Here it is. The moment you and your reader have been waiting for. Your hero is about to pull the covers off his spectacular invention. A shiny new time machine! One that can move forward and backward in time as far as the imagination will take him. He yanks the covers back… and begins to tell you how it works…
“Once the time/space continuum has been distorted or bent to the correct degree, I can then skim across its surface, jumping from wave to wave. It is all very simple you see. The rate of tachyon conversion allows me to slip across, at a quantum level, the very barrier presented by the following equations… here let me illustrate on this blackboard…”
Huh? Can’t he just strap himself in, enter a date, and get on with it? Well, he could, but the author wasn’t about to let all of those hours studying time travel theory go to waste now was he? Of course not. And you’re going to learn about it too. When this chapter is done, and perhaps a bit of the next, you may just be able to build your own. If you’re not sleeping that is.
Perhaps Mr. Time Traveler could have forgone the long explanation and simply said. “I know you might want to know how I created this but does it matter? It works. And I’m about to show you doubting Thomas’ out there just how well it does.”
Then perhaps he could shoot back to a simpler time where all he had to worry about was avoiding a hungry dinosaur.
Comments on this entry are closed.