Fiction Reviews
The Traveler
(2026) Joseph Eckert, Tor, £14.99, trdpbk, 375pp, ISBN 978-1-035-08408-1
Tor (US), US$28.99, hrdbk, ISBN 978-1-250-42855-4
One morning Scott Treader is driving to work as usual when his car vanishes. Fortunately he was only doing around 25 miles per hour and so survives hitting the road but only narrowly missed the black truck that was suddenly immediately behind him. He makes it to the side of the road and a passing cyclist asks him if he is all right? Apparently there are strange things on that road as only yesterday the cyclist witnessed a driverless car plough into a parked car down the road.
Scott soon realises that his car did not vanish but he had somehow jumped in time and lost a day. His wife does not believe him until, that is, the next day when he vanishes in front of her, only this time he does not return for two days.
Long story short, they go to the local university and manage to convince someone in the physics department to witness Scott's next jump. When he returns to the same spot in the physics office four days later there is a small crowd of physicists awaiting his reappearance…
At precisely 7.52am everyday Scott jumps through time, with each jump being twice as long as his last. Naturally, this puts a lot of pressure on Scott's wife, and Scott's young son, Lyle, refuses to let his father go… Scott is a stone skipping across the ocean of time. Meanwhile, the legend of what he is follows him across the decades and then centuries.
I have to say that The Traveler (sic USA spelling) is a cracking read. A simple but solid SF concept underpins a rollicking adventure, ultimately across deep-time. Yet, this so easily have been ham-fistedly crafted but instead we have a honed SF tale that takes us to a firm conclusion (vague shades here, dare I say, of Sagan's Contact) and along the way some high-octane adventures.
The 'science' underpinning this pure-ist Arthur Clarke would no doubt decry as fantasy, is done rather well, especially so as the author is not a scientist (though has studied that oxymoronic subject 'political science'). Having said that, he does not go into great detail or reference technical terms (which some SF readers I'm sure would welcome) and so we get in all-but-name things like 'frame drag': Scott reappears in the same place on the Earth's surface as he departed the day before and not left floating in space as the Earth moved on. (Purely coincidentally, some very recent research further affirms frame dragging and measures it.)
There three distinct dimensions to The Traveler. First, the whole business of Scott being dragged forward in time each day exponentially doubling. (Though the reader should be aware that 'exponential' is a mathematical form of growth and doubling (per unit of time – in this case one day) a rate of growth, as the author muddles this: scientist readers will spot this, though non-scientists may miss it.) Second, a number of the substantive jumps effectively are short stories in vastly different futures. Third, his son Lyle's efforts to stop the jumps and then guide him into the far future.
Time travel is a common SF trope even if this particular form of time travel is not. Having said that, there are echoes of Laurence Manning's prescient novel The Man Who Awoke (1933) whose protagonist hibernates into the future in 5,000 year leaps. Some of the futures that book portrays have broad parallels with some in The Traveler. Indeed, Isaac Asimov credited The Man Who Awoke with alerting him to the energy crisis concerns of the 1970s.
Another time travel novel which The Traveler (only) loosely echoes is Joe Haldeman's Nebula Award short-listed and Locus Award short-listed The Accidental Time Machine (2007), whose protagonist also time travels in exponentially doubling increments and who visits some futures loosely comparable with some of those in The Traveler.
That other SF works cover similar ground is not to The Traveler's detriment: tropes and some portrayals of the future have appeared numerous of times by different writers and there is nothing wrong with that; The Traveler's is sufficiently unique to stand on its own two feet. But it is worth noting that The Traveler's tropes and future visions have pedigree or, if you will, provenance within the larger, and historic, SF landscape and I think that this novel may well resonate with seasoned SF readers as well as younger, comparative newcomers.
I have to say I liked Eckhart's novel a lot. The book and PR material says that the author has been writing SF since childhood: I guess these must be short stories as The Traveler seems to be his novel debut. It will be genuinely interesting to see what he does next.
Jonathan Cowie
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