My favourite spec fic magazine is The Future Fire, and its reviews section, The Future Fire Reviews, has just published a review of TimeSplash. It was actually a fairly lukewarm review, but well-written and well-researched. The reviewer, Keith Lawrence, called TimeSplash “a pleasant read” (ouch!) but for me, at least, [...]]]>

The Future Fire

My favourite spec fic magazine is The Future Fire, and its reviews section, The Future Fire Reviews, has just published a review of TimeSplash. It was actually a fairly lukewarm review, but well-written and well-researched. The reviewer, Keith Lawrence, called TimeSplash “a pleasant read” (ouch!) but for me, at least, the review was extremely thought-provoking. You might want to click the link above, zip over to The Future Fire Reviews and read Lawrence’s review before you read on.

Here are some of the many thoughts it provoked:

On the quality of the review. I write reviews much more these days than I used to, so I tend to read other people’s reviews with more of a “professional interest”. Lawrence’s review was very good. He strove for balance, he took the trouble to do some background reading, to check out my website, to check out the publisher’s site, and to set his comments in a broader context. As the person on the receiving end, it was gratifying that he had taken the book seriously enough to have done all this work. It was a good example for me and I hope I can learn from it.

On “a cold-war spy thriller”, genres, and marketing. Something interesting Lawrence said was that the publisher and I may have pitched the book to the wrong market because we misclassified it. TimeSplash is a fast-paced adventure story, a thriller, in fact, which uses the future, the past, and a range of cities and buildings as exotic locations for the action. That it uses time travel as a new technology to pose extreme social problems – not just for the characters but for the whole world, is what makes it real science fiction. So I think the reviewer got that part wrong. However, the Europe of 2050 is not so very different from that of 2010 (although, in the background, other parts of the world are radically altered) and, while I did the world building very carefully, there is very little there that is too alien.

In fact, I had agonised before publication about whether I should describe this book as a “science fiction thriller” or as a “techno-thriller”. I agree that it has much in common with the kind of “thriller” that includes lots of high tech (the kind of thing Michael Crichton used to write so well.) But, in the end, I decided that people who buy “techno-thrillers” would expect something more like Tom Clancy – far more thriller than sci-fi – and the balance in TimeSplash would not quite satisfy that audience. So I went with “sci-fi thriller” and, on the whole, reader reaction has vindicated the choice.

On depth and thoughtfulness. At a personal level, it was difficult for me to read Lawrence’s comments on the lack of depth and thoughtfulness in the story, especially the idea that I had disappointed him, that he had expected more from me. And that isn’t for the reasons you might think. Yes, of course I think TimeSplash is deeper and more thoughtful than he makes out, but it is a rip-roaring thriller – an action adventure – it was never a book designed to explore political, social or even personal issues in depth – although it raises many along the way – and I certainly don’t want to defend it on that score. What bugs me is that the book I write before TimeSplash (another time travel story called Time and Tyde) and for whcih I could not find a publisher, is exactly the kind of time travel novel he seems to have been hoping for. Time and Tyde really does explore the philosophical and moral issues involved in time travel, in the interference of powerful cultures with weak ones, even in what it means to be human. Trouble is, it is TimeSplash that the publishers wanted, not Time and Tyde - pacey thriller, not psychological study. To a large extent, this is just a matter of reader preference. Lawrence obviously likes the kind of sci-fi that holds up a mirror to life and asks, “Do you like what you see?” I can’t help approving of such a taste. TimeSplash is a different kind of sci-fi, the kind that thrills and entertains, less thought-provoking and more fun.

On Sandra’s relationship with Jay. One area in which TimeSplash should be taken seriously, is in the characters and their relationships. Sandra in particular is a complex individual into whom I put a lot of work. Obviously not quite enough work, as it turns out. If a reader can say that Sandra was “out for vengeance” or that she was “miraculously cured by Jay’s clean-cut niceness”, then I guess I just did not manage to write it clearly enough, since both interpretations are as wrong as they could be. Lawrence’s comments about TimeSplash as a “morality play” are interesting – and I can see how he got there – but again, wide of the mark. It is Sandra’s fear and self-loathing that drive her. Her redemption is not through the love of a good man, but through the self-destructive impulses that finally leave her at rock bottom, staring into the abyss and recoiling in horror. Jay, in his ineffectual way, merely provides a back for her to step on as she clambers out of the pit. It is alarming and sobering that I somehow failed to convey what was really going on there. More lessons to be learned.

On female characters in the book. It is very true that in the various macho cultures prtrayed in the book – the world of the spashteams, the secret service, the police, and organised crme – women are, as Lawrence says, largely “adjuncts” to the male characters. The two exceptions are Sandra – who, more-or-less single-hadedly, achieves what none of the men can – and Camilla, a woman tough enough to prosper and even triumph in that world. Really, that’s one of the points I was trying to make.  Men, mostly, are responsible for turning the world to shit. That’s just the way it is. They grab what power they can and they use it selfishly. It’s human nature. Women’s lives are hugely distorted by this. The greatest distortion occurs in close proximity to the most powerful men. Women who live in that world have to be exceptional to make any kind of impression – and not often exceptional in a very good way. Otherwise, they are simply used.

I actually love stories in which a strong woman triumphs. I remember being amazed at the film Alien when I first saw it. What a powerful feminist statement! The film systematically showed all society’s usual androcentric values failing in the face of the alien and, when all the men and machines had finished flailing about and getting themselves killed,  let Ripley beat it – and the company – with little more than a cool head, a stout heart, and a cat box. Sandra is my Ripley – a rather more disturbed and dark version, and her victories are rather more ambiguous, but Ripley all the same.

On Sniper’s evilness. Some people read Sniper – the bad guy in TimeSplash – as little more than a moustach-twirling villain from a Victorian melodrama. Lawrence, I’m very pleased to say, seems to have understood the character’s motives. I do present Sniper as an evil man (“milled from a block of solid evil” in Lawrence’s lovely phrase) and that is because I very much believe in the existence of evil people. I’ve met them. I’ve known them well. And I don’t mean the kinds of emotionless psychopaths you see in so many TV shows. The kind of evil person I mean is the kind who is deeply emotional and sensitive, but only about their own feelings, the kind who finds it impossible to care about, or even believe in the feeling of other people, the kind who is absolutely free to threaten and bully and manipulate others, to harm them in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, with no remorse, no guilt, nothing but the feeling that their own well-being entitles them. If that’s not evil, I don’t know what is.

On the bubble simile. Finally, I just have to mention the way Lawrence described timesplashing. He said it was “like a glass of water into the depths of which bubbles can be pushed through a scientific straw”. That was just brilliant and I wish I’d thought of it!

So thank you, Keith Lawrence, for a thought-provoking (and sometimes just provoking) review and to The Future Fire Reviews for printing it. If you haven’t come across The Future Fire before, and you too enjoy thoughtful, socially-relevant speculative fiction, you should definitely grab a copy and give it a try.

The amazing thing about Ms Harte’s review is her summary of the book. It is far better than any that I have written and better than the one my publisher is using. If [...]]]>

And, hot on the heels of the review by Booktaste, this wonderful review of TimeSplash by A. M. Harte at Quillsandzebras.

The amazing thing about Ms Harte’s review is her summary of the book. It is far better than any that I have written and better than the one my publisher is using. If only she could bottle that skill, there are a million writers out there struggling with synopses who would pay large sums to acquire it.

Well, actually, even more amazing – or, at least, gratifying – is how well she speaks of the book Just listen to this:

Set in the near-future, the novel is action-packed, full of political intrigue and a sprinkling of romance. Look out — science fiction is far from dead!

I think I’m going to grin broadly all day.

And, don’t forget, while you’re over at Quillsandzebras, to have a look around the blog – lots of book reviews, author interviews, events, links, and more – and the quality is excellent.

I just came across The Anderson Institute website and thought I would pass it on. I have no idea what this site is all about – it could be some kind of spoof for all I know -  but it contains some great summaries of [...]]]>

Riding the wave with an Alcubierre warp drive

I just came across The Anderson Institute website and thought I would pass it on. I have no idea what this site is all about – it could be some kind of spoof for all I know -  but it contains some great summaries of potential time travel technologies. Writers, like myself, who love playing around with these ideas, will love it. Geeks, nerds and sci-fi fans who are fascinated by time travel technologies, will have a field day (or maybe a time-warped field day). Physicists may shake their heads in sorrow, or leap about with excitement – they’re an odd lot and have been known to do both in superposition.

If you’re not familiar with the physics involved in these technologies, let me warn you now to take a large pinch of salt with you on your visit to The Anderson Institute. While everything they mention is within the realms of theoretical physics speculation, a lot of it is on pretty shaky foundations and is way beyond any kind of reasonable assumptions about our technical capabilities in the next few generations. As food for the imagination, however, it is a feast.

You already know about the TimeSplash Blog Tour. I’ll be giving you some more details as the [...]]]>

With just a month to go before the release of TimeSplash, I’m pleased to say the edits are all behind us and I’ll be seeing the galleys soon. It’s time to get down to some serious promotion.

You already know about the TimeSplash Blog Tour. I’ll be giving you some more details as the start date approaches, but, for now, let me just say I have some great venues lined up. If you are kind enough to follow me, I shall be taking you to some of the most interesting writing blogs on the Web.

Today, though, I want to mention a magnificent event I have planned for the 24 hours immediately after the release: the TimeSplash non-stop round-the-world Twitter tour!

OK. This is going to sound crazy but here’s how it will work. From 7pm to 8pm New York time, I will be tweeting about the book to everybody in the GMT-5hrs timezone. This includes all of Eastern USA, about a quarter of Canada, plus Cuba, Peru, Ecuador and the Bahamas.

As 8pm strikes, I will move west by one timezone, to GMT-6 hours, where it will again be 7pm. I’ll be jumping backwards in time! This first jump puts me in another chunk of Canada and the USA, and includes most of Mexico along with El Salvador, Costa Rica and so on. I’ll be tweeting at those guys until 8pm too. Then I move west again.

Each hour I move on, going steadily westward over the next 24 hours until I’m in the GMT-4 hours timezone between 7pm and 8pm the next day (talking to Chile, Peru, parts of Brazil and a teensy bit of Canada, among others.) What this means is that, wherever you live in the world, at 7 – 8pm* on the evening of 15th or 16th February, I’ll be tweeting at you about TimeSplash. For me, it will be 24hours of it being 7 – 8 pm!

Of course, some hours may be quieter than others. At GMT-1 and -2, I’ll be in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. GMT+7 will find me in the frozen wastes of central Russia. GMT+10 to +8 should be relatively lively though as I cross Australia (along with Japan, China and another chunk of Russia).

I know it sounds crazy and I’m painfully aware that everyone I’ve tried to explain it to has either failed to understand it, or failed to see why anyone would want to do such a thing. And, of course, any tweets I make will be visible to the whole world at once, not confined to a single timezone. But I’m launching an ebook here. It will be available to everyone on the Internet who can access the major online bookshops. And that’s nearly everybody in the whole darned world! Sitting in the bookshop in the local mall signing bookmarks (or whatever) seems far too limited in scope for what is really happening. So I want to visit everywhere in the world, for just one hour, to say hello and to tell people about my book.

I hope you’ll indulge me by being around at 7pm to 8pm your local time* to give me a wave as I pass through your town.

TimeZones

—

*I don’t know when everybody’s daylight savings time is, so I may be there an hour early. I’ll be following the Sun. If you have local daylight savings, please make the adjustment.

Writing stories about time travel is one of the most challenging, but also one of the most satisfying undertakings I know. There are so many different models of how time travel might work, based on the many competing physical [...]]]>

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in” – David Henry Thoreau

Writing stories about time travel is one of the most challenging, but also one of the most satisfying undertakings I know. There are so many different models of how time travel might work, based on the many competing physical theories of how space and time are structured, that it is a complete smorgasbord for the sci-fi writer. And each different cosmology has its own, fascinating paradoxes and implications.

When I came to write TimeSplash, I had just finished writing another time travel book, Time & Tyde (which is still unpublished, by the way). In that book, I had used a model of time that was strictly in accordance with general relativity. Time was ‘just’ another dimension. If you follow Einstein, time travel is allowed but the Universe is completely predetermined and therefore travelling backwards is merely unravelling the forward travel so nothing could be done in the past that had not already been done. Other major views are that time travel is prohibited by the Universe (Stephen Hawking) or that time travel is allowed but you cannot (for some unknown reason) ever create a paradox (ie it would be impossible ever to shoot your grandmother – Kip Thorne). I chose the Kip Thorne interpretation and had a lot of fun with it (in a dark, psychological thrillery sort of way.)

So I was ready for something very different when it came to TimeSplash. I started as far away from the physics of time travel as I could possibly go (given that physical reality has me on a pretty tight leash most of the time) and asked myself, “What if time was just the way it feels and the way ordinary people like to describe it? What if time flows, like a river, that there really is a timestream, and what if there could be currents and eddies in this stream?” And, if time is a river, where are we on it? Is the present special? Or is it just another point in the stream?

So I made a decision: The forward edge of the Universe’s flow through time is the present, and once the past has been ‘made’ it cannot be undone. This is consistent with some of the more ‘out there’ cosmologies (Cahill and Klinger suggest that the Universe is constantly self-assembling out of chaos, the present is therefore like a wave front moving us through time) so I was quite happy to give it a go and see where it led. And once you start imagining a river – an actual river, broad, deep, calm, inexorable – other analogies suggest themselves. Time travel, for example, might be like lobbing a brick backwards from where we are in the present to an earlier point in the river. If you did this, time travellers might make a splash when they re-enter the stream. After all, the past has been made and the travellers would not belong there. But just keep that analogy going. What happens when you lob a brick into a river? There is a splash, yes, but the river keeps flowing on. It takes away the turbulence, it carries it downstream. Pretty soon, the river is smooth and steady again, as if the anomaly has been straightened out and everything is back the way it was. Time, the past, would be self-repairing. Whatever anomaly or paradox was created, it would be fixed. The original past, the past we know, would be preserved.

By this time in my speculation, I was pretty excited, because I’d seen two great possibilities for a story. Firstly, if the disturbance created by the splash was big enough, it might flow all the way downstream to the present. At that point it would have nowhere else to go, there would be no more chance for it to be corrected and for the stream to heal itself. A big enough splash would affect the present – strangely, perhaps – because what would a splash in time consist of unless it was acausality and space-time distortions? – but also the effect might be dangerous if it were big enough. Secondly, if you can go back in time, create acausal disturbances, and return, it might actually be fun. Acausality, space-time distortions might be pretty trippy things to experience – as long as they were mild enough.

And there was the rub.

What if kids got hold of this technology? What if they used it to lob themselves back in time to experience trippy anomalies? What if they started making bigger splashes, deliberately creating paradoxes, say, so that the turbulence flowed all the way to the present and their friends could also enjoy it? What if a whole party culture evolved around timesplashing, with the heroes of the scene – the ‘bricks’ – creating big splashes so that hundreds or thousands of partying kids could feel the backwash? And then, what if one of those bricks took it too far? What if people started dying, whole towns started being wrecked?

The actual science of time travel in TimeSplash is glossed over. Essentially, the ‘lobbing a brick into a river’ analogy is about all there is to it. A way has been found to hurl material back through time, where it can remain for a period dependent on how far back it has gone. In the normal course of such an event, only small disturbances to to the earlier flow are created, which are wiped out as the flow moves inexorably forward. The material of spacetime is, however, somewhat elastic. It can be disturbed but it will return to its original configuration. Imagine a 4D lattice of points (spacetime events) connected by elastic links which are directional along the line of causality. Pull one of the points backward to meet one of its antecedents and then snip the lines leading out of the antecedent. This is analogous to shooting your own grandmother and creates a paradox because some things which exist no longer have any cause. The more influential a person (or thing for that matter) has been, the more acausality will ensue from going back to halt their progress through time. The elastic mesh metaphor (spacetime as a crystal lattice) explains how the Universe ‘knows’ how influential a particular person or event has been, and why some paradoxical events will lead to much bigger disturbances than others. Disturbing a point in the lattice, or removing forward-pointing links, changes the stresses across the whole network. A reasonable assumption is that this effect would increase exponentially the farther back you go because (generally speaking) forward links will increase exponentially.

A cool idea about time travelling, as the extreme sport focus for a whole, fringe youth culture, is one thing. Having the material for a novel is another. I still needed a story, and I needed to build a world for the story to take place in. Most of all, I needed some cool characters, with complicated relationships and motivations to hang the whole thing on. But I think I’ll leave all that for other posts.