Jonathan_Hennessey
Temporal Novice
Hey TTI folks. My name is Jonathan Hennessey, and I would like to introduce myself to everyone here. I am a published author of fiction and nonfiction, and among my current projects is an epic time travel comic book series called EPOCHALYPSE.
Epochalypse is published by Legendary Comics, the publishing arm of Legendary Pictures, which produced the Hollywood features Inception, Interstellar, The Dark Knight Batman series, The Hangover, and many more. See more here.
I will submit to you — and I know this is a tall order — that Epochalypse is a "take" on time travel that hasn't been done before, and I would love it if you would check it out!
Here's why I think the concept here is something fairly unique:
Typically in a time travel story, you have one person or a small group of people that are somehow empowered to travel through time, usually with some degree of control over where they end up. The characters make the transition to one or a number of places in history. They have an adventure, meditate on some Big Theme on the nature of history and/or fate, and then return... Often with the specter of paradoxes looming over their activities.
Here's how Epochalypse turns that paradigm inside-out.
In my story, some baffling event makes EVERYONE spontaneously time travel, with NO CONTROL over where they end up. 600 years of history — from the late 1500s to the late 2100s — essentially collapse into a single new timeline.
People, places, cultures, ideas, technologies, and religions that were never meant to coexist suddenly all stand side by side. And there is apparently no way to unscramble history. Paradoxes, therefore, do not seem to enter into the equation. The past, present, and future have been melded into one "New Now." The current actions of the survivors (there were relatively few of them) by all evidence are incapable of affecting what has come before or what will come after.
To take this a bit further, the chronological shakeup — dubbed "The Incongruity" — has left most of the Earth uninhabitable. That's because not only were people transported in time, but also animals, objects, bits of landscape, weather systems, and light and heat.
In the time zone where it was noon at the time of The Incongruity, so much light and heat from other parts of history migrated together that the very air exploded with the force of atomic bombs. The intensity of this destruction gradually diminishes towards the direction of astronomical midnight. There, the least amount of light and heat was present at the time of the collapse.
What's more, people, places, and things inhabiting the same space in multiple historical eras nearly all "overlapped." This destroyed them on impact. The overlapping phenomenon tended to occur on sites that witnessed a lot of change and activity over time — i.e., the urban cores of cities, and large-scale construction sites.
On the other hand, the overlapping phenomenon was LEAST likely to occur in places with little change or activity over time. For instance, deep wildernesses, small towns and farms, and within buildings that for one reason or another stood on the same spot for many centuries.
Therefore, the only people to survive were those who happened to be in areas of comparatively little historical activity along a roughly 100 mile-wide longitudinal strip where it was astronomical midnight when The Incongruity took place.
As the Epochalypse story opens, it is 14 years after this doomsday event. A mysterious enclave of scientists has emerged from the wreckage and imposed some minimal order. These scientists — "The Trustees" — claim to have apprehended the vague outlines of what caused The Incongruity. They say that they are at the beginning stages of learning how to undo it and find a method of sending everyone back to their "home times."
Bringing about this readjustment, however, will require a great deal of experimentation, labor, and potentially destructive trial and error.
Meanwhile, The Trustees have spread the word that everyone and everything from later than 1951 causes a kind of invisible "timeline turbulence." Timeline turbulence is a kind of chaotic time/space radiation that disrupts everything The Trustees are trying to do. It plays havoc with their instruments and shuts down their experiments. Therefore, under The Trustees' authority, all people ("exotemporals") and artifacts ("anachronisms") from 1952-2199 must be placed in permanent quarantine.
To enforce this law, The Trustees have constituted a highly-trained police force. The members of this police force are called Resynchronizers. Although they have special dispensation to use a limited amount of future technology in the line of duty, Resynchronizers must all themselves come from 1951 or earlier. And it is their job to find and neutralize everyone who does not.
The Resynchronizer hero of Epochalypse is Johannes Van Der Honing. Johannes, now 23, was a Dutch colonist boy who arrived in 1645 in what would later become New York State. Back in Amsterdam, his father had just been released from prison, and Johannes and his family were coming to New Holland to start a new life. Shortly after arriving, though, they ran aground of some hostile Indians and French bandits, and all except for Johannes were tortured and killed. Johannes believes that if he works to set history right again, he will be able to go back to 1645, warn his family, and save them all. For this reason he is dogged and feverish in the pursuit of his work.
Johannes' cohorts include Frank Herkimer, a U.S. Marine from the WWI era who later worked as a Prohibition Agent in the 1920s; Nyakwye Kamara, a former slave taken from Africa's Rice Coast (modern Sierra Leone) who was making his way to freedom in Canada in 1821; Paula Harridge, a brilliant but persecuted female U.S. War Department administrator from 1949; Leonard Rooke, a hard-bit elderly sheriff and one-time foreign service bodyguard under Grover Cleveland from 1886; Guillaume St. Eugene, a French monk/explorer and Indian trader from 1599; and Captain Eli Parsons, a stubborn pioneer militiaman and American Revolution veteran from 1788. Supporting characters from points all over history in between fill out the cast. We also get strange and troubling glimpses of future history from 2016-2199. All of these people, with starkly divergent outlooks, prejudices, beliefs, and agendas, all must somehow cooperate to return the timelines to the way they are supposed to be.
Epochalypse is currently being published as a monthly comic book that can be found in most better comic book stores or in multi-device (iPad, Kindle, laptop, smartphones) digital editions online through the digital comics service Comixology. You can also read an early, unpublished version of Issue #1 here on my website.
In July, Issues 1-6 will be collected into a trade paperback distributed through Random House and in all Barnes & Nobles and other bookstores.
I hope you will agree that this is some of the most bracing and original time travel fiction to come along in a while. I understand if comics and graphic novels just aren't your thing... But for the rest of you I would love to hear what you think of this twist on the usual concept and, of course, its execution.
If you blog or otherwise write and/or review this sort of thing please don't hesitate to get in touch, I can probably work out getting you something to look at for free.
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to checking out the rest of what's going on in this community!
All best,
Jonathan
Epochalypse is published by Legendary Comics, the publishing arm of Legendary Pictures, which produced the Hollywood features Inception, Interstellar, The Dark Knight Batman series, The Hangover, and many more. See more here.
I will submit to you — and I know this is a tall order — that Epochalypse is a "take" on time travel that hasn't been done before, and I would love it if you would check it out!
Here's why I think the concept here is something fairly unique:
Typically in a time travel story, you have one person or a small group of people that are somehow empowered to travel through time, usually with some degree of control over where they end up. The characters make the transition to one or a number of places in history. They have an adventure, meditate on some Big Theme on the nature of history and/or fate, and then return... Often with the specter of paradoxes looming over their activities.
Here's how Epochalypse turns that paradigm inside-out.
In my story, some baffling event makes EVERYONE spontaneously time travel, with NO CONTROL over where they end up. 600 years of history — from the late 1500s to the late 2100s — essentially collapse into a single new timeline.
People, places, cultures, ideas, technologies, and religions that were never meant to coexist suddenly all stand side by side. And there is apparently no way to unscramble history. Paradoxes, therefore, do not seem to enter into the equation. The past, present, and future have been melded into one "New Now." The current actions of the survivors (there were relatively few of them) by all evidence are incapable of affecting what has come before or what will come after.
To take this a bit further, the chronological shakeup — dubbed "The Incongruity" — has left most of the Earth uninhabitable. That's because not only were people transported in time, but also animals, objects, bits of landscape, weather systems, and light and heat.
In the time zone where it was noon at the time of The Incongruity, so much light and heat from other parts of history migrated together that the very air exploded with the force of atomic bombs. The intensity of this destruction gradually diminishes towards the direction of astronomical midnight. There, the least amount of light and heat was present at the time of the collapse.
What's more, people, places, and things inhabiting the same space in multiple historical eras nearly all "overlapped." This destroyed them on impact. The overlapping phenomenon tended to occur on sites that witnessed a lot of change and activity over time — i.e., the urban cores of cities, and large-scale construction sites.
On the other hand, the overlapping phenomenon was LEAST likely to occur in places with little change or activity over time. For instance, deep wildernesses, small towns and farms, and within buildings that for one reason or another stood on the same spot for many centuries.
Therefore, the only people to survive were those who happened to be in areas of comparatively little historical activity along a roughly 100 mile-wide longitudinal strip where it was astronomical midnight when The Incongruity took place.
As the Epochalypse story opens, it is 14 years after this doomsday event. A mysterious enclave of scientists has emerged from the wreckage and imposed some minimal order. These scientists — "The Trustees" — claim to have apprehended the vague outlines of what caused The Incongruity. They say that they are at the beginning stages of learning how to undo it and find a method of sending everyone back to their "home times."
Bringing about this readjustment, however, will require a great deal of experimentation, labor, and potentially destructive trial and error.
Meanwhile, The Trustees have spread the word that everyone and everything from later than 1951 causes a kind of invisible "timeline turbulence." Timeline turbulence is a kind of chaotic time/space radiation that disrupts everything The Trustees are trying to do. It plays havoc with their instruments and shuts down their experiments. Therefore, under The Trustees' authority, all people ("exotemporals") and artifacts ("anachronisms") from 1952-2199 must be placed in permanent quarantine.
To enforce this law, The Trustees have constituted a highly-trained police force. The members of this police force are called Resynchronizers. Although they have special dispensation to use a limited amount of future technology in the line of duty, Resynchronizers must all themselves come from 1951 or earlier. And it is their job to find and neutralize everyone who does not.
The Resynchronizer hero of Epochalypse is Johannes Van Der Honing. Johannes, now 23, was a Dutch colonist boy who arrived in 1645 in what would later become New York State. Back in Amsterdam, his father had just been released from prison, and Johannes and his family were coming to New Holland to start a new life. Shortly after arriving, though, they ran aground of some hostile Indians and French bandits, and all except for Johannes were tortured and killed. Johannes believes that if he works to set history right again, he will be able to go back to 1645, warn his family, and save them all. For this reason he is dogged and feverish in the pursuit of his work.
Johannes' cohorts include Frank Herkimer, a U.S. Marine from the WWI era who later worked as a Prohibition Agent in the 1920s; Nyakwye Kamara, a former slave taken from Africa's Rice Coast (modern Sierra Leone) who was making his way to freedom in Canada in 1821; Paula Harridge, a brilliant but persecuted female U.S. War Department administrator from 1949; Leonard Rooke, a hard-bit elderly sheriff and one-time foreign service bodyguard under Grover Cleveland from 1886; Guillaume St. Eugene, a French monk/explorer and Indian trader from 1599; and Captain Eli Parsons, a stubborn pioneer militiaman and American Revolution veteran from 1788. Supporting characters from points all over history in between fill out the cast. We also get strange and troubling glimpses of future history from 2016-2199. All of these people, with starkly divergent outlooks, prejudices, beliefs, and agendas, all must somehow cooperate to return the timelines to the way they are supposed to be.
Epochalypse is currently being published as a monthly comic book that can be found in most better comic book stores or in multi-device (iPad, Kindle, laptop, smartphones) digital editions online through the digital comics service Comixology. You can also read an early, unpublished version of Issue #1 here on my website.
In July, Issues 1-6 will be collected into a trade paperback distributed through Random House and in all Barnes & Nobles and other bookstores.
I hope you will agree that this is some of the most bracing and original time travel fiction to come along in a while. I understand if comics and graphic novels just aren't your thing... But for the rest of you I would love to hear what you think of this twist on the usual concept and, of course, its execution.
If you blog or otherwise write and/or review this sort of thing please don't hesitate to get in touch, I can probably work out getting you something to look at for free.
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to checking out the rest of what's going on in this community!
All best,
Jonathan
