Time-travel stories sit at a nexus of the literal and figurative. All of us are travelling through time – at the ambling pace of a human life, moving in a direction we think of as forward, with the future ahead and the past behind. But memory is a form of time travel, the study of history is an attempt at building time machines, and past and future are entangled.

In 2016, I sat down with my co-author Max Gladstone to write our novella This Is How You Lose the Time War, which follows two time-travelling female spies as they fall in love. That same year was also when I first heard people speaking earnestly and frequently about feeling as if they were in the wrong timeline, as the Brexit referendum results rolled in and Donald Trump was elected US president. But our book did not feel like it was specifically about 2016; as we finished and moved on to other projects, I remember being troubled that it would feel inadequate to the moment, that when the world needed rallying cries against fascism and white supremacy, we’d given it a time-crossed love story.

But our novella is just one of several recent stories of queer women time-travelling. There is Kate Heartfield’s Nebula-nominated novella Alice Payne Arrives and its sequel Alice Payne Rides, which see two 18th-century women – lovers – become embroiled in a war. There are also Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, Kate Mascarenhas’s The Psychology of Time Travel, Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach and Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline.

Every time we affirm that queer people have always existed and often led happy lives, we change not the past but history

I cannot stress enough how different these books are in genre – ranging from historical romp to murder mystery to military sci-fi – as well as in prose style and voice. But what they have in common is women loving women, while striving to shape the world into a better place for their relationships.

I wrote to each of these authors in anticipation of this piece and it turns out we were all drafting our books in 2016. As Annalee Newitz told me: “I think many of us have a strong feeling that historical amnesia is part of what’s brought us to this dark place.”

To be a queer woman of colour is to be acutely aware that your existence is political – and that you don’t need a time machine to rewrite history. Women are written out of history with infuriating consistency, and written back in only intermittently. My childhood was shaped by JRR Tolkien’s ubiquity but Naomi Mitchison, his contemporary and friend who wrote dozens of novels across multiple genres and lived to be 101, was unknown to me until my mid-20s. I didn’t know about Joanna Russ – who literally wrote the book on how to suppress women’s writing – until very recently. Women talking to women, women loving each other in the fullness of our differences – women of colour, trans women, queer women, older women and younger women – is a political act, a refusal to accept the erasure of our names, achievements and lives.

Mascarenhas has said of her novel that time travel “[makes] you constantly think of what stories people leave behind”. Every time we recover a female author, scientist, doctor, activist, every time we affirm that black people lived in medieval Europe, that queer people have always existed and often led happy lives, we change history – not the past, crucially, but history, our story about the past, our narratives and paradigms. And as we change history, we change the future. I’d worried that our book wouldn’t be relevant – it turns out all of us were right on time.