Cover blurb
Control the past.
Save the future.
One morning, Dr. Sam Anderson wakes up to find that the woman he loves has been murdered.
For Sam, the horror is only beginning.
He and his daughter are accused of the crime. The evidence is ironclad. They will be convicted.
And so, to ensure his daughter goes free, Sam does what he must: he confesses.
But in the future, murderers aren’t sent to prison.
Thanks to a machine Sam helped invent, the world’s worst criminals are now sent to the past – approximately 200 million years into the past, to the dawn of the time of the dinosaurs – where they must live out their lives alone, in exile from the human race.
Sam accepts his fate.
But his daughter doesn’t.
Adeline Anderson has already lost her mother to a deadly, unfair disease. She can’t bear to lose her father as well.
So she sets out on a quest to prove him innocent. And to get him back. People around her insist that both are impossible tasks.
But Adeline doesn’t give up. She only works harder.
She soon learns that impossible tasks are her specialty. And that she is made of tougher stuff than she ever imagined.
As she peels back the layers of the mystery that tore her father from this world, Adeline finds more questions than answers. Everyone around her is hiding a secret. But which ones are connected to the murder that exiled her father?
That mystery stretches across the past, present, and future – and leads to a revelation that will change everything.
My thoughts
Lost in Time begins with protagonist Sam Anderson framed for murder. A few years before the start of the novel, Anderson was one of a team of scientists who discovered how to transport people and objects to the prehistoric past. There is little practical application for the technology as it is a one-way trip, but Sam and his partners devise a way to profit by allowing governments to transport death row prisoners to the deep past, where they will die of exposure or predation. It is a business decision that Sam comes to regret after he is convicted of the murder of a colleague he was romantically involved with. As punishment, Sam is transported to the late Triassic, where he will live out the rest of his life alone. In the meantime, his daughter Adeline sets out to prove Sam’s innocence and find a way to return her father to the present.
Lost in Time is billed as a science fiction mystery thriller in the vein of Michael Crichton, but in truth, it doesn’t have much mystery or thrills. Most of the mystery concerns who killed Sam’s lover, but the potential suspects are so poorly written and the time travel twists so ham-handedly choreographed that the revelations aren’t surprising nor interesting. The thriller part primarily comes from Sam’s experiences in the prehistoric past, but they make up only a tiny portion of the book and are not well-researched or written.
Lost in Time also fails as science fiction because, unlike the best sci-fi, author A.G. Riddle has put no thought into the societal implications of the technology that drives the plot. Sam and his partners make money by sending people back in time to die slow, terrible deaths. Sure, these are death row inmates—but as Sam’s experience shows—the U.S. justice system regularly convicts innocent people. And we later learn that Sam’s company is selling its services to India and China, which are certainly sending innocent political prisoners back in time. Sam would be a villain in most other science fiction stories, yet he, Adeline and their colleagues never reconsider their actions nor undergo character growth to become better people. (A bit of a spoiler: The lesson they learn from Sam’s experience is to start new businesses to make more money.) It is impossible to root for Sam, a guy who became rich by helping politicians rid themselves of inconvenient people, but the message here is that wealth equals moral clarity. For this and the reasons listed above, Lost in Time gets a thumbs down from me.
Trivia
A.G. Riddle is the author of several science fiction thrillers. Visit his website.
Prehistoric Pulp 