TOM LEARMONT #2, SCI-FI WRITER, GHOST WRITER, ILLOVO, JOHANNESBURG, GAUTENG

‘My three books are all about time, in them time becomes plastic, malleable, time becomes a thing which people can use as a weapon, time becomes a thing like where you can play a leapfrog war, you leap ahead in time, you get there earlier than the guy you are trying to destroy, you wait and when he pops out of sub metric space into metric space you zap him! That is where time becomes a theatre of war. Also, I love time. Everyone knows this story, about the two young fish. They are swimming along one morning, and they say ‘o what a lovely morning’. And they meet the old fish, he comes past and he says ‘hey, hallo boys’, he says ‘the water is nice this morning hey’. The young fish says, ‘what’s he mean by water?’. That’s like weird, like us saying - what do you mean by time? Is time granular, I don’t know. I think they worked out something like there is a Planck length for time, I’m not sure, don’t quote me on that. One of my characters says ‘time and space are granular they inhabit each others intestines, give them a shake and they come apart’. But this is all bullshit, all science-fiction. A real physicist would laugh, mind you I do have a physicist friend who read my books. He said ‘ja I enjoyed it’, he said ‘Jesus Tom you know, you come up with all this absolute nonsense and made up bullshit and it is so plausible!’. Which is a big compliment.’