Nicholson Baker wrote a novel called The Firmata about a guy who could stop time. And, as most guys who could stop time would probably do, he largely just used his superpowers to take off women’s bras and panties. But he also did all these funny little things to fuck with people, and if nothing else it’s a very entertaining, though often bordering on pornographic, book.
But if you really think about it, it would never work. Stopping time and then just continuing on like normal while everybody and everything around you is frozen in place I mean.
Let’s start out with light.
What light we are able to perceive travels through space to our eyes, in particles or in waves it doesn’t really matter, because once time is stopped that light stops travelling and thus is no longer travelling into our eyes triggering nerve impulses and creating images constructed by our brains and fed to our perceiving minds (which is what we actually “see”).
Because of this a world where time has been stopped would actually be darker than dark.
And likewise with sound.
What we call sound travels to our ears through the air in waves, and again without time flowing those waves would just suspend in space and never end up reaching our ears.
Of course you could trigger these waves by moving into them, but even at your fastest you could never move into them as fast as they would have been moving into you were time flowing normally and naturally, so it still wouldn’t work.
And let’s not even get into breathing.
So it’s really more of just a fantasy what-if sort of novel than it is about real and actual possibilities.
Which makes it completely unlike the stuff I write about of course.
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