The Empire of Time

On Time’s Progression

It might be noted at the outset that this work is told, not in a direct and chronological fashion, but by great leaps forward and back through time. This is, I’d argue, how it should be. It is, after all, a time travel novel. Oh, H G Wells might have done things differently in his day, leaving out those complications that seem to come with the territory, but I am quite certain that had he, like I, witnessed more than a century of development of this sub-genre, he might have told it in the same way, experiencing all that happens through Otto’s eyes, through Otto’s thoughts; sharing each moment as he experiences it, and, by that means, giving the reader the very feel of travelling in time.

Roads To Moscow was originally written, and was always intended to be, a singular work, though of considerable size. Throughout its six-year gestation, and through all the changes of mind and direction the work took, there was never any question in my mind that the story that began in Chapter 1, in the dark and distant depths of the ancient Prussian forest, should be the same story that culminates in Chapter 468, long years later and in the futuristic environment of Four-Oh.

And so it is presented. Only… not in one book but three; those three books intimately connected – laced together, if you like – to form a seamless whole. Three books which, part through design and part through chance, came to chart the various stages of Otto’s ‘education’; an education that in a very real sense, is the work. What Otto learns, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, reflects how we, as a species, must change. Or die.

Three books, then, each with its own distinctive feel, each charting a stage in the development of our hero, Otto, each taking us one stage further, and yet each embedded in the others, bound together event by event, until, at the end, we share some flicker of his understanding of the world.

And so my singular trilogy, my journey back and forth through Time, on roads familiar and yet strange. A brief flirtation with infinity. A worm, swallowing its tail. Or simply a lesson in how to become fully human. Here it is. Make of it what you will.