Some great news about the EARTHLOOP TRILOGY
my upcoming time travel extravaganza
Hello!
You might have heard of Earthloop before. Half of you signed up to this newsletter just so you could grab a free excerpt, but for the rest, here it is.
The goal of this particular email is to give you new information about the trilogy, so don’t worry, I won’t be repeating what you know from the free sample. This is a look at the project progress and the ideas I have had to bring the timelines together.
(Some of you are new subscribers this week too. I didn’t have a welcome email ready, so I will link one of my stories at the end of this email)
THE EARTHLOOP TRILOGY
The Earthloop Trilogy is a story split into three novels, each focusing on a new time loop. It’s not a multiverse like Who Built The Humans? was, it’s a single reality where actions in the future can influence actions in the past. Think Netflix’s DARK mixed with THE X-FILES with a little bit of 1950s Sci-Fi thrown in.
It was featured on the official Manchester ComicCon leaflet.
It’s recently launched on Kickstarter, and it’s already 34% funded.
Each book follows a new incarnation of Lax Morales as its central thread, with the climax being a knot in time, and a trap set for an alien called Fixer.
I don’t want to spoil it all, so here’s a short list of things you can expect.
Time travel, aliens, reincarnation, sentient spaceships, cloning, psychics, shadowy government agencies, reverse engineering, time-loop relationships between a man and a shapeshifting interdimensional crab, some more time travel, nanotech, and a tiny ‘engineerbug’ who rides a tabby cat into battle against some grey aliens, and obviously wins.
If you read this email carefully, you’ll find some sneaky foreshadowing for the plot.
The story itself starts out pretty simple, but soon spirals as lies are uncovered by our protagonists.
In THE FURUKAWA PARADOX, Nori Furukawa goes from student to professor, all the while shadowed by strange coincidences. As a student he is a keen viewer of various conspiracy shows, and is fascinated with the Betty Bines alien abduction case, as well as old videos of the enigmatic TV psychic Lax Morales, founder of a strange new religion called Virtualism.
Elsewhere, Lax Morales has abandoned his work, choosing to hide from the world in Swamphenge, where it all began. One night in 2010, he is almost caught trying to remove the copper plaque from the Betty Bines memorial fountain by a young Darlene, Krystal, and Quinton, local teenagers with a habit of trespassing on government property.
What’s behind the plaque?
This is the part where I try to condense the three novels inside my head into a catchy newsletter.
Back in the UK, Nori meets an older woman at a philosophy lecture who tells him not to give up on his dream of time travel. Days later, a letter arrives for Nori from Bill Bines (brother of alien abductee Betty Bines) which contains partial instructions for a working ‘time gate’. It’s up to Nori to fill in the missing pieces with his own innovations, leading to a time machine that he eventually unveils in 2016 in a lecture attended by a handful of students and journalists.
That morning, Nori notices half of the cactus in his office has been eaten. He ignores it, taking his student Brigid Pearson with him to show her the machine. He activates it and a tall woman called Nefertari steps out, proclaiming to be from the future, claiming she knows when Nori dies: Today.
And then it gets weird. It turns out that this psychic time travelling assassin has the battery for the time machine inside her. She’s a cyborg whose brain is surrounded by a ‘brain spider’ But why? And did she really come from the future?
Earlier in the timeline, Bill Bines falls in love with Lax Morales and it gets about as complicated as you imagine it might. Bill and Lax make an interesting team, and go on their own detective adventures as everything else is going on. This bit gets quite dark comedy, which I am loving writing. Bill has to talk Lax out of killing people once a week, if not more.
These are my social media promotion images. When viewed on instagram, nine of them showcase the timelines in the books and hint at some foreshadowing.
In book two, THE SWAMPHENGE INCIDENT, our time travelling friends start picking apart the conspiracies that buried the spaceships, the alien abductions, and all the other goings on.
In 2016, a teenage milkshake bar waitress called Darlene watches as the city across from Swamphenge is showered in violent light. Thinking her sister Krystal is dead, Darlene blames Lax Morales for convincing her to move there to pursue her dreams of becoming an actress.
Darlene begins hunting Lax, luring him out into the swamps where she plans to kill him. Across the water, several strange men with grey faces watch eagerly, nudging the timeline into the correct position.
Behind the trees, Nefertari stands with a younger Lax Morales. By observing his own death, it will be made inevitable.
In the 1950s, a starship crashes to Earth. Brigid and Nori meet a towering arthropod called ‘Lahkx’ and soon work out he will grow up to become Lax Morales. They drive through the desert, using Lax’s night vision to hide without making their position clear. Later, Lax takes a chunk out of a cactus as Nori tries to work out what is going on.
Nori accidentally mentions Virtualism to Lax, and Lax adopts the term.
the Swamphenge incident begins with the violent death of a high ranking officer in the Swamphenge research facility. But it isn’t aliens doing the killing this time. It isn’t Brigid either.
Elsewhen, an older Brigid starts plotting her escape from the past. Using an unusual feature of Lax’s alien biology, she realises she can sleep through entire decades to re-emerge in the 21st century. But once this is done it cannot be reversed, the time-gates were designed with a self-destruct mechanism.
Nori’s original time gate has already destroyed the physics building in which it was housed.
And there is another buried underneath the city north of Swamphenge…
Fixer spends most of her time dressed up as a human, but for social media it makes more sense to show her alien form.
In the third book, THE PLANET THIEVES, there are a few big reveals I can’t spoil for you.
One thing I can say is that Lax Morales finally bumps into himself, whilst bumping into himself, and they have a hilarious (but universe-altering) argument over pancakes. Whilst Lax3 is reminiscing and planning the explosive end to his schemes, Lax2 is too drunk to care, and Lax1 is sombre and reflective (he has just watched his own demise, after all).
Just outside the diner, an aging Nori comes to terms with his own mortality.
Brigid finally goes home the long way round, visiting her mum one last time.
Darlene finds closure for Krystal.
Bill Bines finds out the truth about his sister.
I’m pitching this whole thing to Netflix, by the way.
I have designed each chapter so it is easy to transfer onto screen. Chapter breaks are inserted where they are needed, not arbitrarily, leading to a trilogy that has deep lore and worldbuilding, but is still a smooth read.
I hope that was convincing. The Kickstarter is a lot of fun. It starts with a low tier just for the first eBook, and gradually increases all the way to all three signed paperbacks, your name in a story, some pin badges, merch, and potentially a live reading in your living room.
Because I like ridiculous goals. They keep me going.
I funded the creation of WBTH with big goals. Two brilliant guys got their names in that book, hidden as vital pieces of technology in my ever-expanding multiverse of weirdness. Thanks for being here, AJ and ‘Astra’ ;)
If you want to check out the tiers, click here.
The Kickstarter ends on the 12th September, but I think some timezones are ahead of me here in the UK. So let’s say the 10th.
At the time of writing (12/08/2022), that gives us 30 days to fund it.
And if you wouldn’t mind sharing it, that would be fantastic.
I'd totally stream a Netflix series based on these stories. The world you built here sounds fascinating.