Most time-travel stories begin with a machine. A lab humming with energy. A car modified with impossible tech. A device someone chooses to switch on.
Bus Number 43: The Midday Run takes a very different route. There is no inventor, no experiment, no chrome-plated apparatus. There is only a tired Greyhound driver, a small-town bus depot in Dubuque, Iowa, and a “milk run” to Elkader that no one expects to remember.
Somewhere along Highway 52, the familiar road rises into a column of light, and when the bus comes out the other side, forty years have disappeared. The way the novel handles that jump is what quietly reinvents the classic time-travel premise.
An Ordinary Route as the “Machine”
Raymond Olsen wakes at 4:47 a.m. on August 15, 1955, the same way he has for twelve years, no alarm; his body knows the rhythm. Shower, shave, bitter black coffee, and a walk-through Dubuque’s humid streets to the Greyhound depot on Main Street. His assignment that morning could not be more mundane:
- 5:30 a.m. departure from Dubuque
- Fifty-three miles of Highway 52
- A milk run through rolling farmland and small river towns so farmers can get to the county seat and back before noon
Ray is not a scientist or an adventurer. He is a middle-aged driver with a failing marriage, three miscarriages in his past, and a deep appreciation for predictability: “The work was honest. The routes were predictable. And predictability… was underrated.”
That is the first twist. The “time machine” in this story is not a constructed device; it is a perfectly ordinary route, driven by a man whose entire life is built on routine. Time travel arrives not as a chosen experiment, but as a disruption of the most dependable thing he has.
The Column of Light and the Void Instead of Hardware
The bus becomes the vehicle for time travel only when it meets something no one designed.
Ten miles south of Elkader, Ray sees it: a column of light spanning the road. When Bus 43 enters, reality snaps. Sound doesn’t fade; it erases. The diesel rumble, passenger voices, even the whisper of wind through a cracked window vanish into absolute silence. Inside the light:
- The bus is still visible, but everything looks wrong. Colors shift into ranges without names; vinyl and metal seem to glow from within.
- Time stops behaving. Movements feel thick and stretched, as if the passengers are trapped in a slowed-down frame between instants.
The book breaks this experience into chapters, “The Light,” “The Void,” “The Physics,” “The Moment of Change” , treating the anomaly as a phenomenon to be survived and later interpreted, rather than a machine to be explained.
There is no control panel, no dial, no decision. The bus drives forward because the road demands it. Time tears because something in that light decides it will.
Time Travel as Shock, Not Adventure
When Bus 43 emerges and rolls into Elkader, the town’s outline looks right, courthouse, storefronts, familiar streets, but nothing else does.
Cars are decades newer in style. Parking meters are unfamiliar. The faces are wrong. Ray hails Deputy Dale Richter, a man he last saw at age forty, and finds himself looking at someone closer to sixty-five.
Ray’s question cuts straight to the premise:
“Dale, what year is it?”
The answer, 1995, hits him like a physical blow. “Forty years” repeats in his mind as he stares at his own unchanged hands on the wheel, realizing the world outside has aged while he has not. There is no thrill here, no sense of “we made it.” Time travel lands as disorientation and grief:
- Lives that should have unfolded between 1955 and 1995 have been erased.
- Relationships, careers, and futures the passengers expected are gone or altered beyond recognition.
- They are instantly out of date in language, law, technology, and culture.
The book rejects the usual adventure framing and leans into shock. Time travel is not an opportunity; it is a theft.
Ordinary Passengers, Extraordinary Consequences
What makes this premise feel fresh is the cast. The passengers of Bus 43 are not chosen heroes but a cross-section of everyday 1955 Midwestern life:
- Walter and Margaret Fischer, grandparents on a routine trip to visit their daughter and grandchildren.
- Grace Holbrook, traveling with her four-year-old son Timothy, carrying the aura of a woman used to hardship.
- Eleanor Schmidt, a schoolteacher marking papers on the bus.
- Betty-Lou, a nineteen-year-old with a suitcase and secrets of her own.
- Clara Holst, sixteen, thin and watchful, on the edge of leaving childhood behind.
None of them signed up to rewrite history. They boarded because the bus was affordable, practical, and familiar.
By choosing such ordinary lives, the novel reframes the time-travel question from “What paradox will they cause?” to “What does it mean to lose forty years you were meant to live?” The stakes are personal before they are cosmic:
- Grandparents miss the entire arc of their grandchildren growing up.
- A young woman’s runaway escape becomes an unintended erasure from her own era.
- A sixteen-year-old thrust into 1995 must raise an “enhanced” child in a world that never knew her as a teenager at all.
Science fiction often zooms out to timelines and universes. Bus Number 43 stays zoomed in on people.
Enhancement without Agency
The light does more than move the bus. Medical examinations at Fort Dearborn reveal that the passengers’ bodies have been altered:
- Faster healing and recovery
- Stronger immune response
- Heightened stamina and cognition
- Signs of extended lifespan potential
Later, pregnancies discovered among the women show that their unborn children share these enhancements, suggesting the anomaly has changed them at a genetic level.
In many stories, this would be the moment where the narrative shifts into superhero territory. Here, the opposite happens. Enhancement brings:
- More interest from authorities, not more freedom. The group is confined, studied, and treated as national assets.
- More fear from institutions, who worry about what enhanced people might mean for security, medicine, and power.
- More risk for their children, who quickly become targets of control and political debate.
The book uses enhancement to explore exploitation, not fantasy. Time travel creates a new kind of human capability, but the people who carry it never get to decide what it’s for.
It’s All About Going From “How?” to “What Now?” – Shifting the Sci-Fi Question
Classic time-travel tales often revolve around the mechanics: wormholes, quantum theories, causality diagrams. Bus Number 43 certainly nods toward physics, the table of contents includes “The Physics” and “The Questions Without Answers.” But the narrative energy shifts quickly into aftermath:
- The Facility and The Tests (1995) – confinement, medical ethics, and power imbalances between scientists, military, and displaced civilians.
- The World Outside and The Plan – media frenzy, legal strategies, and public opinion shaping what happens to the passengers next.
- The Children of the Light and The Future Generations (2005, 2025) – how enhanced children grow up under scrutiny, and how global bodies like the WHO and UN write protocols around their existence.
Instead of lingering on how the light works, the book keeps asking what now?
- What happens when people become medically unique overnight?
- Who decides how much of their biology can be studied, and by whom?
- How do laws written for a pre-anomaly world adapt when time itself has proven to be less stable than assumed?
It’s still science fiction, but built around institutions, rights, and human dignity rather than circuitry.
A Generational Time-Travel Story
Another way the book reinvents the premise is by looking far beyond the initial jump. The story doesn’t end when the bus arrives in 1995 or when the passengers escape Fort Dearborn. The structure stretches into 2005 and 2025, with chapters focused on first births, WHO meetings, UN testimony, and the lives of enhanced children such as Montana-Charles and Aurora. Time travel here is not a one-off event; it becomes a generational fault line:
- First generation: The original passengers, grieving lost decades and fighting for basic autonomy.
- Second generation: Children whose abilities make them symbols in global debates about medicine, security, and human rights.
- Wider world: Nations forced to agree on protocols for people whose existence bends previous definitions of what it means to be human.
Most time-travel fiction closes its loop, back to the present, back to the original timeline, paradox resolved. Bus Number 43 keeps the loop open and asks what it means to live inside it.
Reinventing Time Travel by Making It Unwanted
In the end, the novel reinvents the classic sci-fi premise not with new physics, but with a different emotional center.
- The “machine” is a bus route.
- The travelers are people who never meant to leave their time.
- The jump forward creates no heroes, only survivors dealing with legal, ethical, and personal wreckage.
- The enhancements are gifts no one asked for, wrapped in lifelong surveillance and responsibility.
By removing intention and agency from the act of time travel, Bus Number 43: The Midday Run turns a familiar genre device into something more unsettling and more human. The question is no longer “Would time travel be cool?” but “What if it happened to you, on a day you thought would be exactly like the one before it?”
The answer, in this story, is clear: it wouldn’t feel like adventure. It would feel like a bus ride you never finish, even when the wheels stop, the route you were supposed to have through life is gone, and a new, harder one begins in a year you were never meant to reach this way.
