An Introduction
Of all of my eight works to date, I most enjoyed writing The Ripple in Space-Time.
I played around with ideas and put together chapter summaries for the book about a year and a half ago. I visualized a dark and gritty Film Noir-like world with danger and scoundrels skulking around every corner. It would be an archetypically bad world with just a few good guys trying to save the day.
I imagined Humphrey Bogart or perhaps Bruce Willis as the aging male protagonist. Rutger Hauer or Edward G. Robinson would be the sociopathic super villain. The rest of the characters would fall into place as typical of the genre.
I discovered a collection of newspaper clipping from the mid 1800’s that my great great grandfather had pasted into an old ledger book. The articles that he collected were filled with the florid language that was common in newspapers of the day. As I read through dozens of accounts of local scandals, odd natural phenomenon and criminal misdoings I began to appreciate the heavy-handled use of adverbs and adjectives. I scribbled a few gems on a scrap of paper: “rapacious raiders” in a report about the lingering threat of piracy, “citizens brooding over the most retched of all human undertakings” to describe a Civil War commemoration, and, one of my favorites, “With speeds climbing ever higher and a confusing hodgepodge of systems to measure that velocity still persisting from the earlier days...” denoting an attempt to standardize the maritime “Knot.”
I decided to intersperse these often overwritten “official accounts” of what was happening as “News Items” to counterpoint what the reader had already discovered to be untrue.
Enjoy the book as it was intended; I wrote The Ripple in Space-Time as a tongue-in-cheek romp though serious matters.
I played around with ideas and put together chapter summaries for the book about a year and a half ago. I visualized a dark and gritty Film Noir-like world with danger and scoundrels skulking around every corner. It would be an archetypically bad world with just a few good guys trying to save the day.
I imagined Humphrey Bogart or perhaps Bruce Willis as the aging male protagonist. Rutger Hauer or Edward G. Robinson would be the sociopathic super villain. The rest of the characters would fall into place as typical of the genre.
I discovered a collection of newspaper clipping from the mid 1800’s that my great great grandfather had pasted into an old ledger book. The articles that he collected were filled with the florid language that was common in newspapers of the day. As I read through dozens of accounts of local scandals, odd natural phenomenon and criminal misdoings I began to appreciate the heavy-handled use of adverbs and adjectives. I scribbled a few gems on a scrap of paper: “rapacious raiders” in a report about the lingering threat of piracy, “citizens brooding over the most retched of all human undertakings” to describe a Civil War commemoration, and, one of my favorites, “With speeds climbing ever higher and a confusing hodgepodge of systems to measure that velocity still persisting from the earlier days...” denoting an attempt to standardize the maritime “Knot.”
I decided to intersperse these often overwritten “official accounts” of what was happening as “News Items” to counterpoint what the reader had already discovered to be untrue.
Enjoy the book as it was intended; I wrote The Ripple in Space-Time as a tongue-in-cheek romp though serious matters.
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