Trying to socially engineer the world’s population is not easy. Especially when you discover that a pair of reluctant time travellers keep on getting in the way of your plan.
The problem all started with James Urquhart, science lecturer, living in 2015, enjoying a walk in the countryside. and meeting Elizabeth Bicester, a Victorian Cambridge graduate, at a cricket match at Hamgreen in 1873.
Of course at the time, he didn’t know it was 1873. All he knew was he’d found a rather attractive woman who looked like she’d fallen straight out of a Tissot painting.
Perhaps if he hadn’t left his phone and she hadn’t picked it up, the story might have ended there; and time travel would have carried on its normal path.
The Time Travel Diaries –Recommended Reading Order:
Out of Time A Drift Out of Time A House Out of Time The Space Between Time The Time Palace of Mars Silicon Abbey
Bruce Macfarlane is the author of the humorous and sometimes romantic Time Travel Diaries of James Urquhart, a scientist, living in the 21st century and Elizabeth Bicester, a Victorian Cambridge graduate whom he accidently met at a cricket match in 1873.
He spent most of his working life in radiation protection and emergency planing with the nuclear industry, and is now enjoying retirement with his wife, Julia, and their cockapoo, Lulu, on the south coast of West Sussex, just a few minutes’ walk from the sea.
A life of writing scientific reports and reading early science fiction, especially the genre of time travel such as the works of Anderson, Simak and H. G. Wells encouraged him to start writing his own time travel adventures.
When he’s not writing he’s out walking on the South Downs trying to remember all the names of the flowers and mushrooms, Julia, has identified.
When it’s raining, he can be found sometimes in his “shed” as Julia calls it, trying to master new jazz chords instead of doing the ironing.
His stories have been described as “Tom Holt meets P.G. Wodehouse meets Philip K. Dick meets Fortean Times.”
You can read more about how he created the stories, the characters and places used at his website http://timetraveldiaries.co.uk/
Apparently, unless the author is Connie Willis or Diana Gabaldon, I need quite a bit of humor and some madcap capers in order to enjoy a time travel novel. Anyone else writing with a serious tone or too much pseudo-science and I just can't hang in there. This one fits the bill, and while it's not without its issues, they're minimal and not prohibitive when it came to falling into the story. At several points I half expected Max and The Time Police (from Jodi Taylor's Chronicle of St. Mary's novels) to show up. Enter H.G. Wells - the seemingly requisite famous person in any time travel novel - but he fits right in; where do you think he got the idea for all of *his* novels? I can't say that I completely understood everything I read, and felt a little lost at times, but overall enjoyed.