Who is JL Peridot?
JL Peridot writes love letters to the future on devices from the past. She’s a qualified computer scientist, former website maker, amateur horticulturist, and sometimes illustrator. But most of the time, she’s an author of romantic science fiction. She lives with her partner and fur-family in Perth, Western Australia, on Whadjuk Noongar country.
What’s your book about? Please tell me about the genre, people and time period.
Until We Met Again is a sci-fi time travel romance, set in a middle-distance future where our descendants eke out survival in a post-collapse society. The dwindling human population is spread out across remote village-sized camps, hiding from extreme weather and pollution. A subset of people have consented to receive a neural lace, which gives them the ability to travel to the past and modify small details in the hopes of undoing climate change and securing a better future for humanity.
Qing is one such time traveller, mourning someone she loved, whose future was erased by a change someone made in the past. One day, she takes off, intending to get back what was taken from her. Of course, it all goes awry, but I promised this was a romance, so…
What form of time travel have you used? eg science/machine, magic, situation/ chant etc. What sort of internal rules does it have?
This novelette is scant on time travel rules! I felt the story works better without hard explanation, as it focuses on how people deal with things like change, loss, grief and choice. But for my fellow nerds out there, there’s a section in the back of the book mentioning the sources I studied and drew inspiration from to make the time travel part work.
Along the sci-fi spectrum, Until We Met Again is at the softer end. Think real soft, like creamy mashed potato.
Past or future? How did you decide on a time period?
Oh boy, there’s a story behind this story. In 2022, I flew to the UK for a weekend with a few writer friends. Once we confirmed we weren’t all random axe murderers from the internet, we decided to collaborate on a romance anthology. We each picked a time period and, me being the odd one in the group who writes SFF, of course I picked a futuristic setting. It came at a time where I had a climate change and solarpunk reading habit, so I had post-collapse futures on the brain.
The anthology, unfortunately, fell through very suddenly at the last minute, almost as if someone had gone back in time and changed something that altered the course of this novelette’s future. Of course, that’s not possible according to, you know, the laws of physics governing the known universe. Maybe this was always going to happen. Or maybe you and I are now trapped in some weird eddy in the flow of time ;)
Do you have any favourite time travel books you can recommend?
Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. It’s an anthology novella rather than a book by itself, but it got made into that 2016 movie, Arrival. I love how it explores determinism vs free will, although you could say the time travel genre does that by nature. But what sticks with me about this story how it stokes the feeling of thinking about such things in a contemplative and heartfelt way, deep in that intimate place where our wonder at the universe has its roots.
If you could time travel where would you go? What do you think would be the best and worst of the experience?
Cindy, there are SO many places I would go: to the Rubicon to soak up the vibe while Julius Caesar contemplated crossing; to prehistory to find out why the Neanderthals really died; to humanity’s deep futures when we hit Types II–V Civilisation levels on the Kardashev scale, just to see what it’s like.
Learning and understanding all these unknowns would definitely be the best part, and there’d have to be provisions to mitigate the worst—I’d need to ride in some kind of quantum safety bubble that means I don’t make anyone sick or get sick myself, or mess anything up by accidentally changing stuff.
More realistically, though, I’d be pretty chuffed just to time travel through the next four decades, reasonably fit and healthy with the love of my life.
Until We meet Again
A time traveller absconds to the past in search of her lost love.
One word: my name. A call from Origin through the neural lace grafted to my brain and nerves, connecting me to another place in another time. A reminder of what I’m here to do.
I clutch a bottle cap; its sharp metal edges ground me in the present. It’s funny, don’t you think, to consider this moment the present, as if the past and future I came from aren’t supposed to exist? If you were here, I’d ask. You’d smile and kiss my forehead and say you love my nonsense questions.
But you’re not here. They want me to forget you ever were.
Release day is 28th October, with preorders now open. I’m looking forward to my copy!