"Apocalypse"

Dean Crawford worked as a graphic designer before he left the industry to pursue his lifelong dream of writing full-time. An aviation and motorcycle enthusiast, he lives with his family in Surrey, England.

His novels include Covenant, Immortal, and Apocalypse.

Crawford applied the Page 69 Test to Apocalypse and reported the following:

From page 69:

“If the sun vanished from the center of our solar system right now, we wouldn’t know about it for eight minutes. In comparison, the light from the Andromeda galaxy takes about two million years to get here, so we see that galaxy as it was two million years ago.”

Jarvis nodded as he got the message. “The farther away you’re looking, the farther back in time you can see.”

“That’s right,” Ryker agreed. “And if someone in the Andromeda galaxy had a big enough telescope and they zoomed in to this very spot here, what do you think they would see?”

“Not this office,” Lopez guessed.

“They’d probably see saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths,” Ryker confirmed. “Whatever was living on this spot two million years ago.”

“Okay,” Ethan said, “I’ve got that much, but how does all of it translate into Charles Purcell being able to see into the future?”

Ryker stepped away from the blackboard.

“Well, the simplest way to put it is that time and space are effectively the same thing. You need space in order for light to be able to travel from one place to another, and how long it takes light to cross that space gives you the definition of time. Each needs the other in order to exist, and what affects one will affect the other. This relationship is known as the space-time continuum.”

Lopez nodded.

“I’ve heard of that before,” she said. “You reckon that Purcell has somehow worked out how to alter the continuum?”

Ryker shook his head.

“I’m not sure. What I do know for sure is that time does not always run at the same speed across the universe, or even here on earth.”

Apocalypse is a novel about time, and of mankind’s remarkable achievement in finding a way to see both forwards and backwards through time. Most science-fiction titles imagine time travel as the key to such an achievement: with Apocalypse, I focused on the fact that the nature of light allows you to see back in time, even by the simple act of looking at the moon. The light cast upon it from the sun takes 1.3 seconds to be reflected off the moon and then reach your eyes here on Earth, so you’re looking 1.3 seconds into the past. We live in a time-machine universe, the secrets of the past awaiting a sufficient piece of technology to unveil them…

Learn more about the book and author at Dean Crawford's website and blog.

Writers Read: Dean Crawford.

My Book, The Movie: Apocalypse.

--Marshal Zeringue