What would your family do? I don't know about you, but my alibi would not hold up. If I disappeared for three days, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had better be with me when I return, or the wife would rain down Hell on me.
Mysterious time jumps doubling every day is the premise of The Traveler by Joseph Eckert, the most innovative science-fiction story you will read this year. The protagonist begins to shift forward in time, and he quickly realizes that in two weeks he will have missed the entire childhood of his seven-year-old son. His son realizes it also, and makes a vow he will figure out how to stop it.
So they both go about their lives, him reappearing at the same time except the days doubled each instance, in the same location on D-Day, "Dad Day" - despite that being impossible. Time is a not a dimension, despite what you have read in books by pop science writers. It is very much based on our three actual dimensions. Forget the stuff about twins and stopwatches, that does not make it a dimension - that makes it relative to dimensions and the universe of natural laws that exist. To actually move forward (or back) in "time" would require calculation power based on an infinite scale, because the entire universe is moving; the earth is spinning and orbiting the sun and the sun is moving in the galaxy, you get the idea. We don't even know how many galaxies there are. If I just use the city where I write this article, and ignore everything movement outside the galaxy, in the time I took to write this sentence I moved 420 miles. How will you move 140 miles every second even if earth was its own pocket universe? 22,000 miles per second is even more unrealistic.
That is part of the science mystery his son sets out to solve. How the impossible is happening. The energy it would take to travel forward in time is equivalent to a galaxy of fusion, the physics at this time unimaginable, but his child doesn't want to just know why his father was "chosen by the future", he wants to break the cycle.
It is out June 9th and you should make sure to get it the first chance you can.
The Traveler by Joseph Eckert via Tor Publishing, out June 9th.
It is a science mystery but some projections are fun. Science Daily today is only a site that reformats university press releases but in the future, it is a real newspaper and the science journalist we meet is an opportunist exploiting a prominent scientist for fame. How many people in media today feel like science journalism is a way to get ahead? And how many scientists think theoretical physicists are who you bring in to solve a science mystery? That's part of what makes it a hoot - and it is a time travel story, so theoretical physicists who love strings or pretending time is a dimension get to shine. In science-fiction, anyway.
It is rare at my experience level (read: age) that I receive a book and can't put it down but that happened in this case. I sat outside yesterday and was so compelled to see what happens next I caught myself wanting to skip paragraphs of things that were 'description' so I could see how the story evolves. I didn't, I stopped myself, because there are no wasted paragraphs, no plot points you will want to skip. By page 70 you will feel like you read a whole book.
I can't stress this enough. Buy the book.
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