The Skin Map

Countless people have wondered if time travel is possible. Others believe that telluric energy¹ (a.k.a. an earth current) is a time-travel force and we only have to learn how to harness it in order to travel back or forward in time. The Skin Map, written by Steven Lawhead, is a fictitious novel about the “what-ifs’ involving telluric energy and time travel. It is the first book in the Bright Empires series.

            Kit Livingstone is a twenty-seven year old loser, he works a job in London, only to survive; and he willingly admits that he needs a new girlfriend. He keeps the one he has just for the sake of being in a relationship. On a random, Sunday afternoon, he is on his way to her house because he had promised her that they would go shopping together. Through a series of unfortunate events, he is forced to walk the several blocks to her house. On his way, he passes down an alley that he has never been down before. A freak storm comes and then, just as quickly as it came, it was gone. As he nears the end of the tunnel, he hears someone call his name. He turns to find his great-grandfather, Cosimo Livingstone, following him. Thinking that it is just some crazy man, he walks on and comes out the other side of the alley, but finds himself in a seaside village, not London. He demands to know what happened and the Cosimo informs him that he has walked through a portal into the past, although not history. It is another dimension of history (meaning, if he changes something there, it will not necessarily change the future in real time).  Cosimo goes on to ask Kit to help him with something, but Kit wants nothing of it. He walks back into the alley which is back into London. A few minutes later, he comes to his girlfriend Wilhelmina’s house and is thoroughly confused when she is upset with him for being so late. Not quite sure what she means by “so late”, he looks at his phone and sees that it was 4:30pm, a full eight hours from when he left his house. He tries his best to explain what happened, but she doesn’t believe him. Finally, he decides to take her to the portal. When they get to it, he walks through first with her following directly behind him, but when he gets through, she is nowhere to be found. Cosimo finds him and tells Kit that he knew that he would return soon, but asks him what caused him to come back. Kit sighs and explains what happened. Cosimo is not at all thrilled with this, saying that this could be very bad for all the dimensions of reality, because she might upset the balance of things. It turns out that the portal that Kit and Mina came through has several ‘drop spots.’ Cosimo and Kit then set out to find her… before it’s too late.

            When an author sets out to write a series, he must make the first book intriguing enough that the readers will want to read the next book. Steven Lawhead has done this well, weaving many different story lines together into one amazing plot.

¹Telluric energy is an electric current that moves underground or through the sea. Telluric currents result from both natural causes and human activity, and the discrete currents interact in a complex pattern. The currents are extremely low frequency and travel over large areas at or near the surface of Earth.