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Moral Kiosk
What if you could travel a day into the past?
On rainy Thameside Battersea in the near future, there’s a secret passageway back in time. Stored on an unassuming industrial site, any subject placed in Booth A is transported to Booth B via ‘quantum foam’. During the process, the subject also travels to an earlier point in the day, although the time frames vary.
Soon enough, Simon – the engineer who combined Dark Matter with wormhole science to build the Booths – begins to improve his finances and relationships through do-overs, ultimately meddling in matters of life and death . . .
A 2016 Kindle Press selection, Moral Kiosk is a time travel story about loss, shelved dreams, and second chances.
On rainy Thameside Battersea in the near future, there’s a secret passageway back in time. Stored on an unassuming industrial site, any subject placed in Booth A is transported to Booth B via ‘quantum foam’. During the process, the subject also travels to an earlier point in the day, although the time frames vary.
Soon enough, Simon – the engineer who combined Dark Matter with wormhole science to build the Booths – begins to improve his finances and relationships through do-overs, ultimately meddling in matters of life and death . . .
A 2016 Kindle Press selection, Moral Kiosk is a time travel story about loss, shelved dreams, and second chances.
- GenresScience FictionEbooks
325 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 27, 2016
23 people are currently reading
31 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 14, 2017
Moral Kiosk by Ryan Daff is my kinda book. Sci-fi junkie that I am, I hear 'quantum foam', time travel, dark matter, worm holes....well I am right on this! I enjoyed it. It is well written and a fun read. A great escape that took me away, far far away, lol.
Great suspense, intrigue, sci-fi, characters, and filled my sci-fi addiction for today.
Great suspense, intrigue, sci-fi, characters, and filled my sci-fi addiction for today.
June 16, 2020
This was an interesting book, part science, part science fiction and also quite a big lump of it about relationships/friendships.
It was off to an odd start, what I felt should have been quite emotional was actually quite objective in the way it was told and lacked feeling. I think this is down to the science side of things, of which there is a fair amount in here, and I have to say this came across as a little boring (even for me and I like this kind of science), I felt like someone was droning on explaining science to us in a rather boring way, which is odd because the story line is exciting. Thankfully the actual science is mainly at the beginning and again towards the end of the book, so you don’t have to put up with it all the way through as the explanations rather interrupt the flow of the story itself. Paradox’s were mentioned regularly though and that was interesting, as our lead characters tried to assess the danger of these in their time travel escapades - I do love a good paradox!
The premise of the book was good. You can time travel but you can only travel about a day back in time, it gives you a chance to have some small do-overs, or some big ones if you react quickly enough. But.. where do you stop?
Once we get past the prologue the story itself takes a while to get going, in part I think down to all the science explanations as well as setting the scene with the history and background of our characters. We have two central characters; Simon who reminded me of Sherlock Holmes, smart but eccentric and often reckless, and then we have Richard, who I suppose is the Watson, much quieter and calmer and responsible. They make a good pair and I like their relationship, they bounce off each other well, and are both likable characters.
Towards the end of the book (about 70%) we catch up with the beginning of the book (it’s one of those stories that starts at the end), and then we had to read through knowing what was going to happen, I was willing myself to read quicker to find out what happened afterwards!
Overall this is quite a lovely book, a story of friendship I think, with some really interesting ideas about time travel and wormholes. It had science but not too much. It also had a pretty good ending. I lay in bed last night having finished reading and just let my brain run through it all, that's the sign of a good book to me - I was still thinking about it and working it out in my head after I read the final page. Nicely done.
I’m giving this a 4*/5, it doesn’t quite warrant a 5 as it was somehow not as exciting as it should have been, but still worth a read.
It was off to an odd start, what I felt should have been quite emotional was actually quite objective in the way it was told and lacked feeling. I think this is down to the science side of things, of which there is a fair amount in here, and I have to say this came across as a little boring (even for me and I like this kind of science), I felt like someone was droning on explaining science to us in a rather boring way, which is odd because the story line is exciting. Thankfully the actual science is mainly at the beginning and again towards the end of the book, so you don’t have to put up with it all the way through as the explanations rather interrupt the flow of the story itself. Paradox’s were mentioned regularly though and that was interesting, as our lead characters tried to assess the danger of these in their time travel escapades - I do love a good paradox!
The premise of the book was good. You can time travel but you can only travel about a day back in time, it gives you a chance to have some small do-overs, or some big ones if you react quickly enough. But.. where do you stop?
Once we get past the prologue the story itself takes a while to get going, in part I think down to all the science explanations as well as setting the scene with the history and background of our characters. We have two central characters; Simon who reminded me of Sherlock Holmes, smart but eccentric and often reckless, and then we have Richard, who I suppose is the Watson, much quieter and calmer and responsible. They make a good pair and I like their relationship, they bounce off each other well, and are both likable characters.
Towards the end of the book (about 70%) we catch up with the beginning of the book (it’s one of those stories that starts at the end), and then we had to read through knowing what was going to happen, I was willing myself to read quicker to find out what happened afterwards!
Overall this is quite a lovely book, a story of friendship I think, with some really interesting ideas about time travel and wormholes. It had science but not too much. It also had a pretty good ending. I lay in bed last night having finished reading and just let my brain run through it all, that's the sign of a good book to me - I was still thinking about it and working it out in my head after I read the final page. Nicely done.
I’m giving this a 4*/5, it doesn’t quite warrant a 5 as it was somehow not as exciting as it should have been, but still worth a read.
April 20, 2017
Have you ever thrown a penny into a wishing well?
Have you heard the splash that penny made when it hit? Did you try to picture what it looked like, with all of the ripples radiating outward from the single tossed penny?
Have you got that image fixed in your imagination?
Good. Now turn up the volume a little, would you?
Try and picture yourself throwing an entire wishing well, full of brand new shiny Lincoln pennies, each of them minted at the very same moment in time.
Now you've got a kind of a picture of what I felt like after reading MORAL KIOSK.
This novel is a time travel novel. It is a sort of a soft scifi that reads like a hard one. It goes deep into the whole "time travel paradox" trope. It is the kind of a novel that will make you think just a little bit.
Stop giggling in the back row there. I see you chuckling. I know that I said "hard one". Don't be so darned juvenile. This isn't funny, darn it.
Like those billion round pennies thrown into the rounded mouth of a gigantic wishing well, with all of those splendidly-carved arcs radiating outwards like a flotilla of paper swans, this book is incredibly reflective. It needs to be read slowly and chewed carefully. It isn't for someone looking for a little quick-and-dirty Connecticut Yankeee in King Arthur's Court action.
It is a thoughtfully-written narrative that soars out across the pages like a well-hit baseball, soaring across a baseball field into the glove of an eager center field rookie who leans back and heaves that horsehide sphere right straight back towards home plate.
(Oh God, he's mixing his metaphors, isn't he?)
The plot is one of those beautiful perfect looping plots that make you feel as if you were jogging on a Mobius Strip and the tracks of your sneakers were embossed with a series of interlocking lemniscates.
(Oh God, he just hit frappe on the metaphor-mixer - has anybody got any Dramamine?)
The only problem I have is that Simon is such a nasty selfish twit, but he is a perfect dark mirror for the protagonist Dick. The title is a bit of a poser as well. I tried to find some sort of a link between the novel and REM's song, but meaning evaded me.
In any case, if you are in the mood for a long and thoughtful time travel novel, this definitely would be worth picking up.
Yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon.
Have you heard the splash that penny made when it hit? Did you try to picture what it looked like, with all of the ripples radiating outward from the single tossed penny?
Have you got that image fixed in your imagination?
Good. Now turn up the volume a little, would you?
Try and picture yourself throwing an entire wishing well, full of brand new shiny Lincoln pennies, each of them minted at the very same moment in time.
Now you've got a kind of a picture of what I felt like after reading MORAL KIOSK.
This novel is a time travel novel. It is a sort of a soft scifi that reads like a hard one. It goes deep into the whole "time travel paradox" trope. It is the kind of a novel that will make you think just a little bit.
Stop giggling in the back row there. I see you chuckling. I know that I said "hard one". Don't be so darned juvenile. This isn't funny, darn it.
Like those billion round pennies thrown into the rounded mouth of a gigantic wishing well, with all of those splendidly-carved arcs radiating outwards like a flotilla of paper swans, this book is incredibly reflective. It needs to be read slowly and chewed carefully. It isn't for someone looking for a little quick-and-dirty Connecticut Yankeee in King Arthur's Court action.
It is a thoughtfully-written narrative that soars out across the pages like a well-hit baseball, soaring across a baseball field into the glove of an eager center field rookie who leans back and heaves that horsehide sphere right straight back towards home plate.
(Oh God, he's mixing his metaphors, isn't he?)
The plot is one of those beautiful perfect looping plots that make you feel as if you were jogging on a Mobius Strip and the tracks of your sneakers were embossed with a series of interlocking lemniscates.
(Oh God, he just hit frappe on the metaphor-mixer - has anybody got any Dramamine?)
The only problem I have is that Simon is such a nasty selfish twit, but he is a perfect dark mirror for the protagonist Dick. The title is a bit of a poser as well. I tried to find some sort of a link between the novel and REM's song, but meaning evaded me.
In any case, if you are in the mood for a long and thoughtful time travel novel, this definitely would be worth picking up.
Yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon.
December 23, 2016
This was a book I nominated in the Kindle Scout campaign.
Set near and around the Battersea area, in the near future, there is at once a familiarity for me, as well as blindness. It reminds me of the days of my youth, growing up in a town west of London, within the M25 yet just outside of Greater London. So the area of South / South West London was always vaguely familiar to me, having passed through it numerous times on the train and wandered around a couple of times. The shell of Battersea Power Station is one of the most familiar sites from the train when travelling in towards Central London. And of course, the Tube lines, the ones that take you to one of the other locations, Camden (a place I always loved to visit, with the old stables converted into one of the most bizarre markets in the world) and the Northern Line (one of the deepest lines), with its array of mice (although, last time I visited, there weren’t as many to be seen with all the modern improvements) (as an addendum, a list of Tube facts can be found here (who doesn’t remember the King’s Cross fire?!)). And, of course, I had heard about the Nine Elms development since moving away from England. So all of this means that it gave me a world that was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, enough at least to enable me to picture the surroundings far better than any novel set in the US, for instance.
So I was quite excited to read a tale set in an area that I know, albeit from a vague distance. Yet, throughout this book, I found it hard to ascertain what this story was about. Yes, there are sci-fi elements inside, which run through the book like a red thread (leitmotif, perhaps), tying the individual stories together. This book also contains hard science fiction, with much explanation of the theories behind the practicalities of what’s taking place. Although it’s not necessary to understand this to understand the story, I can still say with certainty that the days are quite gone when I thought of String Theory as how long a cat would play with a piece of string. Parts of this story also made me think wildly and excitedly of Doctor Who, with the mentions of Time Rift, amongst other things. There’s even a Cassandra (no spoilers to be found here…! ;) ). But, unlike the very famous sci-fi show, the science behind the experiments taking place here are plausible, mostly because it’s based on discoveries that are very much real.
I did notice another reviewer mentioning that the story was predominantly about cigarettes and alcohol. Well, yes, to some extent, it could feel like that. Yet it just shows the age of the characters, trying to keep their youth alive, albeit with a very British near recklessness, and what perhaps could also be considered selfishness. These are characters who work hard and play hard. Having faults and terrible habits is what makes them human, even if it doesn't necessarily make them, throughout most of the story, likeable.
My rating wavered throughout, partly as I was trying to work out what the hell the story was actually about. The backstory of our primary narrator seemed out of place. I was frustrated as I assumed that he was the one documenting all the developments and discoveries of his wild friend, so what did his story have to do with anything? Yet the last 20% of the story is perhaps the most important, as it all starts to tie in and I actually understood what the whole journey, as a reader, was about. The title of the story, Moral Kiosk, should be the biggest hint; morals. What would you do if you could travel back in time and change events…?
Final rating: ★★★★☆ – Really liked
Set near and around the Battersea area, in the near future, there is at once a familiarity for me, as well as blindness. It reminds me of the days of my youth, growing up in a town west of London, within the M25 yet just outside of Greater London. So the area of South / South West London was always vaguely familiar to me, having passed through it numerous times on the train and wandered around a couple of times. The shell of Battersea Power Station is one of the most familiar sites from the train when travelling in towards Central London. And of course, the Tube lines, the ones that take you to one of the other locations, Camden (a place I always loved to visit, with the old stables converted into one of the most bizarre markets in the world) and the Northern Line (one of the deepest lines), with its array of mice (although, last time I visited, there weren’t as many to be seen with all the modern improvements) (as an addendum, a list of Tube facts can be found here (who doesn’t remember the King’s Cross fire?!)). And, of course, I had heard about the Nine Elms development since moving away from England. So all of this means that it gave me a world that was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, enough at least to enable me to picture the surroundings far better than any novel set in the US, for instance.
So I was quite excited to read a tale set in an area that I know, albeit from a vague distance. Yet, throughout this book, I found it hard to ascertain what this story was about. Yes, there are sci-fi elements inside, which run through the book like a red thread (leitmotif, perhaps), tying the individual stories together. This book also contains hard science fiction, with much explanation of the theories behind the practicalities of what’s taking place. Although it’s not necessary to understand this to understand the story, I can still say with certainty that the days are quite gone when I thought of String Theory as how long a cat would play with a piece of string. Parts of this story also made me think wildly and excitedly of Doctor Who, with the mentions of Time Rift, amongst other things. There’s even a Cassandra (no spoilers to be found here…! ;) ). But, unlike the very famous sci-fi show, the science behind the experiments taking place here are plausible, mostly because it’s based on discoveries that are very much real.
I did notice another reviewer mentioning that the story was predominantly about cigarettes and alcohol. Well, yes, to some extent, it could feel like that. Yet it just shows the age of the characters, trying to keep their youth alive, albeit with a very British near recklessness, and what perhaps could also be considered selfishness. These are characters who work hard and play hard. Having faults and terrible habits is what makes them human, even if it doesn't necessarily make them, throughout most of the story, likeable.
My rating wavered throughout, partly as I was trying to work out what the hell the story was actually about. The backstory of our primary narrator seemed out of place. I was frustrated as I assumed that he was the one documenting all the developments and discoveries of his wild friend, so what did his story have to do with anything? Yet the last 20% of the story is perhaps the most important, as it all starts to tie in and I actually understood what the whole journey, as a reader, was about. The title of the story, Moral Kiosk, should be the biggest hint; morals. What would you do if you could travel back in time and change events…?
Final rating: ★★★★☆ – Really liked
December 16, 2016
A great debut novel. I loved it!
December 19, 2016
The "Ki"osk to Time Travel
Moral Kiosk is an excellent time-travel tale. There's a feeling of omniscience as the reader is privy to all, while the characters are not necessarily "in the loop" - ha.
I received the book for free because I nominated it through the Kindle Scout program. It exceeds the expectations set by its campaign.
Moral Kiosk is an excellent time-travel tale. There's a feeling of omniscience as the reader is privy to all, while the characters are not necessarily "in the loop" - ha.
I received the book for free because I nominated it through the Kindle Scout program. It exceeds the expectations set by its campaign.
February 28, 2020
More about drinking and who is in a relationship with who than science
It did have an interesting ending and discussed various theories of time travel and how they might apply. Way too much inane conversation spent over drinks.
It did have an interesting ending and discussed various theories of time travel and how they might apply. Way too much inane conversation spent over drinks.
April 14, 2018
Pretty interesting
Fun book that seems very realistic for time travel! I may not know physics, but it sounded good to me!
Fun book that seems very realistic for time travel! I may not know physics, but it sounded good to me!
February 3, 2017
Well crafted with a skilled, literary hand.
Moral Kiosk could not be described as an all-action, breathless page-tuner, but it is a measured, contemplative read that builds and builds and does not disappoint. Sit down and take your time with this one!
The science of the time travel booths, or kiosks, is not only plausible and well researched, but depends on the crazy input of a whacky inventor. The ‘touch of genius’ from the initially unlikeable and egoistical Simon, forever on alcohol, tobacco or speed, for me, put the seal of believability on the time travel contraptions.
To begin with, we only see Simon through the eyes of Dick, the ‘down on his luck’ narrator, who was asked to document the development of the time booths, and who becomes Simons confident to his foolhardy experiments. These decadent Oxford University graduates, who could have walked out of the pages of ‘Brideshead Revisited’, both act in foolish and reprehensible ways; they are maddeningly disagreeable! Yet, by the end of the book, I found that I had grown fond of both characters. Desperate to see what fate awaited them, and full of anticipation following the long discussed consequences of time paradoxes, I found the ending as surprising as it was engaging and I was more than a little sorry to have reached the end.
Please keep writing Ryan Daff!
Moral Kiosk could not be described as an all-action, breathless page-tuner, but it is a measured, contemplative read that builds and builds and does not disappoint. Sit down and take your time with this one!
The science of the time travel booths, or kiosks, is not only plausible and well researched, but depends on the crazy input of a whacky inventor. The ‘touch of genius’ from the initially unlikeable and egoistical Simon, forever on alcohol, tobacco or speed, for me, put the seal of believability on the time travel contraptions.
To begin with, we only see Simon through the eyes of Dick, the ‘down on his luck’ narrator, who was asked to document the development of the time booths, and who becomes Simons confident to his foolhardy experiments. These decadent Oxford University graduates, who could have walked out of the pages of ‘Brideshead Revisited’, both act in foolish and reprehensible ways; they are maddeningly disagreeable! Yet, by the end of the book, I found that I had grown fond of both characters. Desperate to see what fate awaited them, and full of anticipation following the long discussed consequences of time paradoxes, I found the ending as surprising as it was engaging and I was more than a little sorry to have reached the end.
Please keep writing Ryan Daff!
January 8, 2017
This is not a fast-action story. It has a lot of backstory, which eventually has relevance and ties into the theme of the "moral kiosk." While I enjoyed the story, my eyes glazed over and I had to skim through the techincal or scientific parts talking about time travel. They tended to bog down the story, although others may quite enjoy them. There is a quote in the book that I can relate to: "He provided the following dry, yet fascinating, spiel of exposition."
January 31, 2017
Review coming soon.
Read
June 18, 2018The story is good, but the book needed a good editor.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews