I was supposed to be on the train this morning—but time slips away, even for the most timely aspect of our dying civilization; the trains. An avalanche, I think. I am re-booked for tomorrow. Dove said, “I hope you don’t miss meeting any of your people, I promise I didn’t pray for this delay—but I’m glad, I have my honey bunch for two extra days!”

Here I am, in a house shared with three old Indian broads, one with a bum ticker, one with brain damage from an auto accident and one, like me, afflicted with bronchitis. We are all time traveling along an increasingly steep route. This journey, in which Time always remains undiscovered by its explorers, yet is kind to its sufferers in the same measure as it is cruel to the fortunate few, has generated a sub-genre of speculative fiction that harkens back at lest to the 1800s. [1]

Time travel as a story-telling device appeals to the history buff and the futurist. Last week, a certain Steward of the West, wondered if I would be willing to write a time travel yarn on commission. I no longer do works for hire, as it takes more energy than writing out of my own head… and I am behind on many writing projects. He pitched the idea, which appeals to two of my rampant muses.

Under the working title Zoomtime, I will write a short novel in a dozen sections, posting nine on jameslafond.com under the Zoomtime tag. The full work will be sent to Steward of the West for publication in all forms. Only the first 9 chapters will be included in the Graphomaniac Archives #3. This is a useful exercise and the gentleman can compensate as he sees fit. I would prefer a Mongolian slave girl who can haul my ruck and fetch firewood, so I can resume the search for Mister Pete in the Uinta Mountains…

The goal is to write a different kind of time travel. I have worked according to the following tropes:

The Sunset Saga

In this epic series I employed “time looping” which is governed by the “grandfather paradox,” alongside “time branching,” in which going back in time and changing events according to the “butterfly effect,” creates another branch of time. This was a dual trope means of exploring what-if futures and why-not pasts.

Hurt Stoker

This time travel based setting, was created when a man from the future warned Stonewall Jackson that he was about to be shot by his own troops, and thereby saved the man who saved the South, lynching Lincoln in 1862. The method is not explained. Rather the results of the Confederacy winning two wars against the Union are explored. Hints to the method are presented, possibly a portal.

Timejacker, Nat Star—Timejacker, and Banjo: Timejack, explore a method of using dream to access the past and the future. Much more energy and hazard to the time travel device is expended going back in time rather than forward. The catch is a living dreamer must be harnessed to the vehicle, with the process fatal to the dreamer, depending on the depth of his imagination. Therefore, speculative writers who committed suicide or who died for lack of modern medical treatment: Poe, London, Lovecraft, Howard, Hunter S. Thompson, are sought as time machines.

Incidents in the Life of Orion

This weird setting explores various means of time travel, including a carpet bag, an idol, a bicycle and automobile fatalities as well as execution as a form of soul gathering by agents of Eternity.

Zoomtime

The story line outlined by Steward of the West, presents a chance to explore a method of time travel that I considered while turning over the soil in planting beds in Kamas Valley, Utah, ten paces from state route #30 in 2021. If Charon, ferry man of the dead to their various destinations along the River Styx, is assigned a boat in service to Hades, Lord of the Dead; what of Khronos?

The father of Zeus, Poseidon and Hades was imprisoned for a set time in the depths of a deeper afterlife, where malevolent powers, personified by the titans such as Typhon, where chained. Just as certain well-behaved inmates of modern prisons are granted the breath of free air while working on roadside cleanup details, or cutting the warden’s lawn as a trustee, might not God permit Khronos or one of his agents, to breath free air in return for accomplishing certain tasks. Might not such a road agent, an angelic being, neither good or evil, be assigned as guides for those who wish to travel outside of Time? Zeus’ most often used name was not Zeus, meaning Thunder-chief, but Khronian, or Timeholder.

Near two hundred years ago Dickens essentially used the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Past as such instructive time teachers for the protagonist Ebeneezer Scrooge in his A Christmas Carol.

Part of the inspiration for this method was the reading of the first 200 pages of Phillip K. Dick’s exegesis, in which the famous altered state writer revealed that he was in communication with a 2nd Century AD Christian, by the name of Thomas, I think. If Death is a river, than this pulp writer, likes Time as a road, our lives the length we travel it.

For Zoomtime, my working title, I would also like to assign Generation Z members a unique ability to be escorted outside of Time, based on their generation coming at the end of a downward civilizational cycle. That notion, suggested by Steward of the West’s concept of Gen-Z time travelers trying to go back to the Summer of Love and steer the Boomers away from the cliff of terminal decline, also suggested the title.

One final note on Hades. He was not to be named directly, less he be invoked, making him congruent to the Mosaic God whose chosen people would not utter his name or write it complete, with even these missives deposited in tiny clay tombs. An ancient euphemism for Hades was the Westward One, or the Lord of Sunset. How interesting, that Europeans sailed into the west where their cultures, nations and civilization died; dissolved in a monetary melting pot, different only in scale from the melting pot that Fagan the fence used to melt down the watches and jеwels gotten from the doomed children he had inveigled into a life of crime, in Dicken’s Oliver Twist.

Notes

1.) Dickens, A Christmas Carol