The Traveler by Joseph Eckert - A Review

 


The Traveler by Joseph Eckert


I do like a time travel story. This science fiction debut by Joseph Eckert scratched the time travel itch for me. I couldn't put it down in places.

The story is quite a simple one. Scott Treder, a seemingly normal fellow, finds himself thrown out of his car and hits the ground. Picking himself up, he looks around and his car is nowhere to be seen, even though only mere seconds before he had been in the driving seat.

Sorting himself out, he goes home to discover his wife frantic. The car, a little bit dented, is in the drive and he, apparently, has been missing for the last 24 hours. Thinking it must be a bit of amnesia caused by the accident, he gets himself looked over by the doctor but all is well.

The next morning he arrives at work earlier than normal to make up for missing the day, sits down at his desk. The clock strike 7:57am and he finds himself on the floor of his cubicle, surrounded by colleagues who wonder where he's been for the past two days.

It transpires that at 7:57am every day, Scott Treder travels forward in time exponentially. First 24 hours, then 48, then 96. Before long he's racking up a week of travel and needs to find out what is going on and hopefully, how to stop it.

He finds, at first, a sceptical professor who believes him to be a hoaxer. Scott disappears and reappears in the professor's office about a month later. The professor refuses to have anything to do with him and hands his case off to another professor who sets up another experiment. Scott disappears and reappears three months later. News has got out and the press are surrounding the university trying to get the scoop on this hoaxer.

The story itself limps along in the first third of the book, but really shifts into high gear as we hit the near future from around 2050 onwards. Scott isn't ageing but his wife and family are. His son, now a professor himself, is determined to save his dad but every jump takes him further in time. 

Scott becomes "The Traveler", a mystical being who has a religion rise up around him for the first 500 or so years of his jumping. With the help of his son, he jumps through time spending only 24 hours in the next time period. Some time periods are peaceful, others incredibly dangerous. We see civilisations rise and fall, great wars, great inventions, Scott witnesses the rise of AI greater than we could ever imagine and its demise.

The last third of the book slows down again as we come to the end of the universe, with each jump sending Scott billions of years into the future and we finally discover just what is pulling him forward. All in all, Scott travels only for around 64 days but trillions of years have passed by. That's the beauty of exponential maths! 

The book reminded me of a story about a man in China a long time ago who helps the emperor with a problem. The emperor asks the man what he wants in payment, but the man declines. The emperor isn't best pleased and demands the man have some kind of payment for his work. The man says that he would like rice. One piece of rice on the first day, two on the next, four on the next and so on. He even shows the emperor a chess board to make it easier for him to get it and says sixty four days will be plenty. The emperor thinks this is a steal and agrees...only to run out of rice quite quickly. If the emperor had continued he'd have discovered that by day 64 the man would have been owed more rice than there are atoms in the universe.

There's no real plot to the story. There's no enemy except time itself. It's slow to start, speedy in the middle and slows back down to a satisfying ending. What it does do well is put a sense of dread in you as you read Scott's travels. Every other leap seems to take him in to a world that has forgotten the lessons of the past. Are we destined as a species to build great things only to tear them down again? Will we keep repeating the same mistakes?

There's a few scifi tropes in there with plenty of nods to Planet of the Apes, Mad Max, Logan's Run and others. One awesome Doctor Manhattan on the moon bit made me smile. The tropes add to the story rather than spoil it.

I flew through the book and enjoyed it considerably. I look forward to reading whatever Joseph Eckert creates next. 


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