Continuing the theme from my last post, 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years, is not a novelette, it is a longish short story. John Scalzi is an award winning American novelist.
The theme here is time travel, which has become a reality in the not-so-distant future. This future is a continuation of our world, so naturally it has become commercialised. Cost of the tech makes it an elite luxury, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime experience for others. Our unnamed narrator is (apparently) the man who works the machine.
Scalzi takes the time to outline the process and its rules. There are two chambers and two doors, one in, one out. Customers go out to their chosen time, and come back a second later through the other door. It is a second in our time but in theirs it has been either 3 days, 9 months, or 27 years. These are the 'resonances' that have been found to work best. It doesn't matter if they interact with their younger selves or successfully intervene in the assassination of JFK (the traditional rules of time travel fiction) because the moment they arrive in the past an alternate reality has been created, which then continues. They can travel to any time in the past, near or distant, so long as it is longer than 27 years ago. They cannot travel forward in time. That is impossible because the future doesn't yet exist. That is the official line. But of course it is possible...
It is amazing how many ideas Scalzi gets into such a short work whilst carefully avoiding techno-babble or pontificting. This is a thought-provoking read with a really effective twist. I'm very impressed.
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