OK, it is nearly Christmas time in this year of our general discontent, 2020. The pandemic has caused damned panic anywhere and everywhere. Things will surely never be the same again. Except that they are pretty much as they have been in the past, and as they will be in the future. The unpredictable happens, predictably enough. Human folly, in the midst of the occasional (again unpredictable) moment of sheer genius, is as reliable a fixture as ever it has been. The Universe rolls on, with scarcely a glance backward at the twitter talk of the breathless or the breathless talk of the twits.

Forget about the universal goodwill of mankind, or the shared wealth of a shared planet, the capacity for good or evil, or the ability to make or rescind a choice. The real thing that we all, all, all, share, in the beginning and in the end, in the middle and at the edges, in the light and in the dark, and in the laughter and in the tears, is TIME. And lo and behold, we don’t even know what the damned thing is!

My books give an account of the adventures of a time traveler. He is thrust into this role, and must make the best of it that he can. After some time, he realises that time is a difficult customer, choosing to reveal its secrets slowly, reluctantly, and mysteriously at every turn.

Time. Surely the greatest riddle, inside an enigma, wrapped inside a mystery, that ever there was. But my goodness, what a new vista there would be, once we reach something like an understanding of its secrets.

Fiction is fiction to be sure. Also, fiction ain’t fiction. My hope is that the adventures of Jasper Jarman will catalyse new thoughts about time, new concepts, new horizons, and new imaginings. Fiction is born of such imaginings, and non-fiction relies on that.

I want my website to become a forum for the discussion of matters time. For creativity, imagination, wonderings, and joy. I want theoretical physicists, as well as armchair theorists, and everyone else in between. Together, we can achieve, much, much more than we could ever conceive.

And so my challenge to all begins with this. WHAT IS TIME? What, who, where, why and how is time? And when. When?

Send me your answers, simple, complex, rigorous or flippantly fanciful. At this stage, they all count. I will publish the best. We can work this out, together.

Yours truly, Jack