Limited Time Travel: Dissecting Francis Mont’s novel ‘Saved In Time’
There was once a contest held at my college where participants had to come up with ideas to monetize flying cars. The contest was primarily targeted towards ex-engineering students who were looking to start a career in product management. Its key premise was that moving into management requires a critical mindset shift, where one should learn to look at technology as a mere ‘black box’ and focus more on who the target customer is, how an invention can be taken to market, how it can generate steady revenue and what the potential risks could be.
And if you think about it, science fiction writers are also product managers in some sense. In most cases, science fiction isn’t really about the science; it’s more about how a scientific breakthrough can be used (or abused) - and the social, economic and ethical implications that come with it. And while it’s true that there are ‘hard sci-fi’ stories where explaining the science is important to the story, the fact still remains that science doesn’t just exist in a vacuum.
Saved In Time: An Escape Story by Francis Mont is one book which epitomizes the above spirit. The story is centred around a magic device called the Time Scope, a TV-like gizmo with which one can observe any event that happened in the past, no matter how private or distant the event was.
Link to book: https://www.amazon.com/Saved-Time-Escape-Francis-Mont-ebook/dp/B07TSTP19V/
The book is a quick, unconventional and entertaining read which delves into numerous themes, while also providing some interesting insights into product strategy:
Different personas. Different motivations. Same technology…
As you may have guessed, fact-finding is one of the killer applications of this device. But product thinking often requires going a few steps deeper to understand which users would benefit the most from fact-finding, and why. In this book, there are 3 distinct personas who use this device for differing reasons.
Zack Dougall is a young, carefree tinkerer who first discovers this device after the sudden death of its inventor. Senator Gordon Hopkins is an honest politician who is worried about the harm that the leading presidential candidate could do to the country. Then there is Joe Petuccini who is a former mobster trying to lead a clean, normal life. He now runs a legitimate casino business and is exploring the possibility of getting into a serious relationship. Somehow, the three of them meet and become the only people in the world who have knowledge of this device’s existence. Each of them need the Time Scope for different reasons, and also need the device to be kept secret for different reasons.
The Cost of Compliance…
When the story begins, there is mutual distrust between the three parties. So they come up with a set of rules regarding who can use the device at what times and for what reasons. This isn’t unlike the compliance function in big organizations where there are precise rules governing how resources can be accessed, to guard against illicit activity by a bad actor.
The first rule that they agree to is that nobody else can know about this device. The second rule is that all 3 of them need to be present when anybody is using the device. And finally, they agree that each of them must disclose which events they want to observe, and obtain an explicit sign-off from the other parties before using the Time Scope for the same.
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Soon, the trio realizes that implementing these rules is leading to a lot of inefficiency. Zack realizes that this affects his plans to start a detective agency because he doesn’t have unlimited access to the device, despite it being located in his own house. Gordon is wary of meeting Joe too often as he doesn’t want the media to dig up any connection between them, as it could affect his credibility as a politician. Joe is an impatient person and finds the Time Scope a little too difficult to operate by himself.
Given that nobody is happy, Zack proposes a new set of rules. He asserts that he should be given the right to use the device whenever he wants, as it’s the only way he can meet his own goals. In return, he says that he can help Gordon and Joe get any information that they are looking for, by taking the observations himself and collecting relevant data for them. In this way, Gordon can avoid physically visiting Joe and Zack too often, while Joe has a handy research assistant to do his grunt work. They all eventually agree to this plan.
Now, this new set of rules is less airtight than the earlier set of rules, as there is the possibility of Zack misusing the device - potentially using it to blackmail Joe or Gordon. But the fact that both Gordon and Joe are much more powerful than Zack acts as a strong deterrent for bad behaviour on Zack’s part. And this system ends up working well throughout the remainder of the book, the three of them becoming close friends!
A key takeaway here is that compliance is necessary, but introducing too many controls can be counterproductive. Organizations need to look not only at the cost of non-compliance, but also the probability of non-compliance and the business value of implementing controls.
Open source or proprietary? It depends…
Should an invention be open-sourced or kept proprietary? In Zack’s case, he needs the Time Scope to be proprietary as it’s the only way his detective agency can be a sustainable source of income.
Later on in the book, this same device is re-created by a civilization on a different planet called Atlantis. Atlantis is presented as a utopian world where people have no intentions of harming each other and every disagreement is solved by rational debate and mutual consensus. In this world, knowledge of the Time Scope is made public, and a group of historians use this device to understand the origins of their planet. They realize that their ancestors are trapped on Earth and are in trouble. Eventually, a large team of people led by a historian named Ivo set out on a mission to save them.
Stories like Atlantis are the reason why open-source aficionados clamour for all technology to be open-sourced. Open-source technology benefits from the collective inputs of a large number of people across the world to solve big problems in the best possible way. But at the same time, open-sourcing a piece of technology makes it difficult to guard against its misuse. In the ideal world of Atlantis, misuse isn’t a probable risk. But could the same be said of our own world? Not always.
Conclusion
This book is weird in a good way. It’s probably not the ideal read for purists who like to see completeness and rigour in world-building. But if you’re the kind of reader who wants to have fun and let your imagination run loose, I’d highly recommend this book.
And by the way, this article is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to describing the level of wackiness that this book deals with. There’s a Hitler Disciple, a unique fog which can rewrite peoples’ thought patterns, and physics assignments where students have to kiss each other in an anti-gravity chamber. And to its great credit, there’s a social message underneath all of this. Read the book to find out more!
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