Time no longer linear in fiction

From Prospect magazine: “Time rarely goes straight in literature any longer. The smooth, uninterrupted passage from a beginning to an ending has fallen out of favour. Instead, books that juxtapose multiple stories from different periods in time — such as AS Byatt’s ‘Possession,’ David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas,’ and recently Philip Hensher’s ‘The Emperor Waltz’ — have grown into a genre of their own. Once a sci-fi plot conceit, time travel has become among the most popular structural devices in contemporary fiction. Today “time machine fiction” reigns supreme.”