Secondhand Daylight by Eugen Bacon and Andrew Hook

(John Hunt Publishing, 2023)

Reviewed by Steven French

This is not your usual time travel love story! It begins with Green, a ‘Pommy’ slacker, living in Melbourne in 1990 who goes to a bar, meets a woman—his ‘possible girl’—has a dance with her and then…finds himself flat on his backside outside, with no idea what just happened. At first, he thinks he’s ‘losing’ time, maybe through drink, or drugs or psychosis but the doctors assure him there’s nothing wrong. Then he starts missing appointments with the company-referred psychologist, as well as days at work, and his best mate’s weekend barbecue and other life-altering events until gradually Green comes to realise that he’s skipping forwards through time, whilst aging as normal. With each ‘time-slip’ becoming longer in duration, he faces the frightening prospect of losing not just friends and family and all the familiar landmarks of his life, but perhaps even passing beyond humanity itself. And so, this half of the book ends with Green in the care of the AI-led foundation that he funded, being told that someone called Zada has jumped back through his timeline, using the ‘Tesseract’, a McGuffin of a time-machine that she helped to develop, in an attempt to discover the reason for his time-slips and stop him vanishing into the future.

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Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.