm that sends rich purchasers again to totally different intervals of historical past. Goldstein is within the fantasies that individuals assemble round earlier eras—notably when these individuals are privileged sufficient to think about historical past as one thing charming reasonably than harmful.

The novel’s different central determine is Ro Temple, a charismatic billionaire tech founder partially impressed by figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. But Goldstein wasn’t fascinated about making a cartoon villain. “I thought a lot about movie stars—when they talk to you, it’s like you’re the only person in the room, and everything they say sounds true,” she says. “[Temple] is really sincere, actually. He believes in his own messaging.” That’s what makes the character unsettling, Goldstein says. Rather than precisely presenting his tech as dangerous and destabilizing, he sells one thing softer and extra seductive: the promise that innovation can free individuals from discomfort, accountability, and even actuality itself.

Artificial intelligence can also be a working creepy factor of the ebook, although Goldstein notes that a lot of that facet was written earlier than the current mainstream explosion of AI use. “I think about all these forces that are ramming AI down our throats, telling us our lives would be better if we had less human interaction rather than more, that want us to be isolated,” she says. “And in a way, part of the emotional experience writing Retro was about: Am I prepared to give in to those forces?”

Before writing Retro, Goldstein hadn’t thought a lot about time journey, however she now says wrestling with its “great big existential questions” was rewarding: “Time travel as a genre is fundamentally optimistic, because in every time-travel story, if you go to the past, you can alter the course of history. In our real lives, it feels like nothing we do makes any difference at all. We march and we protest and we organize and we donate and we vote, and it’s like: Is anything getting better? Is anything changing? But on a deeper level, we must believe that we do have the power to make meaningful change or we wouldn’t be telling time-travel stories the way that we do.”

This article seems within the June 2026 concern of Washingtonian.

Editorial Fellow

Tristan Espinoza joined Washingtonian as an Editorial Fellow in 2026. A proud Osage Native from Dallas, Texas, he’s pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Nonfiction) at American University. He is a graduate of Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He lives in Mount Pleasant.