Jessica M. Goldstein didn’t mean to write a time-travel novel. For years, the DC journalist (a Washingtonian contributing writer) built her career reporting on the real world, not imagining alternate realities. But after the pandemic, Goldstein found herself preoccupied with the way Americans seemed desperate to return to the past—or some kind of fantasy version of it. “I was having a hard time being hopeful about the future,” she says. “I was watching nefarious forces weaponize nostalgia to inspire fear, hatred, and cruelty.”
Those thoughts slowly evolved into Retro, Goldstein’s fun and thoughtful new book about a struggling actress named Ash who takes a job at a high-tech time-travel company that sends wealthy clients back to different periods of history. Goldstein is interested in the fantasies that people construct around earlier eras—particularly when those people are privileged enough to imagine history as something charming rather than dangerous.
The novel’s other central figure is Ro Temple, a charismatic billionaire tech founder partially inspired by figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. But Goldstein wasn’t interested in creating a cartoon villain. “I thought a lot about movie stars—when they talk to you, it’s like you’re the only person in the room, and everything they say sounds true,” she says. “[Temple] is really sincere, actually. He believes in his own messaging.” That’s what makes the character unsettling, Goldstein says. Rather than accurately presenting his tech as risky and destabilizing, he sells something softer and more seductive: the promise that innovation can free people from discomfort, responsibility, or even reality itself.
Artificial intelligence is also a running creepy element of the book, though Goldstein notes that much of that aspect was written before the recent mainstream explosion of AI use. “I think about all these forces that are ramming AI down our throats, telling us our lives would be better if we had less human interaction rather than more, that want us to be isolated,” she says. “And in a way, part of the emotional experience writing Retro was about: Am I prepared to give in to those forces?”
Before writing Retro, Goldstein hadn’t thought much about time travel, but she now says wrestling with its “great big existential questions” was rewarding: “Time travel as a genre is fundamentally optimistic, because in every time-travel story, if you go to the past, you can alter the course of history. In our real lives, it feels like nothing we do makes any difference at all. We march and we protest and we organize and we donate and we vote, and it’s like: Is anything getting better? Is anything changing? But on a deeper level, we must believe that we do have the power to make meaningful change or we wouldn’t be telling time-travel stories the way that we do.”
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Washingtonian.
Tristan Espinoza joined Washingtonian as an Editorial Fellow in 2026. A proud Osage Native from Dallas, Texas, he is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Nonfiction) at American University. He is a graduate of Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He lives in Mount Pleasant.
