THE TRAVELER

With neither warning nor explanation, an ordinary man finds himself slipping forward through time, away from his family and into the distant future.

One April morning, Scott Treder’s car disappears while he’s driving to work. He tumbles along the pavement, and when he takes out his phone, which is exploding with angry, confused messages from his employer and his wife, he discovers that it’s the next day. The next morning, he’s in his office cubicle when time slips again, this time for two days. The following morning, a Saturday, his wife and son see him disappear—for four days. So begins this ambitious tale of time travel, in which Scott and his son, Lyle—who in Scott’s perception grows in a matter of days from a 7-year-old boy to an aging theoretical physicist, and who is finally transformed into an “artificial sentient construct”—hurtle 24 hours at a time over exponentially increasing gaps in history toward the heat death of the universe. At first, the story focuses on Scott’s bewilderment with what’s happening to him, especially its destruction of his family grouping and his concern that attempts to save him will take over Lyle’s life. Eventually, it turns into a speed run through a variety of science fiction tropes, as Scott slips forward from technological utopias to post-apocalyptic dystopias; he sometimes drops into a war; sometimes he’s greeted by people—or intelligences—who anticipate his arrival and, as in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, serve as a guide to their own society. The constraints of the premise, in which Scott lives only one day in each time frame before slipping to the next, ultimately leave him with little agency other than to accept his fate, which is simply to experience the unfolding and, finally, unceasing of life over eons. That experience, though wide-ranging, is limited, given the brevity of his encounter with each future.

Provocative and unsettling, with both the scope and the constraints of an SF serial.