3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years (The Time Traveler's Passport) by John Scalzi
Narrator: Malcolm Hillgartner
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, science fiction, short stories, time travel
Series: Time Traveler's Passport #1
Pages: 38
Length: 1 hour and 4 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

A time travel technician must step away from the controls and take action in a twisty short story where timing is everything, by New York Times bestselling author John Scalzi.
Time travel is real—and used for high-end tourism. Every moment of the past is open to visitors, and no matter what they do then, everything now waits for them, thanks to the sure hand of an experienced time travel technician. Come spend a day behind the controls of the time machine, and discover why, this day of all days, it’s time for this technician to make a change. Because sometimes, time travel is more than just an adventure. Sometimes, it’s a moral imperative.
John Scalzi’s 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years is part of The Time Traveler’s Passport, an unforgettable collection of stories about memory, identity, and choice. Watch time fly as you read or listen to each short story in a single sitting.

My Review:

Time travel is a fun idea to play with – which is why there are so many stories about it. Well, the stories aren’t really about the time travel, per se, because that’s usually just a lot of handwavium. Where the stories come in – and often go out – is about what people DO with the time travel. Or when they’ve time traveled. Or when time travel is an available option for both good and terrible motivations.

Or just as a way to take a nice, relaxing vacation. That’s one of the reasons that people choose to avail themselves of time travel tourism in this particular story. It’s the most benign reason. It’s, unfortunately, not the most common reason.

Scientists want to sample history. Literally. Sending a drone back in time to grab a DNA sample from a plant or animal that has gone extinct seems both obvious and relatively low-impact on either the past being sampled or the intervening centuries, while in the present it allows for the creation of cures for diseases and scientific progress and other mostly good stuff.

A lot of people want to observe the past, which can either be dangerous or a lot of fun or both, depending on where and when and why and how – but it’s not research. The minute the time traveler appears, history changes. That it changes for a different version of time and history doesn’t affect the era the time traveler left from or returns to. The whole butterfly thing really happens, it just happens in another branch of the multiverse.

Some folks want to go back and change their own history, even if it won’t affect the ‘them’ that travels. They’re hoping for a different, better, outcome for another version of themselves.

And then there’s the largest, most dangerous, and most potentially destructive portion of the time-traveling public. The ones who believe they can go back and Change History. Definitely with boldface, capital letter emphasis.

Maybe they can and maybe they can’t, but they can’t change the history of the world they came from. Only the history of the version they traveled to. And they all woefully underestimate the difficulties of doing so.

We see the whole organization and mechanism of time travel from the perspective of one, unnamed, time travel technician. It’s a day in his life as he works his way through the clients who are on his schedule for that particular day AND as he thinks through and about some of the more interesting or more typical – or both – scenarios that he has faced over the length of his 25-year career as a mid-level time travel technician.

Which is when the story jumps the fascinating but rather pedantic track that it’s been on for the entirety of the time travel technician’s day of facilitating time travel for well-heeled and woefully unprepared tourists.

The time travel tourists may not be prepared for the reality they’ll face on the other side of the time machine – but he is. He’s done it before. He’s about to do it again. Because the only way to outrun the end of the world is to keep traveling through time, hoping to stay one step ahead of a crash that he no longer has the power to stop.

And probably never did.

Escape Rating A-: The beginning of this story sounded familiar, but the voice in my head reading it to me was the author’s and not the excellent audiobook narrator, Malcolm Hillgartner. Then I realized that I had heard the author read that first chapter when he was here in Atlanta on tour for The Shattering Peace – but at the time he was pretty damn cagey about when and where the story would be released.

That first chapter now reads like a bit of a setup – or a send-up – or both. Because it IS funny, as the author is known for, and it’s the kind of funny that laughs at human behavior from the wry, sometimes sarcastic perspective of an uninvolved narrator who has no fucks left to give and a bit of a jaundiced eye towards humans being human.

And the stories that this technician tells are rather humorous – but they are also stories of humans being human – and doing it badly. I knew there had to be a punch line somewhere. Possibly with an actual punch to the solar plexus, which, in the end, there was.

This is also a story where, even though it’s slight when it comes to page count or listening time, is guaranteed to make the reader remember every single time travel story they’ve ever read to serve as examples for all the reasons that humans would LOVE time travel and all the ways in which it would go terribly wrong. So my mind was whirring the whole time I was listening, pulling up book titles from the classic Time and Again to the obscure Elleander Morning to the outright creepy but ultimately sad Anubis Gates to the time traveling thieves of Kage Baker’s Novels of the Company to the madcap adventures of The Chronicles of St. Mary’s, with a bit of a side trip to Star Trek’s Department of Temporal Investigations.

That’s not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg of time travel stories, because it’s such a fun idea that has just SO MANY ways of going wrong. Which meant that there had to be a fly somewhere in the ointment in those 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years. And it’s a doozy.

I’m afraid that our time travel technician’s jump to a different reality is going to land him in the corner of the multiverse that Nicholas Binge’s recent Extremity ended up. And just plain ended. Or didn’t. Because time travel.

I had fun with this one, and the sting in the tail of the story was appropriately stingy – that’s a stinger that stings and not a miser because the author was absolutely not stingy with the depth of the sting.

I know I’ll be picking up the rest of the Time Traveler’s Passport collection when the mood strikes or I need a short reading/listening palate cleanser to get me through the holiday madness. I can’t wait to explore the rest of the series to see how the stories live up to the collection’s description as “an unforgettable collection of stories about memory, identity, and choice.” So far, it’s off to a fantastic start!