Secondhand Daylight
by Eugen Bacon & Andrew Hook
Reviewed by Galen Strickland
Posted April 26, 2024
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A few months back Eugen Bacon offered two digital review copies, one being her story collection, Danged Black Thing, which was a finalist for this year's Philip K. Dick Award. At the same time she provided a PDF file of this novel, written in collaboration with Andrew Hook. It was published last November. I haven't inquired about details, and I could be wrong, but I assume Hook wrote Part 1, which is a first-person narrative by a man named Green, living in Melbourne, Australia. Part 2 is in third person, but from the perspective of Zada, also a resident of Melbourne, but at a different time. Their paths do eventually cross.
Green's parents had emigrated from the UK, but after years of a tumultuous, and sometimes violent relationship, his mother left them and returned to England. His father was distant, eventually abandoning Green when he was in his late teens. He had a part-time job in a factory, one of the supervisors being his childood friend, Bateman. Without a secondary education or degree, he doesn't have many other options. He also hasn't had much luck in romantic relationships. His favorite hangout is the Sarah Sands Hotel, a traditional pub and dance venue. One night he sees an attractive woman who seems mutually interested, they chat for a bit, but another man interrupts him and offers to buy her a drink. He wanders over to the dance floor by himself, but she later joins him. Something inexplicable happens, he is dazzled by a bright light, and when he comes back to consciousness he is outside the pub on the tarmac. When he goes back inside he can't find the woman he was dancing with, and talking to the bartender he finds out he is also missing quite a bit of time.
Whatever happened that night must have triggered the phenomenon of random time jumps into the future. The next time it happened was a full day, skipping over a Friday and missing work. Then a full week, then six months, during which time he missed his father's second wedding. Of course he loses his job, and loses his house, which had been his parents. But some loophole in the foreclosure procedure nets him some compensation, which he invests. Through multiple other time jumps he discovers his investments have paid off handsomely. I should have mentioned the story began in 1990, on the night he found himself flat on his back outside the pub, the events leading up to that revealed later. By 2050 he is still relatively young, but very rich, owner of a tech company called SocialBox, which he had previously used to record videos explaining the time jumps. SocialBox went far beyond a social media platform, eventually developing true AI programs. Green didn't have anything to do with that of course, since he was not an engineer or computer whiz, but his investments provided the funds for those projects. Besides, he missed most of the developing technologies due to frequent time jumps. In 2050 he learns a woman named Zada had been hired, a time travel device (the Tesseract) had been tested, and Zada had already started her time jumps into the past to try to meet Green and figure out what caused his forward time jumps.
Zada's life had been different than Green's but there were parallels. She was also distant from her parents, not from their neglect or abuse, but rather their smothering attention. She interviews for a job at SocialBox, where she meets A I Green, who seems to know everything about her, and has already charted her path with the company, culminating in her volunteering to use the Tesseract. Through the recordings Green had made, she knows where and when he should be at different times, but the Tesseract's targeting isn't that reliable, so she is either early or late for an encounter with him. She grows despondent, and has to face the possibility one of A I Green's theories might be correct, that the Tesseract would create an alternate timestream, and she would never meet Green, or if she did, he would be a completely different version, having never suffered from forward time jumps. Paradoxes are a frequent time travel trope, as is the chance of alteration of events in the past creating a different future. I won't tell you which happens in this case.
I also won't say which part of the story was my favorite. Even though the tone of each part is different, the two characters are well drawn, realistic, believable. It is possible the two authors collaborated on both, but the style and perspective are very different. I should have read it before now, since I could have considered it for my Locus nominations. Not to say it would have bumped any of the five novels I did nominate off my list, but it would have been close. It is recommended.
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