What might happen if a handful of people living in different eras became entangled in time?
Title: The Five Watches
Author: John R. York
Publisher: DocUmeantPublishing
Pages: 316
Genre: Time Travel
What might happen if a handful of people living in different eras became entangled in time, some intentionally and some accidentally? The nineteenth-century scientist, Dr. Wilhelm Gussen, is passionate about improving the welfare of mankind, and so he begins a journey through time in a quest to learn about future advances in epidemiology. Physicist Emory Lynch, from the twenty-seventh century, studies an old pocket watch, said to be a time travel device, and accidently stumbles into the twenty-first century. In 2019, Jim Zimmerman, the de facto neighborhood go-to guy, finds himself caught in the middle of a clandestine, future conspiracy. True to his character, he becomes inextricably involved in future affairs that involve saving humanity from itself—dragging his wife and a few neighbors along for the ride. Thus, begins a time travel adventure that examines the stubborn predictability of human behavior and how some things, even over time, never seem to change.
Praise:
“The Five Watches is filled with interesting characters and enchanting tapestries woven into the fabric of time itself. John explores not only the ravages of time but more importantly the impact of individual kindness, caring, and selflessness towards others that is heartwarming. I enjoyed this suspenseful page turner, the connection to everyday people and to imaginable heroes that we can all strive to become. Uplifting! – Jim Richards, Beta Reader
Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/46fjjp6f
Is Time Travel Real?
The concept of time travel is ageless, captured in myths and
traditional stories as far back as the first century BC. It’s not difficult to
imagine primitive humans sitting around an open fire contemplating what wonders
the future might bring, or the ability to repeat the past so as to correct a
bad decision. The earliest mention of using a machine to facilitate time travel
is thought to have occurred in Edward Page Mitchell’s short story, The Clock
that Went Backward, although some scholars and critics question whether a
clock really counts as a time machine. Of course, H. G. Wells’ The Time
Machine is generally considered by most to be the first modern time-travel story,
though he actually wrote one seven years earlier called The Chronic
Argonauts. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, time travel became
a common plot element in science fiction, yielding multitudes of books, short
stories, comics, movies, and TV series. The prevalence of time travel fiction
has nurtured the development of several literary categories or types of
temporal travel, ranging from “anything goes” to the real possibility of
time travel derived from quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. In fact,
time is both a concept and a dimension. As a concept, time is a measure of the
flow of events, a straight line on which we can plot the past, measure the
present, plan and hope for the future. As a dimension, time becomes a fourth
dimension of space with a physical property and a mathematical structure.
There are a few brilliant people who study time in ways most of us
would find impossible to understand. They consider how traveling through time
could be possible, at least mathematically, and they labor over definitions of
temporal models that support or contradict various time travel paradoxes. For
many, these scientific theories of relativity, the mathematical models, and the
paradoxes they create lend a modicum of credence to certain types of time
travel tales. When science is cleverly woven into a story, compelling science
fiction often results. Stories about time and time travel are abundant. They
appeal to a broad spectrum of readers because they’re a compelling mechanism
for allowing one’s mind to wander into situations past, present, and future in
ways that other genres cannot—at least not without incorporating time travel.
It also provides the author with a very broad palette of “what if”
possibilities. Fortunately, time travel works in just about every genre, like
romance comedy, fantasy, action, and others.
In my novel, The Five Watches: An Accident of Time, I use a
watch (five of them actually) as a time machine, and I use an obscure concept
of ‘the future of the future’ to dodge those scientifically pesky paradoxes
regarding the inability to change the future. I use the current tensions in our
country and the world as a backdrop for the plot line. Time travel offers an
author and the reader a unique way of considering the state of humanity from
historical and philosophical perspectives. Time forces the story’s characters
to confront the consequences of their actions as well as those of others,
regardless of what time they find themselves in. So, is time travel for real?
When considered as a concept, we all travel through time at exactly the same
rate: 60 seconds per minute. However, there really are people out there who
conduct experiments to prove the reality of time travel. As an example,
there is the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment, performed by Marian
Scully, which involves pairs of entangled photons. If you’re interested, you
can Google it and read the detailed description of the experiment and the
results. I’m pretty sure you won’t understand it, but (spoiler alert) I can
tell you the results of the experiment were inconclusive. To date, there is no quantifiable proof that
we can travel through time, either forward or backward. Nevertheless, time,
each minute of each day, is the most valuable thing we possess. Since time is
precious, we should all use it wisely. Fortunately, we have troves of time
travel stories to stimulate our imaginations.
And here’s some food for thought — as Albert Einstein once said, “The
only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”
John R. York has been writing and publishing his stories since 2016, but he’s always been a storyteller, even as a kid in Central Ohio where he grew up. His life experiences provided him with a wealth of tales to share with others and resulted in his debut work, Wolf’s Tale. He has since published five more novels, including the award-winning Journey to Eden. A retired high-tech executive, he currently lives with his wife, Paula, in New Port Richey, Florida.
Website: www.johnryork.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/john.york.9277
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@johnryork and www.tiktok.com/@dreamwriter
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/John-York/author/B0771RCZJ2?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
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