The Time Equation Novels
Books to Read
My Time Equation Novels have been quite popular with readers. I initially wanted to write an adventure about life during the last ice age (the Pleistocene period), and I had planned to chronicle a single hunter's journey.
Somewhere in the process, the idea of time travel came into play. I contacted Professor Fred Allen Wolf, a noted physicist and author. I used his ideas as the basis of my character's time travel. Wolf felt that the ability to move in time is probably something we all possess but usually suppress, so there is no 'time machine' involved. Instead, there is an altered mindset and a complex equation with numerous variables that are discovered inadvertently by Kathleen Whitby in the first novel, Heart of Fire Time of Ice.
Kathleen finds herself accidentally transferred in time to the last ice age just a few miles south of the glaciers covering the northern part of America. Her difficult life has left her with emotional scars that may impact her ability to survive in that harsh environment. The story then becomes one that deals with her personal growth as she deals with the inevitable challenges. She gradually changes from a timid and fearful person to one who finds that she has something to love in herself.
The primitive hunter (of course, there had to be a primitive hunter) appears soon after she arrives in the past. He, too, has problems. He has lost everyone dear to him and is now wandering with no purpose and no hope. Kathleen quickly becomes his reason for existence. However, she can neither view herself as worthy of love nor a so-called primitive as a potential mate. It takes her time to reach a point where she can consider herself worthy of receiving love. Long before that, she realizes that Cadeyrin is an amazing individual with a polymath intellect. At times, this leaves her feeling even less love-worthy, and she becomes desperate to contribute something valuable to their joint survival.
The creatures and people of the time pose numerous obstacles to survival, and it seems as if the two will never have the leisure to work out their personal problems.
The story has been referred to by one of my readers as the best time-travel story written. While I take this with a grain of salt, the comment still gave me a nice dopamine hit.
The second time equation novel is somewhat of a reverse of Heart of Fire Time of Ice. Paradox: On The Sharp Edge of the Blade takes a college student who stands to inherit a fortune and thrusts him into a complicated situation. Logan must graduate in four years to inherit, and it looks as if he won't make it. He ends up about 10,000 years in the past in Florida. There he meets a young woman who is being hunted. The two go through much and…well, no spoilers.
The third novel in the series, All the Moments in Forever, brings us back to Kathleen and Cadeyrin. Dark forces are against the two. The desirability of possessing the time equation secret hasn’t escaped governments and private entities across the globe. This poses a huge problem for Kathleen when a group captures Cadeyrin and hold him hostage in exchange for the time travel secret.
Kathleen is forced to develop her time-traveling ability to its maximum to survive in her efforts to rescue Cadeyrin. Along the way, she saves several new characters, takes unique approaches to confuse her enemies, and sheds the last vestiges of her insecurity and fears. She is aided greatly in her fight by the friends she has accumulated through time, including a group of deinonychus dinosaurs from the Cretaceous Period.
The back story of the deinonychus group shows that they are intelligent and explains how they learned to communicate with their human partners. The two groups, humans and raptors, get along well, and the deinonychus also serve as rather intimidating shock troops. (As a side note, one of the themes that show up in several of my other novels involves the question of how humans might deal with non-human intelligent creatures, including super-level AI entities.)
The three books comprise a loosely knitted trilogy. Moments is the direct sequel to Heart, but some of the characters in Paradox appear in Moments, so Paradox should be read first for context. Sorry about that. Sometimes author’s plans go astray. In this case, Paradox was intended to be a stand-alone, but readers continued to want more about Kathleen, and I ended up blending the characters into the next stories.
In the fourth book in the series, Time Enough to Live, Kathleen is forced to defend her extended family against a corporate group that wants control of a second incredibly valuable discovery, the secret of a greatly extended life. This compound, formed from plants found across several different times, was given to Cadeyrin by the senior member of a non-homo sapiens Hominin. This group was suggested to me by a friend who is a dedicated Sasquatch hunter, and the idea makes sense if you assume that there are Sasquatches and they are represented in the fossil record.
The fifth story, All Things in Time, continues with the same cast of characters and introduces a new complication to their lives. This novel is a Florida Publishers and Authors Association Presidents Award winner in the Adult Science Fiction category.
Without saying too much, the primary challenge in this story involves reconciling the emotional entanglement between a female deinonychus and a male human. At a certain point, as I was writing the story, I found myself asking myself, “What the Hell am I doing in this plot?” The temptation to just make it weird occurred to me, but that was too easy. It also led to an area of literature where I was unwilling to go. My stories are adult, but the characters all have relatively traditional values, also.
Fortunately, since the story was under my control, in a world that I’d (with the agreement of my dedicated readers) created, I was able to resolve a seemingly insurmountable problem with a little writing magic and a massive, semi-permanent time vortex/storm. It came out well, and the FAPA judges apparently liked it.
The books are adult-level and deal with the harshness of primitive life, murder, tribal war, criminality, hunting, sex, and other sensitive topics. I've made an attempt to handle these topics tastefully without prejudice, but there were specific requirements based on the plots and locations that had to be included to create entertaining stories.
What Readers Say —
"Engaging characters. Like potato chips… bet you can't read just one of this author's novels. I rarely am engaged enough by a story to bother with the next book in a series; this time was different, and I really want to see what happens next."
"What great world-building — in both times. The characters leap off the pages. No two-dimensional beings here!"
"The time period is brutal, but we still have that all-important happily ever after until the next adventure! Love the underlying positive themes of freedom, fighting corrupt government officials, pro-life and pro-destiny, spiritual lore, and the personal growth of the characters."
Thanks for reading!
Regards,
Eric
All of my books may be found at your favorite online sites and also in print in most bookstores (If they’re not at a store, they can be special ordered.)
Here are the Time Equation Series links available through Books2Read
Paradox: On the Sharp Edge of the Blade