Collision with Chronos

Author’s Note

The picture of time used as a background to this novel can be said to owe something to the discussions by J.W. Dunne, of An Experiment With Time fame, particularly from his book The Serial Universe where he sets forth the regression problem I describe in Chapter Nine.

The account of time I have chosen to derive from these arguments is, of course, a crude, fictionalised one, but it does manage to raise the question of whether the present moment is coextensive throughout the universe, as Physicist Leard Ascar first believed, or whether it is a local process, as taught to him by the scientists of Retort City. I am inclined to imagine that the second version comes closer to the truth, though whether time is associated with biological systems, or with larger bodies such as galaxies, or with even larger structures such as, for instance, as much of the sidereal universe as would be observable from one point, is an open question.