Found Things #1

The Little Shop of Found Things

by Paula Brackston

• Release: October 2018
• Format: Novel
• Genre: Fantasy
• Audience: Adults
• Content: Definite Time Travel
• Original Language: English

Had she somehow crucially alterted her own present by changing Alice’s future? The thought that she might have started some terrible chain of events that she could not possibly have foreseen, nor known about, worried her more and more. It was only in the small hours of Wednesday night that an answer came to her that seemed to make sense. The present that she knew, the way things were in her time, could only have come about if she had traveled back to the past. Her finding the chatelaine, her answering Alice’s call for help, those things were necessary to shape the past and bring about the future as it was. She had to believe this. It did work. She was a part of how things had turned out, not an alternative version, but the one she was meant to live in. If she hadn’t gone back, hadn’t taken the decision to help Alice, well, that wouldhave resulted in a different future from the one she knew.

VARIANTS

2 English variants

TAGS(SPOILERS!)

Time Periods

• Circa AD 1600 to 1699: Alice’s time.
• Circa AD 2000 to 2099: presumed time period, August 2018.

Time Travel Methods

• Emotional Outcries through Time: Xanthe hears Alice calling to her.
• Wearable Time Object: Xanthe seems to need the silver chatelaine to travel.
• Wish Travel: And there is a mental aspect of Xanthe wishing on her locket that comes into play.

Themes

• Artist Paradox: A minor artist paradox when Alice describes the screen to Samuel who then creates it.
• Technology and Science from the Future: The torch (flashlight) that Xanthe gives to young Peter.
• Touched by a Time Traveler: Xanthe desperately wants to save Alice, although not entirely for altruistic reasons.

Fictional Tags

• Ghosts: Alice’s mother.

Groupings

• Found Things (story series): Found Things #1

TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY (SPOILERS!)

1. From The Little Shop of Found Things, Marlsborough, circa August 2018 ⋙ to Marlsborough and surrounding area, October 1605. Multiple round trips. Note: Xanthe.

INDEXER NOTES (SPOILERS!)

• Time Travel Model—Aghhhh! <a href='Paula_Brackston'>Paula Brackston</a> comes within a whisker of creating a <a href='tag-3302'>single static timeline</a>. Xanthe thinks to herself that the time she knew ”could only have come about if she <i>had</i> traveled back to the past. But alas, it all falls apart because she finds the crucial silver scizzors and needle case hidden in the present and then goes back to remove them from their hiding spot so that they are no longer hidden in that spot in her present. This was doubly sad because there was a slick solution that has her finding the items in the future and then taking them back to save Alice—and that solution would have created a cool static timeline.