{"id":343,"date":"2015-01-03T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2015-01-03T17:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/?p=343"},"modified":"2014-12-23T21:47:26","modified_gmt":"2014-12-24T02:47:26","slug":"my-favorite-book-the-copper-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/2015\/01\/03\/my-favorite-book-the-copper-room\/","title":{"rendered":"My Favorite Book: The Copper Room"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>
The Copper Room<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My wife is a workaholic.\u00a0 She always schedules more than a reasonable person can accomplish. So one idle science-fictiony thought caught in her brain and she mentioned it over and over for years — the idea of a room where you could go inside and time outside would stop.\u00a0 It\u2019s a place where you could catch a nap and go back to the world ready to tackle your tasks.<\/p>\n

Canton, Missouri, a little college town on the side of the Mississippi River seemed the right place for this story. Now I needed a copper room.<\/p>\n

Now, there really are copper rooms.\u00a0 It\u2019s a metal cage where outside electrical influences are kept out. I\u2019ve seen them in laboratories where delicate instruments are calibrated. But this time I wanted a full-sized room where Jereomy\u2019s inventor uncle built his room with an adjustable time rate.<\/p>\n

The name \u2018Jereomy\u2019 is the result of my habit of collecting names.\u00a0 Dozens of people I meet, clerks, restaurant waitresses, and people I meet randomly, especially those with name-tags, get asked about their name.\u00a0 I ask what the name means, how it\u2019s spelled, and what ethnicity it came from.\u00a0 I keep a note of interesting names and occasionally one of these appears in my stories.<\/p>\n

Jereomy and his girlfriend Lil get caught up in the room, jumping through the future with no way to get back to their own time. It was an interesting problem. Where do you stop? Civilizations rise and fall and nobody can predict what will happen in the future.\u00a0 Do you accept the current status, with all it\u2019s faults, or close the door and jump another hundred years into the future and hope it\u2019s better.<\/p>\n

I had a lot of fun, taking one simple location, Canton on the river and seeing it progress through collapse and rebuilding.\u00a0 I also had the opportunity to toy with genetic modification problems.\u00a0 Might we have genetic-Chernobyl\u2019s, where the area is contaminated with chemicals that trigger gene shifting where animals could leech code from one species to another?\u00a0 And what might the result of that be to the human race?<\/p>\n

As is often the case, I \u2018invent\u2019 a gadget and give it limits.\u00a0 Then it\u2019s up to my characters to solve the problem it creates.\u00a0 Jereomy and Lil had a particularly tough time of it, and I\u2019m proud of the way they handled it.<\/p>\n

So, with one-way time travel and a new future of the human race, The Cooper Room is my favorite.<\/p>\n

More about The Copper Room<\/a><\/p>\n

Next up — My Favorite Book: Breaking Anchor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My wife is a workaholic.\u00a0 She always schedules more than a reasonable person can accomplish. So one idle science-fictiony thought caught in her brain and she mentioned it over and over for years — the idea of a room where you could go inside and time outside would stop.\u00a0 It\u2019s a place where you could… Continue reading My Favorite Book: The Copper Room<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[11,5],"tags":[26,12,8],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4t90x-5x","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions\/344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}