There is a big misconception about time travel. It is more Life of Pi than Top Gun.
Greg is a PLC programmer – Programmable Logic Controllers, industrial process control, the unglamorous work of keeping refineries from catastrophically rearranging themselves. He is qualified by experience, permanently underdressed for the occasion, and the designer of the GTDA42: a Gravitational Time Dilation Amplifier that is relatively energy efficient, eliminates the displacement ambiguity problem that killed the dinosaurs, and has seven interlocks, three of which were functioning correctly at the time of the incident.
The incident is why Greg is writing this.
Absurd Writings of a Time Traveller is Greg's complete account – the jumps, the mechanics, the footnotes, the laminated checklists, and the slowly accumulating evidence that something is very wrong. Not just with Greg. With time itself. With the fabric of a universe that has been quietly absorbing the stress of every displacement event since the Egyptians built the first pyramid generators in 2560 BCE, and which is – Greg has done the mathematics – approaching a threshold that only one person in history fully understood.
That person disappeared in 1938.
Written in the voice of a man who joins Roman queues out of professional habit, fixes mechanisms at the Moulin Rouge by accident, and nearly drowns in a monsoon flood because he skipped item seven on the checklist his wife made, Absurd Writings of a Time Traveller is part Douglas Adams, part philosophical memoir, and part something harder to name – a book about what it means to go very far from home and still know, with complete certainty, what you are trying to get back to.
The ambiguity is deliberate. The bread is important. The terrier's name is Chocolat and he was excellent.
