Time travel
Time travel stories to which the novel has been compared include Jack Finney's "Time and Again" (1970) F.M. Busby's short story "If This Is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" and the film "Somewhere in Time" (1980). Henry has been compared to Billy Pilgrim of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969). Science fiction writer Terence M. Green calls the novel a "timeslip romance". "The Time Traveler's Wife" is not as concerned with the paradoxes of time travel as is traditional science fiction. Instead, as critic Marc Mohan describes, the novel "uses time travel as a metaphor to explain how two people can feel as if they've known each other their entire lives".