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Tarkentower
Then came a long period I don't remember much about. I only remember sitting in the classroom one day, a day that seemed to last forever, like my life was never changing. It was driving me crazy. I put my head down on the table, pretending to sleep, and then the room grew really quiet. When I looked around, nobody was there.
Thinking the bell might have rung and I hadn't heard it, I stood up and walked out. But the hallway was empty, too. In fact, the whole school was empty. I wandered past lockers and the door to the gym and then stumbled out a side door and found myself in the middle of a deserted city.
"Hey, where is everybody!" I yelled, but my voice was lost in the emptiness.
.............
Meet Lewis Fuller, a simple kid with no idea of what's at stake or how to fix anything. Just having arrived in the future, he's got a lot of catching up to do.
Dr. Tarkentower had plans of changing the world forever. Tired of seeing so much pain in the eyes of his patients, he quit his job at the hospital and created a vast machine that could control time itself. From there, he put the whole earth into a loop, repeating the same day over and over.
Each day his machine picks a few people who go forward in time, escaping the loop, living on a future planet that is not so crowded. It sounds like the perfect solution.
But people stuck in the loop are slowly going insane. As they arrive in the future, they bring with them a world of chaos. Lewis has to find Tarkentower's machine and turn it off to save the future. And to pull that off, he's going to need a lot of help.
"There's nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place."—Banksy
Thinking the bell might have rung and I hadn't heard it, I stood up and walked out. But the hallway was empty, too. In fact, the whole school was empty. I wandered past lockers and the door to the gym and then stumbled out a side door and found myself in the middle of a deserted city.
"Hey, where is everybody!" I yelled, but my voice was lost in the emptiness.
.............
Meet Lewis Fuller, a simple kid with no idea of what's at stake or how to fix anything. Just having arrived in the future, he's got a lot of catching up to do.
Dr. Tarkentower had plans of changing the world forever. Tired of seeing so much pain in the eyes of his patients, he quit his job at the hospital and created a vast machine that could control time itself. From there, he put the whole earth into a loop, repeating the same day over and over.
Each day his machine picks a few people who go forward in time, escaping the loop, living on a future planet that is not so crowded. It sounds like the perfect solution.
But people stuck in the loop are slowly going insane. As they arrive in the future, they bring with them a world of chaos. Lewis has to find Tarkentower's machine and turn it off to save the future. And to pull that off, he's going to need a lot of help.
"There's nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place."—Banksy
172 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 1, 2018
2 people are currently reading
11 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Scott White
31 books65 followersMusic video director, producer, and composer. Member of a band of stray tablets. Winner of more than a dozen international film festivals. Ex-studio engineer turned artist and loving every minute of it. Into making animated music videos for my band. Hoping to work on soundtracks for other filmmakers. Have qualified as a voting member of the Grammy Awards with multiple nationally released projects mainly in the blues arena.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 7, 2014
I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Tarkentower from the author for purposes of reviewing and editing.
Tarkentower has been written with a teenage audience in mind and it is a novel which spans the genres of science fiction and fantasy. The story is told from the perspective of Lewis, a boy who finds himself trapped in a surreal and fairly dystopian landscape with little memory of his previous life. Lewis sets out to discover more about the world into which he has been thrown and in doing so discovers himself and his own unique abilities.
I think the best thing about this story is its underlying premise - that Tarkentower has effectively plunged the world into suspended animation, forcing humanity to live out the same day on repeat while apparently randomly selected people escape through worm holes into the future. The weird dream-like environment that Lewis encounters is therefore not the result of some kind of apocalypse or war, but simply the consequence of a well-intentioned mad professor.
If I had to compare the book to anything, it would be a latter day Alice in Wonderland - this is a world which functions according to its own logic, in which rules can be bent to achieve wonders. Lewis finds himself pitted against a group of people who would suppress such freedom in order to impose order upon an environment that resists it.
Lewis makes an engaging protagonist, as he encounters both friends and foes, continually learning more about his new surroundings. The book moves at a swift pace, and really does make for a compelling read, as it moves towards its final confrontation between Lewis and the self-deceiving Tarkentower.
I felt there were just two problems with this story. The ending seemed rather hurried to me - there was a great deal going on, and it seemed a little chaotic - although that may well have been the author's intention. Personally, I would have enjoyed a slower build to the climax of the story.
I also felt some of the relationships between characters might have been more fully developed. I didn't really get a sense, for example, of Lewis's burgeoning romance with Lucerne - I would have appreciated greater exploration of the characters' emotions.
However, these are not problems which detracted from my overall enjoyment of the novel which, I have to emphasise was powerfully written, compelling and offers a new twist on an old genre.
Tarkentower has been written with a teenage audience in mind and it is a novel which spans the genres of science fiction and fantasy. The story is told from the perspective of Lewis, a boy who finds himself trapped in a surreal and fairly dystopian landscape with little memory of his previous life. Lewis sets out to discover more about the world into which he has been thrown and in doing so discovers himself and his own unique abilities.
I think the best thing about this story is its underlying premise - that Tarkentower has effectively plunged the world into suspended animation, forcing humanity to live out the same day on repeat while apparently randomly selected people escape through worm holes into the future. The weird dream-like environment that Lewis encounters is therefore not the result of some kind of apocalypse or war, but simply the consequence of a well-intentioned mad professor.
If I had to compare the book to anything, it would be a latter day Alice in Wonderland - this is a world which functions according to its own logic, in which rules can be bent to achieve wonders. Lewis finds himself pitted against a group of people who would suppress such freedom in order to impose order upon an environment that resists it.
Lewis makes an engaging protagonist, as he encounters both friends and foes, continually learning more about his new surroundings. The book moves at a swift pace, and really does make for a compelling read, as it moves towards its final confrontation between Lewis and the self-deceiving Tarkentower.
I felt there were just two problems with this story. The ending seemed rather hurried to me - there was a great deal going on, and it seemed a little chaotic - although that may well have been the author's intention. Personally, I would have enjoyed a slower build to the climax of the story.
I also felt some of the relationships between characters might have been more fully developed. I didn't really get a sense, for example, of Lewis's burgeoning romance with Lucerne - I would have appreciated greater exploration of the characters' emotions.
However, these are not problems which detracted from my overall enjoyment of the novel which, I have to emphasise was powerfully written, compelling and offers a new twist on an old genre.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 16, 2019
White's crossover YA/adult sci-fi novel moves incredibly fast because of a near Hemingway-esque sentence structure that befits the young narrator, a street artist who finds himself flipped from an endless repetition of one single urban day into a world where the world--thankfully!--moves forward with normal chronology. The downside being that this new world is a decaying dystopia where inhabitants are left to scavenge in a world gone awry, with fungi that can permanently maim, and bands of not-so sane outlanders. The protagonist, Lewis Fuller, is warily befriended by a loosely knot band. He inevitably falls in love with Lucerne, one of teens in the band. Lucerne has other plans: she wants to become a Ranger, someone who roams the country and cities reporting back to a headquarters (of sorts). Lewis learns from Lucerne and the others that a scientist named Tarkentower managed to stop the movement of time, this being his solution to the world's over-population. Lewis begins to see Tarkentower in his dreams. And . . . Lewis has a disconcerting power: he is capable of making objects and people move through space and time. Is this power going to get him banished from the friends he's so recently made? Is the power going to enable him to confront Tarkentower himself? After all, that man is appearing more frequently in Lewis's dreams. This novel works alone, though White is surely heading for at least a trilogy with the Tarkentower series and his attractive group of characters. It's a winding, fun read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews