12:00 AM, 10-MAY-07

Rover Sojourns In Ripper Era

SF author Jana G. Oliver, whose novel Sojourn is a finalist for this year's Compton Crook Award for best first novel, told SCI FI Wire that the book came from two concepts she wanted to explore: the idea of personal legacy and the moral dilemma inherent in time travel. "We all want to leave some bit of us behind, our personal legacy, to prove to the world we were here and we mattered," Oliver said in an interview. "Then there was the time-travel dilemma. Traveling through time sounds like a kick, ... but with every new technology comes the responsibility to use it wisely. Once you arrive in the past, would you feel tempted to meddle with history in an effort to fix things? I've asked a number of people that very question, and most often the answer is 'Yes! '"

In the novel, time travel is a reality, and the past has been opened for academic research, Oliver said. "To ride herd on these wandering professors, there are people like Jacynda Lassiter, a Time Rover," she said. "Cynda, as she's called, is nearing the end of her career, the brain-altering effects of time travel causing increasingly vivid hallucinations. Sent to 1888 to retrieve a missing researcher, she finds herself in the midst of the Jack the Ripper murders. When a fellow Time Rover is murdered and her employer goes bankrupt, stranding her in a time period she loathes, Cynda allies with a mysterious group of shapeshifters known as Transitives."

Cynda is skeptical of authority and has been diagnosed with Adrenalin Reactive Disorder, Oliver said. "She's an adrenalin junkie by 21st-century standards," she said. "One of the few jobs she's allowed to pursue is time travel. She's very good at what she does, but it comes at a tremendous physical and emotional cost. ... To put it simply: Cynda's got issues. Unfortunately, her latest assignment will only complicate those issues and put her right in the middle of a war between the Transitives and the 2057 power brokers keen to alter history for their own ends. She has to trust someone, and that trust is invested in the form of two Victorian shapeshifters: Dr. Alastair Montrose and Detective Sergeant Jonathon Keats of Scotland Yard. They're a most improbable team."

Oliver said one of the major hurdles in writing Sojourn was creating a different kind of shapeshifter. "There are a lot of books with werewolves, wererats and were-everythings; I wanted something unique," she said. "So I began to think along the lines of a type of shifter that didn't change form, but altered how you perceived them. Since Transitives can look like anyone they choose, you never know who you're dealing with. It also meant I had to come up with how these shifters came to be, what their society was like and how they interacted with the Opaques, as they derisively call us."

The second book in the series, Virtual Evil, will be published in October by Dragon Moon Press. ?John Joseph Adams

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