Par Lance
Par Lance is where I come to talk with my friends, mainly to discuss books.
Par can mean at face value,and Lance is just me.
From the Oxford English Dictionary:
Parlance /'pa:l(Ə)ns/
noun [mass noun] a particular way of speaking or using words, especially a way common to those with a particular job or interest: dated terms that were once in common parlance | medical parlance.
origin late 16th cent. (denoting speech or debate): from Old French, from parler 'speak', from Latin parabola 'comparison' (in late Latin 'speech').
Currently reading
I don't know how Howard Loring thinks of all the creative twists of these time travel novels. He has some imagination, which I admire greatly. I aspire to being this good a writer.
I actually believe that he cheats. He really is a time traveller, and therefore has a great, and unfair, advantage over the rest of us poor mortals.
As with his first novel, Piercing the Elastic Limit, it takes some time before the unravelled ends of the rope start coming togehter to form a rope. In the analogy that he actually uses in this book, it is more like the tributaries of a great river, of time, coming together to form the powerful body of water meandering its way through the jungle towards the might ocean.
Having read numerous time travel books, from Robert Heinlein and HG Wells onwards, I have always thought of "The Arrow of Time" being straight, true and swift. Loring puts me in mind of the spaghetti of time: locate the end of a strand, and guess which other end it is connected to.
In this story, there are a team of leaders who are seeking out the "heretic" who is jeopardising the future, or should that be the past?, of the whole universe.
Who is who? In what time frame? And where? And when?
It is fun to puzzle out the answers to all of these questions as you read through. Go for it! I recommend this book to all time travel fans.
One quote from this book, which I particularly like, has to be mentioned in this review.
"What rubbish anyway, he thought with scorn, an all-powerful god that was everywhere at once yet nowhere to be seen. These grunts believe anything, he thought with distaste."
By the way, I thought of two of the characters as a likely, abandoned and alone on the planet, Adam and Eve, long before the author revealed them as such at the end of the book. That was a bit of a 2001: A Space Odyssey moment.