Whenever I attend book signings or events I am asked about the time travel paradox and how it fits in with the books ‘Life on Mars & TVC15’ (latter released in late 2017) Being as both books can be read in either order and make perfect sense. Each book finishes where the last one left off regardless of which order they are read. For this reason they cannot be catagorised as book one and two. That depends entirely on which book you read first. How can this be plausible? Two books set in overlapping time zones which feature the same or similar characters and yet two very different stories.
For the purpose of the book my explanation expands on a common and acccepted space time theory. This follows that space and time are like a loaf of bread and every slice of the bread is our experience of now. We follow our daily lives day by day, slice by slice and feel the passage of time. However the theory goes that in fact the entire loaf exists anyway and always has. At the moment of the Big Bang when the Universe was created everything happened in that instant. Ever single instance, action and decision you make or have made in your life, happened in that single millisecond. From the very first life forms to the last living thing its all there in the loaf. Although time is experienced by us as moving forward in fact it does not, its all predetermined.
But don’t we have choice and the ability to make decisions? It may feel like we do but all the evidence put forward by Einstein suggests we have already made those decisions and our story is written. Our lives and everyone else’s are a bit like a book or film. When we start to watch the film it appears that the characters can decide to do whatever suits their circumstances. We feel tension when they are about to make a wrong move or cheer when they win through. We know its just an illusion and in fact the decisions were made about those lives and interactions way before we decided to watch the story unfold. When we watch the film we can enjoy the illusion of the passage of time, cause and effect. Our hero may well win through in the end but we always knew he would, and he will do so no matter how many times we watch. Its all a lie because the story was written a long time ago and as we experience it to its conclusion then it was always going to end the same way. Unless alternative endings which in themselves are predetermined then everything will follow its expected course.
According to the theories of Einstein this is the case with all of our lives. Your life story is already written from birth to death. Not only your life story but everything leading up to you being born and their stories too. The same applies to your children, grandchildren and so on. You just happen to experience it on a minute by minute, day by day basis. In fact this can be tested using Einstiens theories attributed to time travel. An alien traveling at light speed, hundreds of millions of miles away would, in theory see your past or your future depending on his direction of travel. So at this moment, depending on his frame of reference he could see things that have not happened to you yet? In fact if you were near to the closest star with a powerful telescope looking at Earth. What you see would be the you doing whatever you were doing 4 years ago. Many quantum science experiments support the theory with compelling evidence. We get up in the morning and go to bed at night, getting slowly older and living with our decisions. Our illusion of time is no big deal to us on a day to day basis. The fun for me started when I introduced actual time travel and two books that take place in the same time zone with the same characters. It seemed to me quite plausible that I could take this theory a stage further. Its worth having some fun with because there’s no detail provided in the book itself.
Now lets take two characters A and B. Character A is very old and is frozen in time cryogenically for 500 years. He has effectively existed for that time in his freezer before being thawed out. In the future they are able to give him a much younger and healthier body. But what if character A could be sent back to when he really was that age, say 22 years old. How could it be that he would not meet himself. The original guy would presumably be at his house, being 22 and doing whatever he might have been doing at the time. Surely there would now be two guys who are identical with the latter having no idea who this clone is? Without giving too much of the story away perhaps the guy who travelled back in time just creates a new and more interesting life than his other self?
None of the story detail matters here but the problem for readers and the solution are fun.
Point one is that both these characters have already done everything as laid out in the spacetime loaf. However because the old man went back in time with a young body to live his life differently theres a small ripple in the loaf. Kind of like when the dough folds over and bakes bit on the top. Thats what has happened with these two lives. The loaf isn’t different in any way no matter which slice you experience. Every single detail of the world exists in both the main loaf and the fold in the dough. Everything else would exist for each individual, the Sydney Opera House, Tower of London and his pet cat. The only difference in each dimension would be the other person who has traveled in time. Character A and B are the same person and so as far as either is concerned their opposite character does not exist and never has. A grain of flour in the fold will experience the loaf in an identical way as one in the main loaf. In this way they are effectively living in a different world and yet could never know that. So that makes it impossible for them to meet because neither exists in each others dimension. Either character could spend a lifetime searching and never be able to find the other because they have never been there. So just like every other event in our lives or the characters lives, even the time travel and its consequences are predetermined. So with a slight twist to excepted science I am able to produce the two books where each leads into the next and where the first one you read is either prequel nor sequel.
Thats entirely your choice.