The idea for this book came to me during a time when I’d decided to stop writing. I’d been publishing for a while, but it felt as if I was only just coming to realise how much I still had to learn. A skill that I once hoped to refine in my twenties had become a lifelong challenge and I found myself dryly amused by the irony: at this rate I’d be in a nursing home by the time I mastered any form of true expression.
I wasn’t searching for ideas, but the thought of a writer reaching her potential in a nursing home kept me amused. Over the following days and weeks, it morphed into something new. What if the goal was not self-expression but enlightenment, or true empathy, or something similar – a skill or talent that took so long to develop that it only became apparent when human life expectancy reached a maximum age? How true to our mortal condition, I thought, if the first people to master this new skill were to die from old age just as they discovered it was possible.
I began applying for jobs in libraries and chasing freelance editing work, but the idea stayed with me. I liked it – this thought of a mysterious skill lying dormant within me, if only I could hold it together long enough. It sparked a curiosity and I suspect that deep down it also represented something more: the possibility that perhaps another story existed within me – hidden maybe, and out of reach – but there until I found a way to access it.
To me the creative process is something akin to magic: the transformation of an idea into something real, the path that begins with an initial concept and ends with a novel, or ground-breaking medicine, or new flavour of ice-cream. I find this aspect of human potential fascinating. Look around you, not just at the physical structures made by humans but also at our systems of government, of money, of human rights and schooling: each of these human-made structures and concepts first existed in a human mind before it became reality.
My spark of curiosity about all this told me that I had the seed of an idea, so I carried it into a world that I could write about – teenagers who discover a mysterious power lying dormant within us all. Initially I thought it would be computer gaming that led to the invention of a new brain process, but I think in terms of the skill itself, which I could use as a metaphor for human potential, it took me about three nanoseconds to decide what the mysterious skill would be. It had to be the ability to travel through time.
I am a time travel junkie from way back – put those two words in a book description and I’m pulling out my credit card or clicking ‘hold’ on our local library website in an instant. But even though I’d chosen to write about time travel, I knew that I also wanted it to be contained, limited – at least, as best as I was able – by the laws that govern us all: those of the natural world. Because as a time travel junkie, the moments when I’m most excited are when scientists tell me that it might be possible. Some way, somehow, I want it to be possible. I’ve also read enough science fiction and fantasy to know that it’s at the boundaries where the most interesting stories lie: the weaknesses written into the superheroes – both physical and emotional – the Achilles heels, the glue that melts when Icarus flies too close to the sun.
The reason I wanted to write this note is because of the way the story helped me. Writing about human potential helped me find my own potential; at least, it helped me keep searching for it. It is a kind of arrogance to believe that you can achieve anything: until you’ve written that novel, or invented that gadget or come to truly know another human being, you don’t know whether you’re capable of it or not. We’re floating close a point that’s referenced so often these days – the idea that if you believe in yourself you can achieve anything. But I’m not trying to say that; I don’t believe it’s true. The truth I believe is even more exciting and mysterious: it’s the idea that your unique potential already lies dormant within you; it exists whether you realise it or not. The laws of nature will continue whether we fully understand them, or not. To me, it’s more about searching than believing. I don’t know the extent of it but I promise you, there is more out there than we currently imagine: there is so much to be discovered ‘floating just out of our reach, waiting for someone to give it a name’.
And here, at the end, we’ve reached the final point of this story – imagination matters and as a result stories matter, because ideas are the start of so much.
They will become our future.
-Thalia K
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