No. Just. No. You can't write a novel about time travel technology because there is no such thing as time travel technology. Any book I have read about time travel covers the whole tech thing very sketchily. Here are a few of my recent faves:
Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch - a long corridor with doors to alternative pasts and futures. So, string theory, but he doesn't make any attempt to explain the technology, but he explains the outcome of the technology. It's a great book though!
How to Lose The Time War, by Max Gladstone - Two people on opposite sides of a war across time fall in love via letters. Another great book, but it's a love story in a time travel wrapper.
Sea of Tranquility - I really like Emily St. John Mandel, and she has a great name for a writer :) Time travel happens in certain places. You go there and you can end up in a different time. Awesome book.
All Our Wrong Todays, by Elan Mastai - Maybe more of an alternate reality sort of story - moving from one reality thread to another in search of a better reality.
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley - Time travel has gotten so commonplace that there is a governmental Ministry responsible for it and they bring people from the past to the current time to learn about the past. I love these stories, where time travel is no big deal, in fact it's just a fact of everyday life.
Which leads me to my all-time fave:
The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis - Time travel is no biggie in this reality; in fact a university in England does it all the time with historians but there's a flu epidemic and the operator is sick and someone ends up going back into the wrong time and they can't find her. Highly recommended.
The common thread among all these books and which I with great humility include A Ledge Outside Time in, is that time travel is a wrapper for the real story - a device to keep the readers attention while the author sneakily tells their real story.
