Time and Tyde
Fast cars, sex, violence, drugs, and time travel
Time and Tyde is an 85,000-word literary fiction novel with strong sci-fi elements, looking for an agent and a publisher.
It is the story of Vince Demarco, an ordinary man whose life is destroyed when he meets, Tony Tyde a man who says he’s from the future.
Tony appears out of nowhere and soon comes to dominate the life of Vince, giving him a job, prestige, money, even a beautiful girlfriend. In return, all Tony wants is to study Vince. Unsettled by Tony’s strangeness and his intrusive interest in him, Vince nevertheless becomes entangled in Tony’s world.
Finally, a crisis, triggered by Tony’s typically careless use of ‘future’ technology, convinces Vince to break free, but it is too late. Tony confesses that his company is a sham, its investors gangsters, and its management humanoid robots. The money has been spent to finance Tony’s fixation with Vince and the investors want it back.
Knowing this is the end, Tony reveals all to Vince. He says he is a student from a future where Vince is revered as the world’s greatest writer. A ridiculous claim in Vince’s eyes. Tony is studying a little-known part of Vince’s life and that period is about to end, so he must leave. Vince can’t believe any of it. When the ‘investors’ turn up with guns demanding payment, and the police besiege the company offices, Vince heroically ‘saves’ his girlfriend, shooting the gangsters dead, only to see her – and the management team – appear to disintegrate, leaving no trace but dust.
Completely unhinged by it all, Vince is barely aware of his own trial for multiple murders. His story about Tony, his girlfriend and the managers cannot be corroborated – they have all vanished and, it is discovered, none of them has any past that can be traced. He is given life imprisonment.
Slowly, Vince adjusts to prison life but only by accepting that everything that happened to him was part of a long-term psychosis he has suffered. His prison psychologists helps him work through this by having Vince write about his life and he discovers he has quite a talent for it. His first book – this one, told in the first person – is soon to be published and he believes he has many more works inside him.
