TIME WARPED

by Rob Lopresti

Time is on my mind this week, though not on my hands, or on my side. So let’s spare it a minute or three.

Zoning out

As you may remember I was recently in Copenhagen. One of the interesting consequences of having easy wireless access in our apartment there was the constant reminder that I was nine hours away from my usual time zone.

I would get up in the morning and check Criminal Brief and often be met by yesterday’s column, because it was still yesterday where James lives. And even if the column had been updated before I got there, there would be few if any comments, because our readers were mostly asleep.

In the same way, all my email habits were reversed. I got most of my mail at night and very little during the day. We all know the world is facing a different part of the day than us, but somehow the Web made it more obvious than ever before.

Lagging ahead

But that was nothing compared to the trip back home. Twenty-four hours of travel (Memo to Scotty: We need that transporter online now.). Several days of jet lag. I truly felt like I could feel my brain adjusting bit my bit. Now it’s over the mid-Atlantic. Now it’s reached the East Coast. Maybe by tomorrow it will hit the Pacific time zone.

Sometimes our bodies seem to say, okay, you can zip around the world in a day, but I don’t have to like it, and you ain’t gonna either.

Writing time

So how does all this relate to writing? Glad you asked. I am in the middle of first drafts of three stories. By sheer coincidence they are set in:

Victorian England

Turn of the Century California

1967 New Jersey

That’s three different environments, vocabularies, moods, to throw myself into, not even mentioning all the research I need to do. I feel like the science fiction writer Howard Waldrop who used to lose money on his stories, because he spent so much time digging up the details he needed.

Time travel is so broadening

And speaking of science fiction, a couple of decades ago Spider Robinson wrote a story called “Time Traveler,” about a man who was locked in a South American prison for twenty years with no news from the outside world. One day he was released and felt exactly as if he had jumped ahead by two decades in a single moment. We all travel through time, but we do it at the rate of one day per day, and we don’t always notice the changes accumulating..

When Robinson’s story was published in a science fiction magazine some people cancelled their subscriptions, claiming it was not science fiction. I’m not sure they are right. Maybe – said the man who is complaining that it took a whole day to travel halfway around the world – science fiction is what we are living right now.