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K. A. Bedford recently had a talk with us about his new, upcoming novel Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait, a novel about time travel, murder, and intrigue. It is set to be released August 2008. Chapter one can be downloaded here.

1. Your new book, Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait, deals with time travel. What fascinates you regarding time-travel?

Pretty much everything, actually. There's the question of causality, first and foremost. What happens to the sequence of events if you go back and change something? Do things change in the future? Is it even possible to change events in the past? Do established historical events have a sort of change-resisting inertia to them, or are they as malleable as we find things to be in the present? But if you do change things in the past, do the changes that arise from that carry on and change everything, or do the changes peter out, leaving the longer-term future unchanged? There are a great many "theories" in different time travel stories of what happens with respect to past changes: there's the idea that even the tiniest changes in the deep past can wind up changing everything in the future; then there's the idea that there is only one fixed timeline, and you can only change things to the extent that those events actually did happen (classic example: you go back to prevent the JFK assassination, only it turns out that you inadvertently *cause* the assassination); and many many more. For my book, I went with the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics, which posits the idea that every time you make a decision or a choice or something happens generally, reality forks in such a way that every possible decision/possibility occurs, each in its own timeline, or universe. The consequence of this is that you end up with an unthinkably vast profusion of different timelines sprouting into existence all the time. It's hugely counter-intuitive, and there's no reliable way to test the idea (so it's pretty well unscientific, and is more an intriguing philosophical notion), but it means you can have a time travel story in which the past is changeable, the future can turn out differently, etc, depending on which timeline you're in.

In any case, I've always loved time travel stories, and I'm still a sucker for them today. I've been wanting to write a time travel story of my own for years, and have many failed attempts in the drawer. This time I took the time early on and thrashed out how it all might work. I made a lot of work for myself by including a murder mystery element. The problem with having such an element is that if people have time machines the way they have iPods, it means that investigating murders should get a lot easier, in that all the investigator has to do is backtrack along the victim's timeline until he finds the killer. This meant that I had to find a way for my killer to make use of time travel as well to make it more difficult for the coppers. This led to how to use a time machine to hide or dispose of a dead body, and from that all manner of weirdness followed.

2. Australian Science Fiction has been slowly gaining momentum. What do you think is the driving push behind the rise in Australian Science Fiction?

I really don't know a lot about the Australian science fiction scene, other than that it's huge, and lively, with countless short story writers and a growing number of novelists — as well as a surprising number of small press outfits providing good, paying markets for all this feverish activity. There is a huge convention scene here these days, with several different cons happening just here in Perth each year, let alone the rest of the country. The main Perth convention, Swancon, has now been going more than 30 years. I think what started this golden age of SF activity in Australia was our first Worldcon, Aussiecon, in 1975. Much of what is happening now can be traced back to that event, to the best of my knowledge, in that an awful lot of people who had long been interested in sf started to find each other, build communities, write and read fanzines, and so on. The other great influence, I suspect, has been the advent of the Internet over the past 15 years.

3. All of your other novels tend to side with more Futuristic aspects of society (mainly robots), how come you had a shift in perspective with Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait and why is it set only a few decades away?

As well as the three published books in the "Orbital Burn" universe, there were others that didn't work out, and I simply reached a point where I was fed up with that setting. I wanted to do something different, and then I had this idea for a time travel story set right here in Perth, in the near-future. Near-future sf is a risky thing, because so much of the prediction side of things falls out of date very quickly. It just felt like a fresh challenge, an experiment, something interesting to try. Juxtaposing a very familiar near-future Perth against the awesomely vast, cold and terrifying emptiness at the End of Time seemed like a fun idea. I've long admired Stephen Baxter's work, notably his Xeelee stories, with their extraordinary sense of scale and distance and time, and thought it would be fun to try some of that, too. Whether it's worked or not, I have no idea.

4. Are people going to have problems understanding some of the Australian slang that is present throughout your novel? Or do you think that they will just figure out what it all means?

I have always thought people would just figure out what I'm on about from context. People who read sf are not stupid, and generally are prepared to put in some work to enjoy a decent book. As well, there is also the fact that we here in Australia have been dealing with books chock full of American and British slang for years without too much trouble, and yes, there is a very great deal of American and British slang, even in non-genre books. There's also the example of Anthony Burgess' A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, a book bursting at the seams with an idiomatic language partly of the author's devising, and partly based on the Russian language. That was a very challenging book to read, and I was very glad the edition I read had a glossary in the back. Then there's Iain M Banks' novel FEERSUM ENDJINN, much of which is written from the first-person perspective of a character who is, if not illiterate, then getting by on a very phonetic and slang-based use of language. It was a tough read, but worthwhile in the end, as the key to the book's mystery is revealed in the very last line.

It was wonderful having the opportunity to write a book set in Australia, indeed right here in Perth, using local slang, speech rhythms, ideas and attitudes. In my earlier books, all my protagonists were Australian to some degree (even though Australia, as a nation, along with the rest of the world, no longer existed), but this time everyone's a local, they're recognizable. It feels like a real Australian novel. Naturally, I'd prefer my spelling and usage had remained intact, rather than changed to US spelling and usage. That has always bothered me. For instance, I'll never get used to seeing a word like "arse" changed to "ass", "Mum" to "Mom", and all the rest of it. I expect Australians who read the book will find it a strangely discordant experience, like a movie that's been dubbed into another language. I'm hoping they'll forgive this and look past such things and see the book I wrote.