Literature / Accelerate

"I know that on 1 December 2074 the Earth will be hit by a gamma-ray burst from a nearby star[...] if we pack about 5,000 years' worth of science and technology into half as much time, then by 2074 we should be able to mitigate the GRB and save the planet."

—Stan Lee Bertini

Accelerate (full title Accelerate: How to Save the World with Science) is the debut Time Travel/Alternate History science fiction novel by Dr. John Spencer. A gamma-ray burst from a star hits the Earth on 1 December 2074; Dr. Stan Lee Bertini learns of the devastating consequences for all life on Earth, but there is a glimmer of hope: He has just invented the time machine—er, temporal device—which allows him to change the past. He realizes that, by introducing ideas as early as possible, he can accelerate the pace of scientific and technological development so that by 2074 humanity is ready to prevent the disaster.

To this end, Doc recruits a team of experts. Some of them (Math, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, and Technology Specialists) will find a way to introduce concepts in the timeline pertinent to their areas of expertise; others (History, Society, and Language Specialists) make the interventions of the first group possible in a pragmatic sense. By eliminating mistakes and optimising the technological path humanity takes, they hope to be able to save the world. But just going back in time can have serious ramifications, which can complicate things slightly. Or significantly.

The main characters are Dr. Stan Lee Bertini (the mission architect) and the eight specialists: Terry (mathematics), Ric (physics), Dmitri (chemistry), Lenny (engineering), Al (technology), Aozea (history), Sophia (society), and Bill (language).

A-E

• Abhorrent Admirer: Aozea recoils when, upon meeting her for the first time, Bill kisses her hand with clear subtext.
• Acting Your Intellectual Age: Despite being children aged 11 to 15, the crew of eight is remarkably mature owing to the criteria by which they were selected.
• Adorably Precocious Child: Lenny is this, albeit less so later in the book as he ages.
• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Subverted; Aozea is aloof, but because of her thyroid condition has white hair. This ends up being useful later when she has to run for public office, and her condition masks the fact she is only a teenager.
• Ambiguous Gender: Great care is taken to keep the audience from learning Dmitri's gender, from Sophia protesting the pseudonym Chymes, to other pseudonyms with unisex names. And then there's this:

Dmitri: "I took the pseudonym Jan Czochralski."

Sophia: "I still think it's pronounced Jan, Dmitri."

Dmitri: "No, I'm sticking with Jan."^note Jan being ambiguously the European male name Jan (pronounced Yahn) or the nickname for the female name Janet.

• Amusing Injuries: Roy sticks out his tongue at Aozea, who bumps his chin causing him to bite his tongue.
• Antiquated Linguistics:
  • All the ancient Greeks and Vladimir Nadoveza speak like this, and apart from Lenny the team members who talk to them shift into similarly archaic language. Justified in that they're usually speaking an ancient language to begin with.
  • To a lesser extent, Bill's originating from 1909 does occasionally cause him to use now-infrequent expressions like "what the blazes," "hell's bells," and "land sakes alive."
• Badass Boast: Terry, when trying to persuade Publius Marcus Gaius to learn from him:

"My dear Gaius, I have mastered the fluxions of Anaximedes, the perturbation theory of Urbain Le Verrier, and the group theory of Sophus Lie. I may be the single greatest mathematician you will ever meet."

• Big Disaster Plot: A beam of pure energy is coming for the Earth. It can't be stopped, but maybe it can be mitigated before it reaches us?
• Bland-Name Product: gitHub repositories, meet pratPlace repositories.
• Break the Motivational Speaker: At a conference, Bertini promises to persuade an audience to save the world, but leads with "I am a time traveler," causing him to get booed off the stage and subsequently become despondent.
• Buffy Speak: Lenny. Moreso before going to the Institute for Advanced Study, but still.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Justified in that every time the team goes back in time, the languages of the world change. "Cameras" become "moment capturers," and so forth.
• Chekhov's Armory/Chekhov's Skill: In Chapter 4, we get introduced to a Chekhov's Skill Armoury where each of the eight experts describes trivia about themselves:
  • Terry likes to sail. Cut to the team needing to sail from Greece to Yugoslavia, and Terry leading the voyage.
  • Ric is an outdoorsman. So when the team needs to start a fire with two sticks, he's up for the job.
  • Dmitri is good at gardening, and early in the mission helps the team grow coffee in Egypt.
  • Lenny was in a marching band, which he uses to pace out distances so the team can land in exactly the right spot using the temporal device.
  • Al has a penchant for geology. As Dmitri begins to need to isolate more elements, like aluminium and titanium, his map of where minerals naturally occur becomes increasingly helpful.
  • Aozea has a condition which turns her hair white. Enter the team trying unsuccessfully to persuade global parliament to pass a law, leading to her running for office (and getting elected) because everyone thought she was older than she was.
  • Sophia was the leader of debate club at school. And when Dr. Bertini gets left behind because of a small but critical oversight, she becomes the leader of the team.
• Child Prodigy: By construction, anyone on the team of eight is either this or a Teen Genius, depending on their age.
• The End of the World as We Know It: A gamma-ray burst reaches the Earth on 1 December 2074, depleting the ozone layer, causing acid rain, and threatening all life on the planet. The GRB candidate was hidden behind a black hole, so we couldn't tell it was pointed at us until it was too late.
• Establishing Character Moment: During and after the specialist selection tests, the finalists have a discussion. It's clear that every soon-to-be specialist is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition despite most of them being clueless about how well they did.
• The Everyman:
  • Sophia, whose skills lie not so much in a specific area as in getting society to adopt whatever the subject-matter specialists infuse.
  • To a lesser extent, Dr. Bertini, who always seems to delegate to his team of specialists.
• Expendable Alternate Universe: Lampshaded by Sophia:

Sophia: "Question... Every time we go back, we branch off from the universe... and aren't all the humans in that universe going to die?"

Aozea: "Your question is, 'are we murdering billions of people every time we go back in time?'"

• Expendable Clone: At one point, the team has to aim for a Moon base from the Earth. They calculate the coordinates, then send their past selves there... never to return. Turns out, Terry entered the coordinates incorrectly, so their past selves arrived in the vacuum of space and died.

F-J

• Gentleman Snarker: Stephen Hawking gets one in Chapter 2:

Hawking: "[...]I will not have sent out the invitations until tomorrow. At this point I can conclude one thing about you - that you are a time traveler."

Bertini: "Your logic is impeccable, sir."

Hawking: "Well there was also the minor clue of a giant machine suddenly appearing in this room."

• Insistent Terminology: The time machine is always referred to as a temporal device.

K-O

• Last-Minute Hookup: Al and Dmitri, who had spent one infusion together and "bonded" well, go on a date at the end of the last chapter.
• Meaningful Name: Oh, where to begin? Every subject-matter specialist has one:
  • Terry: Terence Tao, mathematician
  • Ric: Enrico Fermi, nuclear physicist^note At one point, Ric takes the pseudonym of Richard Feynman, leading Aozea to ask if that was the meaning of his name.
  • Dmitri: Dmitri Mendeleyev, the father of chemistry. Bonus points as Dmitri is actually a girl.
  • Lenny: Leonardo da Vinci, inventor and engineer
  • Al: Alan Turing, father of computer science
  • Stan Lee Bertini is an anagram of Albert Einstein.
• Shout-Out:

Aozea: "Wait, who's in Rudna Glava again?"

Lenny: "Al and Ric, man!"

• Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness: Somewhere between 4 and 5, depending on if time travel to the past is ever discovered to be real. Apart from that, and the disaster, everything is realistic.

P-T

• Perspective Flip: In applying for the program, Aozea had to complete a story beginning "There was a monster in a cage. The agents had captured it to study it":

Aozea: "Agents, scientists, and politicians alike stared at the monster...and I stared back."

• Prince Charming Wannabe: Upon first meeting her, Bill kisses Aozea's hand. Justified in that he's literally from 1909, and hand-kissing was a thing back then.
• Puppy Love: Lenny and Sophia. It's heavily implied Lenny makes an advance that Sophia rejects, but later the two of them are alone and clear the air. Subsequently the two of them are portrayed as growing close, holding hands and later kissing each other on the cheek.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The whole point of the story is to do this for all the "missed opportunities" in science and technology.
  • Along the way, Terry fixes a linguistic mistake so that the sine function (which actually means cave in Latin) becomes the chord function (referring to the chord of a circle).
  • Ric fixes the sign convention of electric charge so electrons are positively charged and the direction of electric currents makes sense.
• Sequel Hook: Chancellor Myra of the Three Worlds has one in the final chapter.
• Ship Tease: During the voyage from Greece to Yugoslavia, Ric and Aozea share a moment alone, and he tries unsuccessfully to get her to open up.
• Shout-Out Theme Naming: The subject-matter specialists are named after real-world giants in their fields — typically ones who had a major impact and/or showed precocious tendencies at a young age.
• Significant Anagram:
  • Stan Lee Bertini is an anagram of Albert Einstein.
  • In one of the alternate histories the team creates, John Proebt Premiere invents the atomic bomb. John Proebt Premiere anagrams to J. Robert Oppenheimer.^note Bonus points for Dmitri quoting him moments later: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
• Significant Name Shift: During their furtive one-on-one, Sophia offhandedly remarks to Lenny that even their names have no letters in common. Lenny promptly asks her to call him "Leo" instead, which happens to be the name of his deceased father.

"Then we have an 'o' in common, at least."

• Sweet on Polly Oliver: Al and Dmitri.^note Add to that the fact that the real life Alan Turing was openly homosexual, just to make things more confusing.
• Truth in Literature:
  • Stephen Hawking really did hold a time travel party on 28 June 2009, and sent out the invitations the next day. Unfortunately, nobody attended.
  • The abundances of minerals in various places around the world is accurate.
  • NASA confirms there was a solar eclipse on 14 March 189 BC, with the region of totality passing over Ionia.
  • You can check the locations of the planets at the significant dates stated in the book, and confirm the planets really are where they're supposed to be.
  • All of the math, physics, and chemistry mentioned in the book is genuine - apart from the temporal device there is no Applied Phlebotinum.
• Turing Test: When Terry begins to muse about computers being able to do anything given two thousand years to develop, who better to tell him about the halting problem than... Al?

U-Z

• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The team comes up with a plan to steal a piece of equipment needed to progress with advancing the timeline. All safeguards are in place, but they don't count on being spotted and losing Dr. Bertini in the process.
• We Only Have One Chance: Subverted. The team can go back and forward in time as many times as they like.
• Wham Episode: In Chapter 21, the team is caught while retrieving the Skyhook from a secure research facility. In the mad dash back to the temporal device, Dr. Bertini gets caught, and the team have to escape without him. To rub salt in the wounds, when the team goes back in time to recruit a past version of him, he refuses because of their carelessness (and because his own team needs him).
• Will They or Won't They?:
  • They will: Lenny and Sophia.
  • They won't: Ric and Aozea.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Sophia, who nicely compliments...
• The Woobie: Lenny, after we learn that his father Leo died when he was young, despite which he tells Sophia to call him Leo so they at least 'have a letter in common.'