From the author:
One man, one planet, one destiny
William Hatchett’s new novel, The Chosen, is a cosmic romp through space and time This is science fiction with a difference. The time machine in Hatchett’s novel is decorated with Willam Morris wallpaper and equipped with a drinks cabinets furnished with brandy and luxury cigarettes.
The ornate machine is the key to a cosmic journey that takes the reader from sleepy rural Kent, back to Roman-occupied Britain and then to the future, where the fate of the human race is to be decided.
In this novel you will meet Frederick Frater, a shy book-seller, thrust by circumstances into an extraordinary adventure and his companion, Private Alfred Thomas of the Middlesex Regiment. You will also meet Lara Sidgwick, an auburn-haired pre-Raphaelite beauty, and her father, Dr Jan Sidgwick. Sidgwick is a Polish emigre, a genius and inventor of ‘restorative and invigorating’ liver pills. He is an idealist who seeks to change the world.
You will visit the bloody trenches of the First World War at the height of the Battle of the Somme and the foggy streets of Victorian Whitechapel, where you will discover the true identity of Jack the Ripper. You will travel to first century AD and rub shoulders with Caractus, a leader of the Ancient Britons and his Arch Druid, Brandon.
You will also experience a delightful future, in which delicate flying machines whir over chalk cliffs of southern England and an airship, the Karina, leaves for Bombay each week from a mooring mast near Bexhill-on-Sea.
On the way, you will have encounters with Karl Marx, William Morris, Joseph Stalin and Timothy Leary and the coquettish music hall star, Marie Lloyd.
The novel blends real and fiction characters into a historical phantasmagoria, which is part steampunk, part alternate history. It’s a gripping adventure but it has some serious themes.
Author William Hatchett is an environmental journalist. He has constructed here a utopian novel in the tradition of Thomas More and William Morris, as he speculates on the possible futures of our planet. The book, which has ontological themes, attempts to break down the artificial polarity between science and magic, the rational and the irrational, arguing that we should be friends with both. It maintains that: ‘Science and magic are not opposites, they are complementary, like the two sides of a coin. Science is magic; it is the magic that we understand.’
William Hatchet, author, was born in 1958. He is the editor of a professional magazine Environmental Health News. He lives in London and has a daughter and two delightful grandsons. He has been named housing journalist of the year, in 1998, and editor of the year, in 2012. His main hobbies are messing around with canoes and guitars. He is the author of the Dragon Rising trilogy and has also published books of non-fiction and poetry. The Chosen is his fourth novel. He is available for interview.
Author’s website http://www.willliamhatchett.com/
Also see a review at Sci Fi Pulse.
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