“Meddling Kids” by Edgar Cantero (2018)

“It starts when you pull the lamp chain and light doesn’t come.”

Didn’t we all want to solve crimes as a child? Television and literature alike have always been full of precocious children and teenagers who are able to solve mysteries that leave those who are meant to be solving them stumped. The villains always get their comeuppance and time and again spooky and supernatural premises are shown to have entirely mundane backgrounds. In Edgar Cantero’s second novel, he takes on the genre and wonders: what if it wasn’t quite that easy?

In 1977, the Blyton Summer Detective Club – a group of teenagers made up of Peter, Nate, Andy, Kerri and their dog Sean – stopped the Sleepy Lake monster, who turned out to be yet another greedy, desperate lowlife in a rubber mask who would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids. Thirteen years later, the young detectives have grown up but not forgotten their adventures. And the more they try not to think about them, they realise that maybe it wasn’t as simple as it seemed. The events can’t be explained away by a guy in a mask. Something weirder was going on.

The group have changed, however. Tomboy Andy is wanted in two states after she broke out of prison. Kerri was once a child genius but now drinks away her problems in New York, accompanied by Tim, a direct descendant of the original dog. Nate is locked up in an asylum, but still has contact with Peter, which is probably a bit troublesome as he died two years ago. The surviving members of the detective club decide that they can’t hide from their demons any longer and head back to Blyton Hills to finally put to rest the trauma that has haunted them for half their lives. The town has changed and so have they, but the danger remains as real as ever, and they are soon once again meddling in things that no man or beast should ever meddle with.

Although I’m painfully averse to Scooby Doo (it’s entirely irrational, I just never liked the series), I was always a fan of Enid Blyton’s young detectives, and upon reading this you realise who close the two teams were. Both featured two male and two female characters, alongside a dog, and solved crimes that the authorities could never deal with. Here, Cantero updates the concept by throwing the amateur detectives right into an H. P. Lovecraft novel and letting them fight their own way out. The characters are rich and funny, particularly Tim, the dog, who has an enormous amount of personality without ever being overtly anthropomorphised. The humans feel real, despite the unreality of the plot, and are as likeable as they are broken.

Although already very funny despite the horror, the greatest stylistic device is that the book is very self-aware, pointing out its own construction and breaking the fourth wall so naturally that you completely buy into it. Cantero slips in stage directions, title cards, references to the very paragraphs and sentences he’s writing, and at one point even ends a chapter, only to have one of the characters refuse to let it end there and carrying on regardless. He’s also got an absolutely sublime way with words and can turn absolutely anything into a verb or adverb. A character doesn’t “tell” a story, they “once-upon-a-time” it. Jar lids marimba when there’s a tremble underground, and at one point characters see books “lemminging” off the shelf. It’s a masterful grasp of language made all the more impressive when you learn that his first language is Spanish. Like Douglas Adams, he makes you realise what words are actually capable of. I’m jealous.

If you grew up on The Famous Five, Scooby Doo or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this is the book for you.

My second novel, The Third Wheel, is now available on Amazon and Waterstones! It tells the story of Dexter, a twenty-something teacher who is struggling with the fact that he alone among his friends is single and isn’t ready to grow up. But when aliens invade, it puts a lot of his problems into perspective. Mixing comedy, science fiction and horror, the novel promises to have something for everyone. I hope you’ll check it out!

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Six of the Best … Fictional Vehicles

Characters in books rarely stay in one place for long, unless they’re stuck in prison. How they get about, however, is often of enormous interest to readers. In our world, we are limited by fuel, time and distance, but in fiction the same rules don’t necessarily apply. You can travel at colossal speeds and cover massive distances given the right technology or magic. Cars can fly, submarines can sink to impossible depths, airships can …  well … they can be feasible. Even an elevator can serve as a spaceship with enough ingenuity. We’re also not limited by travelling through space, as time travellers need a vehicle too, and they’re inherently cool.

Rarely is a vehicle the main focus of a book, although exceptions could possibly be made of the Thomas the Tank Engine series. Still, enough have vehicular titles. Many of us would recognise titles such as Murder on the Orient Express, Three Men in a Boat, Strangers on a Train, and The Little Engine That Could.

Transportation often features heavily in fiction as it is not without its risks. Trains were occasionally locations for murders in Agatha Christie’s novels, and few of us can forget the dangerous driving in The Great Gatsby. Despite all this, there is something fantastic about vehicles that inspire humanity. Literature is where we’ve let our imaginations run wild. Books are already an escape from reality, so giving us a cool car, train, boat or spaceship is just adding to that. China Miéville created an ocean-less world in Railsea, where long trains trawl eternally across the planet’s dry surface, acting like boats do for us. Great ships like the Pequod in Moby Dick, the Walrus in Treasure Island, or the Jolly Roger in Peter Pan stir the imaginations of anyone who’s ever wanted to cast anchor and set sail for new shores. The Nautilis submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea so inspired people that numerous real ships and submarines have been given the name, which is ironic as the fictional one got its own name from the first practical submarine, built in 1800 by Robert Fulton.

Above all, a vehicle in fiction has to be cool. James Bond is of course particularly notable for his exquisite taste in cars, and will forever be associated with Aston Martins. Elsewhere, Lord Peter Wimsey drives V12 sleeve-valve Daimlers, and Australian flapper and detective Phryne Fisher traverses her books in a bright red Hispano-Suzia. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo tear through the desert in cars named The Great Red Shark and The Great White Whale, which are cool just for their names, even if the rest of the book lacks.

Before we get on with the list of my six favourite fictional vehicles, I’d like to first run through some honourable mentions. First up, on the left, the shoe car driven by Mr Funny. It would be a great as a statement vehicle, but it has very little practicality, with no luggage space, room for one person only, and apparently no doors. I also avoided putting the TARDIS on the list as, while there are Doctor Who novelisations, it’s better known as a television series (although I go against this reasoning with one of the other vehicles on the list, so, whoops). The TARDIS is remarkable, however. Able to go anywhere and everywhere in time and space (not that you’d necessarily believe it given how much time it spends in modern day London), it is as much a character of the show as anyone. It is the ultimate in travel, even if the pilot doesn’t necessarily know what they’re doing with it. I also left off the titular bus of my first novel, The Atomic Blood-stained Bus. Formerly nothing but a horse and cart, every piece has been replaced over the years until it now resembles a London bus, except for the sheen of blood over everything and the cannibal driving it around Britain at breakneck speed.

And now, on with the list!

Hogwarts Express

J. K. Rowling not only gave us an enormous amount of spells, magical creatures, beloved characters and mouthwatering foods when she created the Harry Potter universe – she also gave us a huge plethora of ways to get around. Wizards never really have to walk anywhere as they’ve got dozens of ways to get from A to B. They can use a Portkey, travel through the Floo Network, ride on the back of a thestral or hippogriff, pilot a broomstick, or catch the triple-decker Knight Bus. This is still before we come to Mr Weasley’s flying Ford Anglia, Sirius Black’s enchanted motorbike, the submersible Durmstrang ship, the enormous Beauxbatons carriage pulled by winged horses, flying carpets, and the Vanishing Cabinet. If all else fails, they can learn to apparate, although this always comes with a danger of splinching.

Despite all this, I think we can all agree that by far and away the greatest vehicle in the series is the Hogwarts Express. The scarlet steam engine is one of the most iconic symbols of the series, even gracing the front cover of the first book. While home to some pivotal scenes in the novels, including Harry, Ron and Hermione’s first interactions, a Dementor attack, and a fight with Malfoy, it’s broadly speaking a very safe space, watched over by the trolley witch, and anyone who’s read or seen Harry Potter and the Cursed Child knows what she’s capable of! The train seems to have very few particularly magic powers, having been stolen from Muggles in 1830. According to supplementary material, the operation required the use of the biggest concealment charm ever performed in Britain, and 167 memory charms, creating a brand new train station at Hogsmeade that hadn’t existed the day before, and leaving the railway staff at Crewe with the feeling that they’d misplaced something.

The Hogwarts Express might not be the most magical of things in the series, it represents something enormous, as it is the literal way Harry moves between the Muggle world he hates and the wizarding world he loves. Despite the lack of inherent magic, who wouldn’t want to set off from the fabled Platform 9¾ at eleven o’clock on September 1st, eating Chocolate Frogs and Pumpkin Pasties with your best friends, watching the British countryside swish by, as you head to the greatest school in fiction? No one, that’s who.

The Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace, as surely many of you know, is credited as being one of history’s first computer programmers, working alongside Charles Babbage. She was the first person to realise that a computer could do more than pure calculation and is responsible for writing the first algorithm. As a fun aside, she was also the daughter of flamboyant romance poet Lord Byron. It was, therefore, absolutely fitting for Nick Harkaway to name his code-breaking train the Ada Lovelace in his astounding novel Angelmaker.

Eleven carriages long and containing “a kitchen, bathrooms, and two carriages of strange machinery”, the train tears through the countryside of Britain, never stopping, “occupying empty sidings and blank slots in the timetable, rolling and slipping around the edges of the map”. Although designed to be perfect, the materials used to make it are not, so the entire train is maintained by hand. It’s a fascinating idea to basically put Bletchley Park on wheels, as it’s then never where it was five minutes ago and it makes it a lot harder to trace. Although it “is narrow and sways with a strange eerie motion”, I think living aboard the Ada Lovelace is something I could definitely get used to.

Death’s bike in Discworld

Since the Second World War ended, the motorcycle has been seen as the coolest way to travel. In Terry Pratchett’s novel, Soul Music – part of the Discworld series – Death rides a motorbike that has been created in accordance with the tropes of rock music. As such, it isn’t designed to slow down, never mind having the ability to stop safely, and is specifically designed to crash at the end of the eighth verse. Even weirder, the bike itself falls apart pretty early in the story, but the idea of it remains, appearing simply as light reflecting off a machine, but without the machine.

Otherwordly figures almost by their very nature have to have bizarre and awesome vehicles. It’s worth pointing out as well that in another of Pratchett’s works, Good Omens, the demon Crowley has a Bentley that is protected from damage by his infernal powers – at least until it drives through a “wall of fire formed by a highway shaped like a diabolical sigil”. After that, it only completes its final journey through sheer force of will and by the end no longer resembles a Bentley – or a car.

Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

I know I said I was leaving the TARDIS off the list because it was better known from television, but I’m allowing this car famous from a film onto the list because the book categorically came first. Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang was published in 1964 was written, perhaps surprisingly, by Ian Fleming. Yes, that Ian Fleming. Inspired by a series of racing cars also called Chitty Bang Bang, it was Fleming’s final work but he did not live to see it published.

The titular car is named for the noise it makes when it starts – the engine noise coupled with two loud backfires – and has been restored to glory by the inventor Caractacus Pott. The car, however, soon begins to exhibit signs of sentience, performing independent actions. When it instructs Mr Pott to pull a lever when stuck in traffic, the family learns that the car can fly. Later, on a beach, it develops hovercraft tendencies. Chitty is also able to track enemies when in pursuit and lock onto their location. The book ends with implications that it has many more secrets still to be revealed…

Flying cars are still absent from the real world, despite decades of promises from scientists that they’ll be along soon, so for many of us, fantasising about flying in Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, even if it is off to a country where children are forbidden and Benny Hill is inexplicably in work as a toy maker, is the closest we’ll get. And as if it wasn’t strange enough that Ian Fleming had written the book, Roald Dahl then penned the screenplay and the car soared into the hearts of people everywhere.

Thursday Next’s Speedster

Like the Hogwarts Express, this is one that is simply in here for being impossibly cool. Thursday Next, my favourite literary heroine, owns a 356 Speedster, that she is compelled to buy after seeing a future version of herself driving it. She claims that she was never much of a car person, but “this one was different”. Described as having a spartan interior, it is painted in red, blue and green. It takes her only a few hundred yards driving the car for them to be “inseparable”.

Beautiful and unusual, the car then features prominently in the series, even turning up on two covers – each book actually features a vehicle of some kind on the cover, usually a cool car – and taking part in one of the only car chases to ever appear in literature. Car chases are ten a penny in films, but in books it’s much harder to get the action right. Still, Fforde manages it, and with a car like this, how could he not?

Bookjumping – the act of reading yourself into a book – is still the coolest method of getting about in the whole series, but it doesn’t count as a vehicle. Unless you flag down a TransGenre Taxi, of course. That might.

Heart of Gold

It wouldn’t be possible to complete this list without the only vehicle possibly more remarkable than the TARDIS – the Heart of Gold. Springing from the pages of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it stands out among the other strange spaceships that Douglas Adams dreamt up as being the only one powered by improbability. Other ships present in the series include the Starship Bistromath, which runs on the laws of “bistromathics” (the specific mathematics of factors in restaurants), Golgafrincham B-Ark, a two-mile long generation ship built to exile a third of its home planet’s population, and Hotblack Desiato’s entirely frictionless Space-Limo which is so cool that Zaphod and Ford are compelled to steal it.

Heart of Gold, however, still rises above the rest for me. Described as the first ship to successfully use the Infinite Improbability Drive (an early form was used in the Starship Titanic, but due to the nature of infinite improbability, the ship stopped existing before it had even been launched), it was devised as a secret project on Damogran, before being stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox at the launching ceremony. The faster-than-light drive was invented following research into finite improbability, which was often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess’ undergarments leap one foot simultaneously to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy”. The Guide itself states that a lot of respectable scientists wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing “partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn’t get invited to those sort of parties.”

The drive works by ignoring space and travelling through every point of every possible universe at the same time, meaning you’ll never be completely sure where you’ll end up or who you’ll be when you arrive. As Adams says, it is “therefore important to dress accordingly”.

I think we can all safely agree that however you travel through fiction, you’ve gotta do it in style. Happy travels!

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Thanks for joining in and reading the third entry in my new series, Six of the Best. This will (hopefully) be a twice-monthly series in which I take a look at fiction more generally and explore the fictional worlds I love so much. If you’ve got any suggestions for things you’d like to see me talk about, then please comment and let me know!

“Death Of A Dentist” by M. C. Beaton (1997)

“It was a chill autumn in the Highlands of Scotland when Police Constable Hamish Macbeth awoke in hell.”

I hate the dentist. Not my dentist himself, he’s a perfectly personable Greek chap who doesn’t make me feel guilty about not flossing, but the whole process in general. I guess I resent someone fiddle about with my mouth, take sharp implements to my teeth and gums and possibly make me bleed, only for me to then have to pay them for the privilege. Still, better than being toothless, I suppose. This mood is fresh as I had my check-up only this morning, and it’s sheer coincidence that I happened to be reading this book today, too. I still decided not to take it to the waiting room anyway, in case I looked suspicious.

Dr Frederick Gilchrist has a reputation has a terrible dentist, prone to pulling out any teeth that are causing problems rather than fixing them. Despite this, he’s also very cheap, so there are a lot of people going about the Highlands with not many teeth. When PC Hamish Macbeth wakes up one morning with unbearable toothache and no desire to drive to through terrible weather to his dentist, he instead decides to see Gilchrist. Unfortunately, the dentist is dead, poisoned in his chair with a hole drilled in every tooth. While no one seems too sorry to have seen him go, there’s apparently no one around who actively wanted him dead.

Elsewhere, things are becoming increasingly confusing. Hamish has heard rumours that two local brothers are running an illegal still. At a nearby hotel, thousands of pounds have been stolen from a safe. And a beautiful, charming woman has just arrived in the village and caught Hamish’s eye. It seems the village bobby has his work cut out for him.

I return to Lochdubh as recently promised and find myself charmed once more by Highland village life. The same problem exists here as does with Midsomer Murders and Murder She Wrote, simply that small places have crime rates higher than Chicago or New York. Nonetheless, you overlook this because of the sheer joy of the thing. The murder and the burglary are both set up in the first chapter, with the illegal still coming along not long after, so you’re trying to solve three crimes, none of which seem to have much evidence to help them along, and the cast of characters is as ever quite wide, although few of them seem to have any reason to commit any of the crimes, so I found myself left scratching my head and wondering who were actually meant to be the suspects. The subplot of Hamish finding another lovely lady to spend his time with also feels unfinished and ends too abruptly for me.

Otherwise, it’s a treat. Hamish is still one of the finest detectives in fiction, and the minutia of village life is played out well, with characters who all know one another and interact naturally, showing how villagers often end up living in one another’s pockets and no one’s business is safe for long. This is best shown by the local seer, Angus Macdonald, who claims to have a second sight but more than likely just has a very good ear for gossip. Fairly bloodless in the manner on a classic Christie, in fact the only bit that truly made me shudder was the fact that the body was found with all his teeth drilled. Makes my molars tingle at the very thought of it.

A quick, joyful read.

My second novel, The Third Wheel, is now available on Amazon and Waterstones! It tells the story of Dexter, a twenty-something teacher who is struggling with the fact that he alone among his friends is single and isn’t ready to grow up. But when aliens invade, it puts a lot of his problems into perspective. Mixing comedy, science fiction and horror, the novel promises to have something for everyone. I hope you’ll check it out!

“Z” by Therese Anne Fowler (2013)

“Picture a late-June morning in 1918, a time when Montgomery wore her prettiest spring dress and finest floral perfume – same as I would wear that evening.”

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a performance of the play The Lost Generation, a three-hander about the tumultuous relationship between Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald. Long a fan of their hedonistic lifestyles if not their writing (I’ve still never read any Hemingway or Mrs Fitzgerald, and only a couple of Mr Fitzgerald), I was inspired to finally pick up Z, which tells the story from Zelda’s point of view.

Not long before her eighteenth birthday, fun and flirty Zelda Sayre meets the handsome and confident F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s 1918 and Scott is about to head off to join the war in Europe, meaning Zelda isn’t sure whether to accept his sudden offer of marriage, even though she knows she’s never felt like this about another man. When the war ends, Scott stays after all and just two years later, the two are married and begin their journey to define a generation.

As Scott gains success and recognition for his writing, Zelda finds herself living in his shadow and her once exuberant personality and zest for life begins to wane. They drink too much, they argue, and Scott becomes increasingly controlling and obsessed with his new friend Ernest Hemingway, who Zelda can’t stand. There is some happiness and love in their relationship, but very little stability, and Zelda must work out who she is in this modern world and reclaim her own independence once more. As they pass through various cities and countries, with Scott always working on the next novel (read: drinking heavily), the couple – along with their daughter Scottie – begin to change and we wonder if their lives are as glamorous as history has recorded.

As it’s based on the true story of Scott and Zelda, how it ends is a foregone conclusion, but I won’t reveal it here in case you don’t know what befell them. We hear a lot about the Fitzgeralds as the couple who made the 1920s what it is. They are a symbol of the Jazz Age, Prohibition and the excesses of the interwar years. Myth states that he was worshipped as a literary idol, and she flirted her way through the entire Western world, but the version presented here by Fowler is much different and far closer to the truth. Zelda was hamstrung by Scott’s ego and he dominated her life, dissuading her from following her own goals of being a professional dancer because they didn’t fit in with what he wanted to do. Perhaps this is par for the course given that at the time men did have much more say in relationships than women, but Zelda is not your average 1920s woman (considered by many to be the “first flapper”) and doesn’t like being corralled and beaten into submission. And yet, on a couple of occasions where Scott’s abuse turns physical, Zelda still seems prone to blaming herself.

Scott, himself, was prolific and wrote stories for magazines and screenplays for Hollywood, but his novels were few and far between and he didn’t really achieve the success and introduction to the literary canon until after he’d died. Because the story is from Zelda’s perspective, it’s hard to know if Scott’s monstrosity has been played up or is an accurate reflection of his personality, because he comes across as singularly unpleasant. He is selfish and domineering but simultaneously thin-skinned and weak, breaking down in tears whenever things don’t go his way or he doesn’t get to be the centre of attention. Depending on which side of the argument you’re on, there are people that say Scott ruined Zelda’s life, but also those who say that Zelda ruined Scott’s. I know which side I come down on, easily.

It is nice for Zelda to be thrust into the spotlight for a change. She also wrote a novel, Save the Last Waltz, and was a great painter and dancer, but to this day she struggles under the reputation of simply being “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife”. It’s fantastic and fascinating to see her given some agency and learn about the tragedy that she went through.

A compelling and startling exploration of the Jazz Age and how history likes to put a neat gloss on everything.

My second novel, The Third Wheel, is now available on Amazon and Waterstones! It tells the story of Dexter, a twenty-something teacher who is struggling with the fact that he alone among his friends is single and isn’t ready to grow up. But when aliens invade, it puts a lot of his problems into perspective. Mixing comedy, science fiction and horror, the novel promises to have something for everyone. I hope you’ll check it out!

Six of the Best … Time Travel Stories

Who among us hasn’t dreamed of travelling through time? Not necessarily to change anything, but just to have a look. Many of us would love to leap forward and see the consequences of our actions, or find out what happens to the planet. Maybe we even want to just get a look at the lottery numbers. Similarly, don’t many of us want to head back through time as well, to meet the late, great heroes of history, or maybe just to find out exactly what dinosaurs tasted like. It seems, however, that time travel – particularly into the past – will remain something that we find only in fiction. As Isaac Asimov said, “Time travel is theoretically impossible, but I wouldn’t want to give it up as a plot gimmick.”

Time travel didn’t originate as a science fiction concept, however, and has been around a lot longer than you may realise. In Hindu mythology, there is the story of King Raivata Kakudmi who visits Brahma in heaven, only to return home to find that “many ages have passed”. The Japanese fairy tale Urashima Tarō – first recorded in the eighth century – features a protagonist who spends three days in an undersea palace, but returns home to find himself three hundred years into the future.

When the concept begins to slip into science fiction territory, it at first focuses on characters who fall asleep for great lengths of time, only to wake up in the future. Examples include Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving (20 years into the future), Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (113 years into the future), and The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells (203 years into the future). Wells, of course, changes everything with the writing of The Time Machine in 1895 – see below for more on this – by giving the protagonist some agency in his travelling. He, however, wasn’t the first to produce a time machine. In 1881, the story “The Clock that Went Backward” by Edward Page Mitchell introduced a clock that, when wound, transported people nearby back in time. The first vessel actually engineered specifically to travel in time, however, appears in El Anacronópete, a Spanish novel by Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau. It predates The Time Machine by just eight years. Since then, science fiction has expanded the nature of what makes a time machine hugely, giving us such greats as the TARDIS and the Back to the Future DeLorean, easily two of the coolest time travel vessels in fiction.

So, how does time travel work? Truthfully, we don’t know. We’re trapped in our forward linear progression of one second at a time. Of course, minds greater than mine have explained what happens when we start moving at the speed of light, but I’m not even close to understanding any of it, so instead I’m going to focus on fiction and what happens in other time periods once we get there. Depending on the story you’re reading (or writing) there will be various “laws” of time travel. There are, broadly speaking, five sets of rules and most works fall into one of these categories.

1. In the first set of rules, it is impossible to change the past, as since the past has already happened, you’d already done anything that you went back to do. (Time travel is also notorious in making tenses incredibly uncomfortable, so bear with me.) An example of this is in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Harry and Hermione go back in time to save Sirius Black from death, and are able to do so only because they already did. History cannot be changed. (The later Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage play, however, ignored this entirely.)
2. Secondly, you’ve got a situation where time can be changed, but there are people or forces in play that ensure it doesn’t happen. A good example is 11/22/63 by Stephen King, where the larger the change one is trying to make in the past, the more the past resists, relying on contrived coincidences to keep the timeline “normal”.
3. The third idea is that of the “rubber-band theory”. That is, you can change history but it will snap back and undo most of the changes. This is mentioned in Darren Shan’s Cirque du Freak as the reason there’s no point in killing Hitler – someone else will just fill that role instead.
4. The fourth idea is one in which history can be changed but you can also go and play around in it and affect nothing. It seems to run on rules beyond our understanding or any given explanation. This is probably also why it’s the kind that features in the Discworld novel, Night Watch.
5. Finally, you’ve got the chaos theory version of events, in which even the tiniest changes will have unpredictable, massive effects on the future. The most famous example of this is Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder”, which I’ll discuss below.

And then what about the changes you made – if you were able to make them at all? Sometimes you’ve overwritten your present (which opens a whole barrel of snakes regarding paradoxes and whether this means you would have been alive to go back in time in the first place),

There’s still so much I could discuss here regarding wormholes, paradoxes, quantum physics and multiverses, but we’ve all got places to be. Suffice to say, there’s always time to mention how time travel works in the Thursday Next series of books by Jasper Fforde. For the first four books of the series, it works in such a way that people can travel freely through time, passing through anomalies and such, and sometimes being entirely wiped from history and never having existed at all, despite their children still surviving. The absolute highlight of what is already a very funny and clever series of books comes in the fifth book when it turns out that time travel has only been being used on the assumption it’ll be invented one day, and when travellers reach the end of the universe and find it was never actually invented, they have to close down the departments and stop it all from happening. Simply genius.

So what are some of the best books about time travel? Let me introduce you to six of the best…

A Sound of Thunder

If you’ve never heard of Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder”, you’ve almost certainly heard of the concept it birthed – “the butterfly effect”. In 2055, Time Safari Inc. is a company that lets wealthy adventurers head back into the past to hunt extinct creatures. Unsure as to how much they may impact the future, they specifically target creatures that would have died minutes later anyway, trying to change as little as possible. Told to keep to the prescribed path, one traveller panics and as he flees, crushes a butterfly beneath his boot, sending a ripple effect through time that changes the present in ways no one could have comprehended. It’s a brilliant book that explores the nature of causality. It also raises the issue that we seem to worried about making tiny changes in the past, apparently not realising that the things we’re doing right now, in our present, are sending ripples of change down into our future.

Time Salvager

Wesley Chu does wonders with time travel in Time Salvager by drawing attention to some aspects of it that seems to be forgotten. Set in 2511, it follows James Griffin-Mars, a chronman who travels back in time to rescue artefacts and power sources from history so they can be reused in this dying future. He finds himself on the run, however, when he breaks the first law of time travel and brings someone from the past with him into this desiccated new existence. I primarily remember the book for being the only one I’ve ever seen to take location fully into account with time travel and understanding that if you travel back to the exact same spot, the whole planet will be absent, as it is constantly moving in space. Loaded with science fiction tropes of all kinds, the book plays up the fact that humans are the great survivors and will whether whatever storm comes their way.

Man in the Empty Suit

How time travel came to be in Man in the Empty Suit is left unanswered – we simply know that our unnamed protagonist can and does flit around the timeline, only returning every year on his birthday to a hotel in New York in the year 2071 to party with sixty or so versions of himself. Things go wrong, however, when he arrives on his 39th birthday to find his 40-year-old self dead. The versions of him that are older are still present, however, and warn him that he’s got a year to solve his own murder, as by the time the next birthday rolls around, this will be him. Sean Ferrell then weaves a beautiful, dark and very clever time travel murder mystery in which the same man is the victim, investigator and all the suspects. It’s been some years since I read this, but the unique premise has stayed with me ever since.

Making History

One of the most commonly recurring ideas in time travel fiction is that of Hitler’s early demise. It seems that every other writer has contemplated killing off Hitler and stopping World War Two, usually to find the present they return to is radically different. Making History is Stephen Fry’s attempt at the notion and is one of the most intriguing. Here, a male contraceptive pill is sent back in time and put in the well in Braunau am Inn so that Hitler’s father drinks the water, is sterilised and Hitler is never born. The timeline shifts to an alternate future where, in the absence of Hitler, another even more charming, patient and effective leader founded and took control of the Nazi party, using the water from the well to sterilise Jews and wipe them out in a single generation. Utterly chilling, it is a brilliant and spooky alternate universe that maybe makes you realise that things could always be worse.

The Time Machine

The first novel to really popularise the concept of a vehicle that has been specifically designed to travel through time, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine is one of the keystones of the genre. Beginning in Victorian England, the Time Traveller (as the protagonist is known) leaps ahead to AD 802,701 where humanity has divided into two species. On the surface live the Eloi, small childlike beings with a fruit-based diet and no curiosity regarding the world around them. Underground and in caves, we find the Morlocks, simian troglodytes that only emerge at night to hunt the Eloi. When the Morlocks steal his time machine, he must seek out a solution in this weird world to get it back again. Broadly speaking, the novel serves as an allegory for the class system, but is enjoyable on its own merits if you don’t feel like having political ideology interrupting your reading.

The Time Traveller’s Wife

Perhaps my favourite example of time travel fiction – or at least the one that has made me cry the most – The Time Traveller’s Wife is, in my opinion, a thing of beauty. In it, we meet Henry who has a genetic disorder that displaces him from time, sending him to other points within his life with not even the clothes on his back along for the journey. When he’s 28, he meets Clare for the first time and has no idea who she is. She, however, has known him since childhood. Now their relationship can begin in earnest, if Clare can learn to live with Henry disappearing without warning at any time. Simply, this is one of the most beautiful and powerful love stories I’ve ever come across, and in many ways the time travel is incidental, as if it’s a far more banal disease that Henry suffers from. It doesn’t feel like science fiction, and Niffenegger manages to construct very human and realistic characters and situations from a very unusual premise.

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Thanks for joining in and reading the second entry in my new series, Six of the Best. This will (hopefully) be a twice-monthly series in which I take a look at fiction more generally and explore the fictional worlds I love so much. If you’ve got any suggestions for things you’d like to see me talk about, then please comment and let me know!

“Normal People” by Sally Rooney (2018)

“Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell.”

Last year, I read Conversations with Friends which a friend had been gently nagging me to have a go at. I ended up enjoying it much more than I thought I would. This was not the end of the nagging however, as then attention was turned to Sally Rooney’s second novel. So here we are.

Connell and Marianne live in the same small Irish town, but have very different backgrounds. Marianne lives in a large house with her mother and brother, and Connell’s mother cleans for them. Despite this difference, the two begin a friendship of sorts, although Connell is so concerned that people at school will judge him for talking to weird friendless Marianne that he keeps everything about it a secret and doesn’t speak to her in public. When the relationship becomes sexual, the two find themselves incredibly compatible, but Connell’s pride threatens to ruin everything.

Over the next five years, at university and out the other side, they continue to weave in and out of one another’s lives and beds, their relationship constantly changing, yet somehow still being the one constant in their lives. As they grow and change and learn more about themselves, it seems that no matter what they do, they are continually drawn back to one another, for better or for worse.

Perhaps inevitably because it’s by the same author, but I found myself having many of the same feelings about this one as I did Conversations with Friends, although I think I slightly prefer that one. Rooney’s writing continues to sing, with its curiously poetic quality. Although there were fewer lines in here that jumped out at me and struck me in that bit of the brain that thinks, “That’s exactly it”, there is still something utterly compelling about it all, and the characters feel real in ways I can’t really fathom. In terms of plot, not much happens, and yet we are drawn deeply and fully into this small world where we find ourselves sitting alongside these people. Part of me wanted to dislike them both, and yet I can’t. That’s not to say I particularly want to be friends with them, but I don’t dislike them.

I guess the biggest compliment I can pay the book is that I could have read another two hundred pages of it, at least. Perhaps after a while the idea would have grown stale, but when it finished I just wanted to know what happened next. That’s not to say that it ends badly, it doesn’t, and the ending emphasises the cyclical nature of life and in particular the relationship between Connell and Marianne.

It’s going to stick with me, and I can’t say that about everything I’ve read. I wonder if this is the beginning of a long and plentiful career, or whether Rooney will rest on her laurels with these two brilliant novels.

My second novel, The Third Wheel, is now available on Amazon and Waterstones! It tells the story of Dexter, a twenty-something teacher who is struggling with the fact that he alone among his friends is single and isn’t ready to grow up. But when aliens invade, it puts a lot of his problems into perspective. Mixing comedy, science fiction and horror, the novel promises to have something for everyone. I hope you’ll check it out!

“The Fog” by James Herbert (1975)

“The village slowly began to shake off its slumber and come to life.”

Fog is one of the strangest weather formations the planet throws up. Sure, when you get down to basics, it’s pretty much just a low-lying cloud. Nonetheless, fog stirs up the primal fear – that of the unknown. Fog shrouds our view of the world and has led to numerous disasters throughout history, from ships running aground on rocks, to lives being lost in wars when views are suddenly obscured. It’s not alone, as there are also its sisters smog (smoke and fog, creating the infamous peasoupers of London) and vog (volcanic ash and fog). But it’s that primal fear I mentioned that we can’t get away from. Nothing is always scarier than something, and who knows what might be lurking in that dense mist, so close but invisible.

In The Fog, it’s not quite clear what the titular mist is. When a large crack in the ground opens up in a village in Wiltshire, a yellowish vapour rises from the fissure and sets off across the countryside. At first people think nothing much of it, just noting its strange colour, but it soon turns out that anyone who gets caught in the fog … changes. At a school, pupils mutilate one of their teachers. In a church, a priest exposes himself to his parishioners. On a farm, a herd of cows trample their owner. When the fog reaches Bournemouth and manages to convince the entire town to walk down to the sea and drown itself, the police and the government know that whatever they are dealing with is unlike anything they’ve ever seen.

The only hope now, it seems, is John Holman, the only person in the country who has been exposed to the fog and cured of its insanity-inducing properties. Given the unenviable task of getting close enough to the fog to get a sample so that a cure can be manufactured to save everyone else before they kill themselves or one another, Holman sets about doing so with guidance from scientists and politicians. However, he’s also got to deal with his beloved Casey, who has also been infected by the fog, and time may be running out, as the fog now seems to be on its way to London…

The scenario Herbert dreams up here isn’t actually scary in itself, as the chance of a malicious, mind-altering fog coming into existence seems slim. However, what the fog actually is never gets adequately explained, so the sense of unease does hang around. It’s very possible it’s an example of biological warfare that has been accidentally released during a bomb test, but it could so easily be something much more otherworldly and sinister. The true horror here lies in how those who have been affected react. It brings out base animalistic tendencies, some people changing immediately and others taking hours to succumb, and most people immediately want to kill and torture. Many kill themselves, either jumping from windows or throwing themselves into water, but many more set about killing their loved ones and strangers in increasingly gory ways.

The novel frequently leaves Holman and his associates to show us how “normal” people are being affected, and Herbert does this well by fully fleshing out each character with a few pages of backstory before the fog interrupts their lives. This is never invasive, and makes us care about the characters we’re seeing die, even if they’re not all pleasant. One man, for example, is shown as being a drunk and a terrible husband but it’s still a shock when his racing pigeons, returning home through the fog, gang up and kill him. Another man, in one of the book’s lighter moments, feels no compulsion stronger in his insanity than a desire to kick everyone’s backsides.

A chilling and very dark novel that explores how quickly society can fall, what measure any of us are sane, and how we must deal with death.

My second novel, The Third Wheel, is now available on Amazon and Waterstones! It tells the story of Dexter, a twenty-something teacher who is struggling with the fact that he alone among his friends is single and isn’t ready to grow up. But when aliens invade, it puts a lot of his problems into perspective. Mixing comedy, science fiction and horror, the novel promises to have something for everyone. I hope you’ll check it out!