Time on My Hands: A Novel Book

Gabriel Prince has time on his hands when his lady-love deserts him, so he's a sucker for the Faustian bargain offered by obsessive physicist Hudnut. Prince can time-travel to 1938 and get rich with foreknowledge of winning horses--provided he rearranges history to spare the US the evils of Ronald Reagan's presidency. An extra temptation is a photograph of Hudnut's beautiful cousin Lorna, who died in a 1938 disaster. Prince duly flashes back to the nostalgically but plausibly evoked past, saves and then falls in love with Lorna and breaks into Hollywood with his Western script Four O'Clock-- which is secretly plagiarised from the 1952 classic High Noon. (The studio can't see why he wants all those shots of clocks.) His master plan is to become a movie mogul and make exasperatingly goofy young actor "Dutch" Reagan a major star who'll have no reason to enter politics. Everything goes awry, of course. Prince's mere presence leads to Reagan's accidental death, causing a break-up with Lorna. Time-tampering is like film editing, with seamless jump-cuts to a rewritten future, and, ironically, the edited America is just as Hudnut dreamt. But Prince won't be satisfied until he has Lorna too--which means saving Reagan. He goes back again. And again. A witty, poignant and tragicomic SF love story, illustrated with evocative old photographs. --David LangfordRead More