By and copyright of Owen Quinn
Virtually every sci-fi show has done a body swap episode.
With the Time Warriors, I try to make every story as original as possible without falling into old tropes. And if you do a story which has been done so many times before, then how could I make it different?
So for To Meet In Dreams, I wanted something different than an alien device or teleport accident. I couldn’t really see the benefit or story if any of the Time Warriors switched bodies with each other.
I was familair with the concept of astral travelling so thought that maybe that would be a good device with which to make the body swap happen. It was always going to Jacke who was having a hard time after her split with Stephen at the climax of the Wolves of Chernobyl & Other Stories. But why would someone be swapping bodies?
I look around at the world where kids literally live in their phones and are losing the art of handwriting and painting and drawing with the advent of AI. One area we avoid is the future where Varran is afraid to go for fear of finding out something that could affect the present day. So I decided that we should see a possible future leading to the immortal line,
“Open your mouth and I’ll rip your balls off!”
That should really be a T-shirt.
But I still needed a new slant on body swap. It’s very easy to shoehorn characters into stories like a certain ethnicity or disabled etc but for this one, it was an ideal opportunity to have a little person as the bad guy who isn’t really a bad guy at all. It allowed me to explore the fact he gets to experience the world as a normal person while Jacke learns how hard it is to be disabled, even in the future.
Professor Eric Talman is a genius in his era, married with a husband, but he is desperate to bring back the art of handwriting and painting which has virtually all died out. And he has pinpointed the era where it all went wrong and he wants to change that. What do you do when you discover you have swapped bodies with a time traveller whose binman is desperate for a date.
It was time for Jacke to get over Stephen and the introduction of Deano the Muay Thai binman feels right for Jacke and the series as a whole.
But unable to reverse Talman’s body swap, will Jacke be trapped in a little person’s body in the future with no help from Tyran’s descendants? What will this mean for Talman’s husband, Mervin? What does it mean for their marriage?
To Meet In Dreams is a chance to revisit an old very used scenario through new eyes. It is also a chance to break the no visits to the future rule and expand the Time Warriors mythos. In dark times, life has a way of pushing you in the direction you need as Jacke discovers.
Find out in When Angels Burn & Other Stories now available in paperback and kindle on Amazon.
The Time Warriors and Beyond 