About a quarter of the way into ‘Lost in Time’ by author A. G. Riddle I had the feeling that I was going to be disappointed by this novel. The story was shaping up to be a murder mystery with some time travel thrown in to spice things up a bit. I am no fan of ‘who done it’ stories and despite the subplot in the Triassic period I wasn’t too impressed.
Boy was I wrong. About one third of the way into the story and the author begins using time travel to the fullest, mentioning but pretty much ignoring the usual time travel no-no’s of altering the past in any way causing disaster in the present. (See Ray Bradbury’s story ‘The Sound of Thunder’ for the classic take on what happens when a time traveler so much as steps on a butterfly.) Another time travel cliché that Riddle breaks is that you can never have a person meet themself.
In the near future a company called Absolom has discovered a method to use quantum entanglement to send objects, including people into the past. Now this time travel is a one-way trip so the only practical use for Absolom is to send convicted murderers into the past, the distant, pre-human past. That way the very worst of humanity are removed from society without society having to execute them, they just died in the past the way virtually every creature who has ever lived has done. Governments the world over have taken advantage of this invention which has also caused crime in general to decrease significantly. The people sent into the past cannot alter our future because it turns out they are actually sent to a different universe in the Multiverse.
The trouble starts when the six scientists who developed Absolom have succeeded in creating Absolom 2, a new version that allows objects to be placed in our Universe’s past, and perhaps also allow the recall of those objects. One of the scientists, Dr. Nora Thomas argues against the whole project, reminding her colleagues of the dangers of altering the past.
That night another of the scientists, Dr. Sam Anderson visits Nora along with his young daughter Adeline. Nora and Sam have begun a relationship and try to tell Adeline about it but the girl is still traumatized by the death of her mother and storms out of the house followed by her father.
The next day Nara is found dead in her house, Adeline’s DNA and prints on the murder weapon. To save his daughter Sam confesses to the murder and is sent back to the Triassic period as his sentence. So there we have the murder mystery set up. Can Adeline solve the crime and get her father back from the past before a dinosaur eats him.
Turns out things are a lot more interesting then that. As I said author Riddle uses time travel to make the plot much more interesting, and just plain weirder. The solution to the mystery is certainly the most unique ‘who done it’ I’ve ever heard of.
I do have a few problems with ‘Lost in Time’ however. First off the scientists who developed Absolom were actually trying to use quantum entanglement to build a kind of ‘Star Trek’ transporter, a device capable of sending objects across the world in an instant. When the objects just keep disappearing the team decides they must be going into the past, how they know this, the evidence for time travel is never explained.
Second, the Constitution to the United States strictly prohibits ‘Cruel and Unusual’ punishments and ya gotta think Absolom is unusual. It’s also cruel because Absolom isn’t too precise about where it drops a person in the past. Remember the Earth is 70% ocean so about 70% of prisoners would quickly drown. Indeed in the story Sam Anderson is dropped in a Triassic Ocean and barely manages to reach a shore.
Finally, author Riddle seems to feel that traveling into the past won’t alter our present, if you’re really careful! By the end of the novel people are going back and forth in time quite cavalierly, too cavalierly in my opinion. Just the idea of taking matter from our present and suddenly adding extra matter at some time in the past makes my physicist’s brain ache.
Still, ‘Lost in Time’ was a fun read, as I said the solution to ‘who done it’ was quite a twist, the most unique murder reveal I’ve ever read. So I do recommend ‘Lost in Time’, even people like me who don’t care for murder mysteries will enjoy it.