Tag: time travel

Chapter 1-Out of Time-SampleSunday

This is the first half of Chapter 1 in my time travel novella, Out of Time. Follow the link to take you to the buy links for paperback and ebook.

They had to escape from this period in time. The people they were visiting in the 1600’s definitely thought they were witches, and the spawn of the devil.

Historians warned the school teacher about visiting Salem, Massachusetts, during the Salem Witch Trials, especially with a dozen twelve year olds in her care. The teacher had Doctor John Hawking and Captain Erickson with the class, but, the villagers were chasing after them, and there was no way to get to the shuttle without significantly changing history. All Mrs. Hanson wanted was to show her class, through the Interactive History program, what made these particular Puritans so paranoid, and what happens to people when they were accused of witchcraft. Well, they certainly got more than they bargained for.

Hawking was loudly complaining, “This is utterly stupid. We should have had a military backup when we go to time periods such as these. With all the threats to us from the Puritans, and the Native Americans, neither of which tolerate strangers on their lands. I’m going to file a protest with the President, and insist we get some military assistance.”

“What about interfering with time by bringing advanced weapons, armor, and everything involved with a military operation?” asked Erickson.

“We have the technology to make our weapons appear to be muskets, so why not? We can then have the soldiers wear whatever uniforms from whatever time we’re in, and that will solve that!” insisted Hawking.

“Well, let’s worry about that when we get back.”

After leading the witch hunters through the forest for over an hour, the time travelers managed to finally lose them. The school kids thought this was really cool, while their teacher was frantic. Erickson led them all back to the holographically disguised shuttle, which was disguised to look like a small house. Once they all got back inside, Erickson piloted the shuttle back to the USS Einstein, which was waiting in orbit. On the ship, Mrs. Hanson and her class went to the room that was a temporary classroom, while Hawking and Erickson went to the bridge. On the bridge, Erickson was asked by Yeager, “How did it go, Captain?”

“It didn’t go very well. One of the villagers got it into their head that we were more than just strangers, so we were accused of witchcraft. Mrs. Hanson tried to argue that we weren’t witches, which made them even angrier. So, within minutes we had the whole angry-mob-with-fire-and-pitchforks coming after us. After our little disappearance, we might as well be witches to them. Remind me never to let any historian, or school teachers, convince us to let them travel to Salem of the 1690’s. Now, we can return home to see what other adventures we have in store for us.”

The USS Einstein traveled forward to 2157, so that the sixth graders could do their e-book reports on what happened in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. After Hawking, and the others, returned from the first missions through time, the government decided that there would be a no-interference policy for the past, a sort of Grandfather Paradox Policy. The idea was, through the previous experience, that if anyone interfered in anything significant to the timeline, that when you returned to your period of time, you may not exist because your ancestors may not have survived a certain period in the time you tried to fix. Hawking said this was all theory, and he didn’t know if the person would disappear from history if they returned to the present, but, he didn’t want to find out.

Contaminating the timeline without meaning to could be a real possibility with the Interactive History program the Department of Education had thought up recently. Too many American children knew far too little about their history, so with the use of a time traveling starship, they could learn from first-hand experience. Hawking disagreed with this, but, convinced Congress to pass a Grandfather Paradox Act, making sure nobody would interfere in the natural flow of history. Sure, Hawking was becoming rich and famous because of this, school districts, historians, and others paid him to take them back in time, but he still cared about not contaminating the timeline.

Hawking was also worried about when those rogue time travelers from the beginning of his first trips through time were supposed to interfere with the original missions, but, he had no idea when in the future they were from. Another worry was the fact that the Time Tripper had been built without his knowledge; what other things had he done that the government had gone behind his back to do their own version? He would never know. Now, government contracts were going to the lowest bidder for the next generation of time traveling starship.
These new ships, with Commander Robinsons’ help, could go faster than the speed of light, if they needed to use the suns’ gravity to jump through time, which didn’t happen very often, since they almost always found fluid time access points. Robinson had also experimented with using black holes to travel through time, which wasn’t quite working out the way he thought the experiments would. All the black hole experiment did was make the ship stay stuck in the event horizon, going nowhere, so now Robinson would have to invent a whole new way to get the ship unstuck from a black holes’ event horizon.

Hawking made sure he held the patents to his time device, which required the new stardrives to work; he wanted no one to go behind his back to build another timeship without his knowledge. President Williamson assured the scientist that anything having to do with the secrets of time travel was now solely Hawkings’ responsibility; there were no longer secret government labs, or secret time traveling missions. Doctor Hawking still wanted to know what kind of missions the Time Tripper had been on previous to Hawking taking control of it to go back to Roswell in 1947, but, all Williamson would say was that it was classified higher than the security clearance that Doctor Hawking had been given by the powers that be.

Hawking had been asked by some Smithsonian Institute historians if he could take them to observe moments like the Boston Massacre, the signing of the Constitution, the War of 1812, and the British burning the White House, the various battles of the Civil War, and other significant happenings in American history. They wanted to record everything for posterity, on video, so that the Smithsonian Museum could accurately portray everything instead of guessing on a few moments in history.

He was a bit overwhelmed with all the requests for his time, and the attention he was receiving, so he finally hired a secretary, and an agent, so that he wouldn’t have to deal with everything so directly. How he ended up as the go-to guy for trips through time, he wasn’t sure; all he wanted to do originally was to figure out how to time travel. Since he enjoyed history, it really didn’t bother him all that much to go back in time, to show everyone how history had happened. What bothered him was what would happen if someone messed up the timeline, like he, and the others, did the first time they went through time, would they be able to fix it again? So, he started reflecting on how he went through this whole time travel scheme the first time.

New cover to Out of Time

I decided to update the paperback, and uploaded it to Createspace. The original was published through iUniverse in 2008, but, I’ve updated it since then, and its been the newer version in e-book form for a little over a year. Here is the brand new cover. Stay tuned for updates! Available for $.99 on Nook, Smashwords, and whenever Amazon gets around to updating it.

The story behind “Out of Time”

This was posted two years ago when I published Out of Time, and I thought I’d re-post it, and share it with everyone, since I’m in the process of publishing a more updated version to Createspace, with a new cover. Next after this will be Don’t Mess With Earth

So, you’re probably wondering how I came up with the story of Out of Time.

I started out with thinking the whole US government-alien UFO landing conspiracy theories would make a good story. Then, I saw the movie Titanic in 1997 and thought it would be cool if I could include it, so it turned into a time travel story. My villain, at first, was a guy who turned traitor, and sold technology secrets to a terrorist organization. I had him hijack the timeship, but he thought he was going to 1941 to help Japan attack Pearl Harbor, instead he ends up in Roswell 1947. I didn’t think this character worked too well as the main antagonist, so I created a bigger bad guy, who pulled the strings from 50 years further in the future.

This antagonist ends up going back in time himself, and impersonates J. Edgar Hoover. I have Hoover stay in control of the FBI because he knows where all the bodies are buried and what skeletons all the politicians have in their closets since he is from the future. He uses his knowledge to try and stop the time travelers, by sending teams of his own to where Hawking and the others are supposed to be. Eventually, it’s discovered that this Hoover had a hand in trying to assassinate JFK. At the end, you find out just why Hoover is determined to stop Hawking.

Other chapters deal with Anne Frank and the time travelers attempt to keep her from dying in the Concentration Camp she ends up in. I have my time travelers visit JFK because I was into the whole conspiracy about there being more than one shooter in Dallas that November day. I still think there is more to the whole assassination of the President than the government will ever let us know, but then again, maybe it was Oswald by himself who did it.

I have my time travelers even attempt to fix Apollo 13 and the Challenger shuttle. The only problem is, that when they return to their present, they discover changes they never imagined. I have them debate about whether they should fix the mistakes or just leave it alone. The message here being, should time travel ever be attempted and what about the grandfather paradox?

I’m really into American history, so that’s why I chose certain times in US history to start with. One of these days, when I’m a much better novelist, I will add more chapters or just add more to the chapters that are in the novella already, because I think it needs more meat to the story. Of course, I could just write a bunch of sequels, I don’t know yet. I just know that my next novel won’t take me ten plus years to finish, because I just nitpicked this one to death, and decided to publish it because I was just tired of looking at it and messing with it. From the various people who have read it so far, who knew how I wrote in high school, have been pleasently surprised by how well the story flows and how interesting it is. Hopefully, that translates into a lot of people wanting to buy a copy.

I’m currently working on another novel that I once submitted to the Writer’s of the Future contest as a short story. Stay tuned for that, once I have it completely written, I will post what that novel is about.

Why I wrote Out of Time: a Time Travel Novel

So, you’re probably wondering how I came up with the story of Out of Time, at least that’s what I’m hoping you’re thinking ha ha.

I started out with thinking the whole US government-alien UFO landing conspiracy theories would make a good story. Then, I saw the movie Titanic in 1997 and thought it would be cool if I could include it, so it turned into a time travel story.  My villain, at first, was a guy who turned traitor and sold technology secrets to a terrorist organization. I had him hijack the timeship, but he thought he was going to 1941 to help Japan attack Pearl Harbor, instead he ends up in Roswell 1947. I didn’t think this character worked too well as the main antagonist, so I created a bigger bad guy, who pulled the strings from 50 years further in the future.

This antagonist ends up going back in time himself and impersonates J. Edgar Hoover. I have Hoover stay in control of the FBI because he knows where all the bodies are buried and what skeletons all the politicians have in their closets since he is from the future. He uses his knowledge to try and stop the time travelers, by sending teams of his own to where Hawking and the others are supposed to be. Eventually, it’s discovered that this Hoover had a hand in trying to assassinate JFK. At the end, you find out just why Hoover is determined to stop Hawking.

Other chapters deal with Anne Frank and the time travelers attempt to keep her from dying in the Concentration Camp she ends up in. I have my time travelers visit JFK because I was into the whole conspiracy about there being more than one shooter in Dallas that November day. I still think there is more to the whole assassination of the President than the government will ever let us know, but then again, maybe it was Oswald by himself who did it.

I have my time travelers even attempt to fix Apollo 13 and the Challenger shuttle. The only problem is, that when they return to their present, they discover changes they never imagined. I have them debate about whether they should fix the mistakes or just leave it alone. The message here being, should time travel ever be attempted and what about the grandfather paradox?

I’m really into American history, so that’s why I chose certain times in US history to start with. One of these days, when I’m a much better novelist, I will add more chapters or just add more to the chapters that are in the novella already, because I think it needs more meat to the story. Of course, I could just write a bunch of sequels, I don’t know yet. I just know that my next novel won’t take me ten plus years to finish, because I just nitpicked this one to death, and decided to publish it because I was just tired of looking at it and messing with it.  From the various people who have read it so far, who knew how I wrote in high school, have been pleasently surprised by how well the story flows and how interesting it is. Hopefully, that translates into a lot of people wanting to buy a copy.

I’m currently working on another novel that I once submitted to the Writer’s of the Future contest as a short story. Stay tuned for that, once I have it completely written, I will post what that novel is about.