Sunday, February 2, 2025

About the Book

Book: Echo Nova

Author: Clint Hall

Genre: YA Science Fiction

Release date: January 14, 2024

Dash Keane is about to become the biggest star in history.

As a poor teenager living in the Dregs, Dash Keane can only escape his dismal reality by competing in illegal rooftop races and staying up late to watch the timenet with his younger brother.

When there is an opportunity to participate in a competition set thousands of years in the past, he uses his rooftop racer skills to catch the eye of Mr. Myrtrym, head of entertainment for the massive Dominus Corporation.

It is the chance of a lifetime when Dominus Corp. hires Dash to be a timestar—the focus of his own series in which he must survive some of the most dangerous periods in history, including the Cretaceous period, feudal Japan, the Wild West, and the Golden Age of Piracy. But when empathy for the people of the past conflicts with the desires of his new employer, he must decide whether the price of fame is worth it, a decision that may cost him everything.

Click here to get your copy!

About the Author

Clint Hall is a storyteller, speaker, and podcast host. He has been writing stories since middle school, where he spent most of his time in class creating comic books. (Fortunately, his teacher not only allowed it; she bought every issue.) Known for instilling a sense of hope, wonder, and adventure, Clint is the author of Steal Fire from the Gods (finalist for several awards), and has been published across multiple anthologies and magazines. Find him at ClintHall.com or “The Experience: Conversations with Creatives” podcast, available on all major platforms.

More from Clint

Time is our playground

What happens when the past becomes the ultimate adventure?

If we could travel back in time, but nothing we did in the past affected the present, would we still consider the past to be “real”?

And if not, how would that “un-realness” impact the way we treated the past and, more importantly, the people who inhabited it? Would they still have fundamental human rights? Would they be protected by laws? Or would we see them as another resource to be exploited?

These are the driving questions behind Echo Nova, though I didn’t have these themes in mind when I started writing the book. I just wanted to write a fast-paced, fun story about a young hero going on adventures through time.

But as I began world-building and plotting, I faced the same issue as so many sci-fi writers before me. In time travel stories, the people going into the past often need to be careful not to make changes that would alter the future. Say the wrong thing to the wrong person in the past, and you might cause a ripple effect of changes that would prevent you from ever being born!

Of course, the problem of being unable to change anything can make for an exciting story with high stakes and lots of tension. The hero must walk a proverbial tightrope to achieve a difficult mission while altering as little of the timeline as possible.

But what if that wasn’t the case? What if the ripples of change in the timestream moved at the same speed as time itself, meaning that if we did alter something in the past, those changes never caught up to us?

For example, if we went back to 2004 and chopped down a tree, it would take 20 years for that “new” reality with the missing tree to reach 2024. But by then, we in the “present” will have moved forward 20 years to 2044, and we’d still have our tree.

If the present is unaffected, the past could become our playground. We could do whatever we wanted.

While that sounds great at first, as I developed the story, I realized that there could also be dire consequences, both in the past and the present.

In Echo Nova, the world’s governments have decreed that because changes to the past don’t impact the present, the past is not “real” but only residual energy and not under the protection of nations and their laws. Corporations can purchase past periods, mining them for valuable resources and owning the people of the past—called “echoes”—like property.

Time travel has also become a pastime of the wealthy. If you have enough money, you can travel back in time to go on a dinosaur safari, watch gladiators battle in the Colosseum, or attend a feast hosted by Cleopatra.

For everyone else, the past is mainly experienced through broadcasts operated by these corporations. These broadcasts feature people called “timestars” who go on adventures in the past to entertain people in the present.

But exploiting humans for our own personal gain and entertainment has terrible consequences, even for those who may claim that they’re “only watching.” When we start to view people as anything other than individuals with rights, flaws, intrinsic value, and everything else that makes us human, the damage goes both ways – hurting those who have been dehumanized as well as those who are guilty of dehumanizing, even if they did so passively.

For instance, while working on this book, I watched the O.J. Simpson documentary and was struck by how people behaved during the infamous Bronco chase. Here was someone accused of a heinous crime, fleeing police while threatening to end his own life, and people responded by flocking to the streets and overpasses to watch. They held up homemade signs while laughing, waving, and smiling for the multitude of news cameras. This wasn’t real life to them. It was part of the show.

As an author, it’s hypocritical for me to be overly critical of entertainment. Further, I believe there is incredible value in well-told stories, both real and fictional, across all mediums. And sometimes, I’ll even admit that I need to turn my brain off and watch something relatively mindless for an hour or so.

But if we’re not careful, we can lose pieces of ourselves on the altar of entertainment.

Echo Nova explores these questions, as well as our culture’s relentless obsession with fame and the dark places in which we can find ourselves in our pursuit of it.

If that all sounds a bit heavy, the book also features pirates, gunslingers, and temporally displaced sea dinosaurs.

After all, sometimes you just need to read something fun.