Time Squared
When a character is real to you, as a writer you can imagine him or her in various settings including the present, that is, a place like the one we are writing from. And the farther you go in displacing them, the easier it is to remove the time constraint from the settings where you are used to meeting them. Tempus was so effective in modern-day New York City, that it was only a hop and skip to the far, far future and an adventure that contrasted not only his previous hundreds of years of age but also what makes him relevant into any era. And of course he brings us along with him. Enjoy the ride!
Think Inter-dimensionally, Act Temporally
Both of this month’s featured books test the limits of time. Tempus’ trip to technocratic dystopia stands in stark contrast to The Stalk’s climactic inter-dimensional re-homing of an entire space-dwelling society. In both stories we stretch to imagine first a classical warrior hero determined to rescue the person who gives focus to his life, while in the second leaders of a space-dwelling population must make a leap of faith in order to survive beyond temporal boundaries.