Greetings ALL!

I am delighted to tell you that we are working with several publishing companies right now! They have lots of ideas for how we can help spread the word about their upcoming releases.

One of those ideas is being apart of book blog tours.

We’ve done this in the past, with great success.

So, welcome to the first blog tour post for Titan Books, a feature written by the authors of Netherspace.

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Contact with alien species was made forty years ago, but communication turned out to be impossible. There is only trade in technology, which allows humans to colonise the stars, but at a heavy cost: alien netherspace drives are exchanged for live humans.  When a group of colonists are captured by a group of Cancri aliens, a human mission is sent to negotiate their release. But how can you negotiate when you don’t know what your target wants?

The Nature of Spacetime.

     Or is it Space Time? Or Timespace? Does it actually exist? Where can I buy some?
It’s not usually understood by the general public but physics and philosophy are inextricably entwined. Both deal with the nature of reality and how we can best understand it. If anything, philosophy asks the more basic or fundamental questions, has done for many thousands of years and especially about time.
For philosophers the questions are about what is. Whereas physicists are concerned with measuring it. Whatever it is.
Philosophy is limited by what the human mind can conceive.
Physics is limited by what humans can perceive.
Theoretical physics attempts to combine the two, helped by mathematics so advanced it produces nose-bleeds in the unwary.
Here’s what the average Joe can understand. For Newton, time is
an ‘area’ or space where things happen and therefore allows measurement. You can go up or down, left or right, forward or back, and in the same way you can advance or retreat in time. For Kant and others time is not any sort of container; measurement is only local or arbitrary; and in that sense time does not exist as a separate dimension. Einstein tried to reconcile these theories and came up with Spacetime in which the common and universal system of measurement is the speed of light.
This defines spacetime as the fabric – don’t ask – of the universe and the medium through which gravitational waves move, as sound waves move through an atmosphere.
Re-enter the ancient theory of the aether, once banished by the Michaelson-Morley experiment that seemed to prove no unseen, undetectable medium exists throughout the universe. But now some say it’s the only way to explain gravity waves. This brings us messily back to Einstein, who explained that the effect of gravity is cause by matter warping the space/time continuum, defined as an area where things happen and events can be measured. We’re told the math is beautiful.
In Netherspace, like most authors, we avoid the whole question of Spacetime and faster than light travel. Instead we postulate a way of moving from A to B by taking a series of short cuts through the underlying continuum of the universe, which is not the same as spacetime. This is done using a ‘drive’ that humans do not understand.
Overall, the idea that humanity will never reach the stars is anathema. If the space-time continuum or Einstein’s equations appear to forbid this, both will have to go.

Andrew Lane is the author of twenty-nine books and multiple short stories, television scripts and audio dramas. He is perhaps best known for his Young Sherlock series, which have sold to 42 countries. He has also written three well-reviewed adult crime novels under a pseudonym, the first of which has been optioned as a US TV series. He is currently writing another series featuring Doyle’s Professor Challenger. He lives in Dorset.