NO ANGUISH WITH ANGUS: HAPPY ACCIDENTS
Posted on February 1, 2015
What I like about a good time travel story is how everything connects, how the details weave together to form a pleasing whole. Plot cogs slip into place with such thoughtful rightness to form a narrative timepiece that really hums or ticks.
This is happening with my new novel, Angus Farseek: Untimely Agent.
I created small little creatures called Quick Slivers who are composed of quicksilver. These creatures are numerous, being the slivers of what was left of H. G. Wells after his own untimely death. In my story, he died attempting to become the world's first time traveler and the result is the basic fragments of what is left of the author form thousands of slivers, birthing actual entities that can travel through time and drag other along with them.
I gave the creatures British accents on a whim and then when I decided their origins, that they came from H.G. Wells, it worked perfectly since he was British himself.
Not only that, I researched Mercury, as quicksilver is another name for that liquid metal. The god Mercury is the god of travelers. That blew me away as I had made these little mercurial beings time travelers and the main method of transport across time and space for the Untimely Agents.
And the fun doesn't stop with time-hopping liquid metal offshoots of a former H. G. Wells, Angus Farseek has clerical dinosaurs and death by random oaking, the official coding for anyone squished in their sleep by a falling backyard tree.
I am having so much fun with this series. It's written for science fiction fans who appreciate The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the humorous works of Terry Pratchett, especially his novel Good Omens.
Anyway, I will post throughtout this novel on some of the ripe synchronicities that present themselves. I have a feeling there are going to be a whole lot more.