It was when I was a student at Cambridge, some fifteen years ago, that many of the ideas behind my novel Faster Than Light first started to take form. I must have been nineteen or twenty years old, studying mathematics at Christ’s College, and was more than a little overawed, not just by the ancient and inscrutable rituals of college life, but also by the apparent worldliness and self-confidence of my fellow students. I’m pretty sure that in my imagination at the time, almost the entire undergraduate population were spending every minute of the day dazzling each other with the casual brilliance of their small-talk, and forging the close friendships that would be so vital in building their future careers as cabinet ministers or editors of national newspapers. It was only myself and a few of my equally non-dazzling friends who’d somehow failed to gain admittance to these elite circles, and were therefore reduced to spending our time in more mundane ways, such as drinking beer in the college bar, and agonising over our own inadequacies. Often we’d find that important bits of agonising remained unfinished at eleven o’clock when the bar shut, and on those occasions we’d have no choice but to go back to someone’s room and stay up late into the night, drinking cheap wine and monstrously strong coffee, and listening to music very quietly, so as not to attract the attention of the night porters, whose job it was to wander the college in the early hours of the morning, making sure that no-one was enjoying themselves. And it was on nights like these, as the wine started to take effect, and our conversation became increasingly enthusiastic and disjointed, that we first began to come up with some of the ideas that would later find a home in Faster Than Light. Ideas, for example, about the possibility of time travel. I believe it’s pretty much common knowledge that if time travel is possible, it should be quite easy to prove it right here and now. All you’d need to do is invest a small amount of money on a compound interest basis, with instructions that the proceeds should be used to buy a time machine at the first available opportunity, and send it back in time to you. Once the paperwork’s signed - bang - you’ve got yourself a shiny new time machine, complete no doubt with go-faster stripes and plastic drink holders, and all for the price of a few pints of beer. My friends and I were extremely keen to try this out, but we didn’t really want to interrupt our drinking to start haring round Cambridge looking for someone who knew how to set up a trust fund at four o’clock in the morning, so we convinced ourselves that actually investing the money wasn’t a vital part of the process. All we had to do was make a firm decision that we would invest it, once the goods had been safely delivered, and that in itself should be sufficient. Unfortunately I have to report that these experiments all ended in failure, or at least I assume they did, although I suppose it’s theoretically possible that our former college rooms are to this day home to a number of time machines too invisible or microscopic for us to perceive. After much debate we concluded that the most likely reason for this unexpected failure was that some terrible stock market crash in the future had wiped out our investments before they could be used for their intended purpose. We did experiment for a while with trying to get round this by making firm decisions to invest in gold sovereigns or Nepalese rupees or Guatemalan quetzales, but sadly we never succeeded in finding a currency robust enough to survive the coming financial apocalypse. I hope that some of you will read my book, and if you do you’ll find that it has quite a lot more to say about time travel, and the well-known paradoxes that it can lead to, if for example someone tries to go back in time and kill their own parents before they’re born. I should probably mention, incidentally, that if I was writing the book today, having recently become a father myself, I would now place a lot more emphasis on just how discourteous and ungrateful killing your own parents actually is. I shall certainly be making this point in no uncertain terms to my own children, when they become old enough to start conducting time travel experiments.

Copyright © John Lucas 2002

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