This post is part of a series on time travel and alternate history fiction — and why we reach for it when the present gets loud. Right now, these books are all available together in the Escape from 2026 Storybundle, through June 25, 2026.
What if the past isn’t as fixed as you think?
Colfax Shaw is a historian. Anna Taber is a mathematician from a century and a half in the future. They share one obsession: a Concord stagecoach that turned up somewhere it has no business being, in the Idaho foothills, in 1902.
Dean Wesley Smith’s Thunder Mountain series treats time travel like a job–an exciting one, but one that has rules and structure. His characters are professionals, not people being jerked out of their own time by an emergency, per se.
My take on how he’s treating time travel is that the situation is chaotic and waaaaay too risky, but the risks can be managed. You can take steps to do the best you can, then take advantage of any additional windows of opportunity that come your way.
The escapism element is always really strong on Dean’s books; it can be easy to miss that there’s anything else going on. But I think in his Thunder Mountain stories, he takes the question of upheaval and chaos and breaks it down into something that can be navigated. A wild ride, but not one where you have no influence or control.
That’s a specific kind of comfort in 2026.
Dry Creek Crossing is in the Escape from 2026 Storybundle — available through June 25, 2026, starting at pay-what-you-want.
Why are we all reading time travel and alternate history fiction right now? Read the hub post here.
About the Author
Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, New York Times and USA Today bestselling writer, Dean Wesley Smith published over two hundred novels and over seven hundred books in forty years, and hundreds and hundreds of short stories. He has over thirty million copies of his books in print.
At the moment he produces novels in four major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the old west, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the cold case mystery series, Cold Poker Gang series, and the superhero series staring Poker Boy.
During his career, Dean also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, they wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies.
He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of almost a dozen films, from X-Men to The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown.
Dean also worked as a fiction editor off and on, starting at Pulphouse Publishing, then at VB Tech Journal, then Pocket Books, and now at WMG Publishing where he and Kristine Kathryn Rusch serve as executive editors for the acclaimed Fiction River anthology series. He took over the editorship of the acclaimed Pulphouse Magazine in 2018.
For more information about Dean’s books and ongoing projects, please visit his website at www.deanwesleysmith.com
