KRIS ASHTON

If a movie is big on special effects and small on storyline, it is often dismissed with the quip, “The screenplay must have been scribbled on the back of a beer coaster.” Believe it or not, that is how ‘Slower than the Speed of Light’ was conceived.

 

One night, while stumbling home drunk from my local club (which would have made me 18 or 19), I was pondering how quickly time seemed to pass compared to when I was a child. A visual explanation for this phenomenon appeared in my head, and when I got to my bedroom I scribbled it down on a cardboard coaster I had on my desk for some reason.

 

When I woke the next morning, I looked at the diagram and was surprised to see it still made sense. It suggested that in ‘present perception’ time doesn’t seem to pass any faster, but when we look back – our ‘past perception’ – time is condensed and seems in retrospect to have passed quickly.

 

That coaster remained on my desk for years. I loved the concept, but hadn’t the faintest idea how to turn it into a story. When I did, a long while later, it was titled ‘Taking the Edge Off’ and was pretty much the same as ‘Slower Than the Speed of Light’ in terms of events, but was philosophical rather than hard sci-fi. Editors and slush readers seemed to appreciate the concept, but the story as a whole was wishy-washy and unfocused.

 

I retired it for many years. Then, in 2017, I watched a series of lectures by Neil deGrasse Tyson on Netflix. One of them was about time and its relationship to the speed of light, and when the episode concluded I discovered I now had a solid scientific basis for my airy-fairy philosophical concept. If travelling at the speed of light makes time pass more slowly, what would happen to our perception if the speed of light itself were to slow?

 

The narrator also changed, from a social worker to the rather cynical journalist who sets out to find a story and gets more than he bargained for.