At what point does time stop feeling “real” in sci-fi?
I’ve been working on a sci-fi project for a while now, and something unexpected happened as I kept building it.
It started as a pretty straightforward story, but the deeper I got into it, the more it stopped feeling linear.
Instead of events happening in a clean sequence, it started to feel like everything existed at once: memories, timelines, different versions of the same moments overlapping and influencing each other.
That idea kind of took over the whole thing.
Now it feels less like “what happens next” and more like how different points in time echo into each other, almost like reality itself isn’t as stable as we think it is.
So I’m curious...
Do you prefer sci-fi that treats time as something structured and logical… or stories where time feels fractured, subjective, and almost emotional?
And are there any books that you think handle that really well?