that time passes more quickly for the old than for the young. An hour to a five-year-old is a long time, a week is beyond comprehension. To an old person, an hour is nothing. As a friend of mine in his eighties said to me, “These days it seems like it’s breakfast every fifteen minutes.”
The rate at which time passes can be different for different people. Suppose that it could be greatly different — by a factor of thousands or millions. One person’s second could be another person’s whole day. Years would flash past for me while you were eating lunch.
And suppose that those different subjective rates could be scientifically controlled.
That thought lies at the heart of Between the Strokes of Night, and it formed the original idea for the book. Of course, an idea is not a plot, and in the course of developing that plot I began to read more about time, in both science and literature. It did not take me long to confirm that time is one of humanity’s great obsessions. Our everyday speech and our poetry is full of phrases that express on the one hand time’s immutable nature, and on the other hand our wishful thinking that we could somehow control the passage of time: “Time is money.”
“O, call back yesterday, bid time return.”
“Tempus fugit.” — Time flies.
“But at my back I always hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” “The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.”
“We’ll make up for lost time.”
“Time and tide wait for no man.”
“Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make perpetual day, or let this hour be but a year, a month, a week, a natural day…”
“But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool, and time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop.”
These examples can be multiplied, in the great works of every language and in every era. Time and mortality go hand in hand, and we cannot think of one without being aware of the other.
Will this book survive, long enough to be read when time has no meaning for me personally? When I wrote it I would have said no, but here we are with a new edition seventeen years after the first one.
In any case, we live in the present, and really only in the present. I hope that Between the Strokes of Night is exciting to read now, because it was great fun to write. The objective control of subjective time provides enormous scope to a science fiction author. How often can a book begin near to the present day, and range on through the farthest reaches of time and space — and keep the same characters throughout?
— Charles Sheffield
2002
