Time travel hotel.
That’s it. That’s all I had. It struck me while wandering the McKittrick Hotel during a performance of Sleep No More. What if there was a hotel where you could walk in a room and find yourself five minutes ahead, or ten minutes behind?
I wrote it down and it sat there while I did other things—but I’m a sucker for a good time travel story. It kept calling to me. I thought it might be a good vehicle to write about the assumed power of money. Time travel and financial markets both being largely theoretical.
It kept calling to me even as I spent nearly a year working on a book that, ultimately, never came together.
So…
Welcome to the Paradox Hotel. My next book. Coming out at some point next year probably.
It’s set in a hotel connected to a timeport, in a world where time travel is a tourism industry for the super-rich—like what space travel is becoming today. It follows January, the house detective, who is trying to solve a murder where events are happening out of order.
It’s a locked-room puzzle box. It’s about class discrimination and the way billionaires are happy to let the world burn to get what they want.
But mostly it’s about the way facing ourselves is the hardest thing we have to do.
I’m thrilled to be working with Julian Pavia again, an incredible editor who did great things with The Warehouse, and has already been a fantastic partner in shaping this very weird, very complicated story.
And once again I feel compelled to build a statue in honor of my agent Josh Getzler. Not even for brokering the deal! He deserves it for putting up with me.
That’s all I’ll tell you about the book for now, but I’ll leave you with the words of the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass:
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
More soon…
Rob Hart 