Time’s Chariot, by Ben Jeapes
Time’s Chariot is a science fiction novel with a strong element of detective fiction. A future society has developed time-travelling technology. The technology is under the monopoly of a College, charged with making sure that the lessons of the past can be observed and used without history being disturbed. But rogue elements are up to something sneaky. Their tentacles penetrate high into the organisation and far back into the past. And our misfit hero – an officer of the College - is bent on defeating them.
Ben Jeapes is another of David Fickling’s authors, and David expects his writers to have a certain something (though we say it who shouldn’t). He looks for what he calls ‘narrative’, which I think means he expects us to tell a story capably in the good old way without too many gimmicks or wanderings. Now, I have to confess that I struggled with Time’s Chariot to begin with, partly because there’s a large cast of characters with strange names and it took me a while to sort out who was who. But then the story woke up, the game got afoot and I’m now reading with real pleasure.
The challenge with a time-travelling novel is how you deal with the paradox – the moment when someone goes back and changes the past in a way that affects a part of the story that’s already been told. It’s tough to do, because story-telling is by nature linear with a beginning, a middle and an end in that order, and a successful story must follow that pattern even if it doesn’t appear to. The easy way is not to have any paradoxes, or to invent reasons why they don’t happen. That seems to me to be a cop-out. In Jeapes’s story, paradoxes clearly can happen. So far they’ve happened off stage. You learn about them in asides from the main characters. We haven’t yet experienced one up close. But I’m reading on in hope. I have a theory that the bad guy whose death was faked at the beginning really will die in that incident, and has been dead for five thousand years before the main story began. Let’s see…
PS. Yes, there was a paradox. But it wasn’t what I expected!
October 31st, 2009 at 4:34 am
Hi Mr. Dickinson! Just wanted to say firstly that I’m a huge fan of your work and love your books! I recently found this website and am putting it in my RSS feed as I type this - I think it’s great that you blog so often!
I have a bit of a random question that doesn’t particularly concern this post, but rather another Ben Jeapes novel; I read one of his books (New World Order), and really enjoyed it, but I was wondering if he’s writing a sequel/is there a sequel?
And also, do you plan on going on book tours in the United States? I happen to live in New York, so if you’ll be doing a tour, you’ll swing by NYC?!
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Hi Sarah, Thank you for this. I don’t know Ben particularly well (I’ve accosted him once at a party) but I’ve sent your question in to him via our publisher’s website and we’ll see if the system sends us an answer.
I’m sure I’ll get over to the States sooner or later. And you bet NYC will be on the list!