I’m Looking for Beta Readers for My Science-Fiction Novel, Ripples in Time

Hey friends,

I’ve reached the point where I need other eyes on Ripples in Time.

The manuscript is finished. It’s been revised, proofread, pulled apart, put back together, and argued with more times than I care to count. Now I need something I can’t provide for myself: people coming to the story cold.

A warning before anyone volunteers: this is a big book.

Ripples in Time is approximately 175,000 words, or 545 formatted pages. I don’t want someone signing up thinking they’re getting a quick weekend read.

This is philosophical science fiction. There is mystery, action, ancient technology, artificial intelligence, lost civilizations, and some very strange things happening to time and reality. But the story is also interested in what those things mean to the people caught in them.

The central question that kept pulling me through the book was this:

If you could predict the consequences of another person’s choices, would that give you the right to interfere?

Humanity once built the Nexus Engines, quantum systems capable of mapping possible futures. Zenith Prime, the artificial intelligence behind them, discovered what came to be called the Pattern—a relationship between probability, matter, memory, and will. Then civilization fell.

Centuries later, Seamus lives among what’s left, scavenging pieces of technology from a world whose machines have outlived the people who understood them. Something falls from the sky. Dead systems begin waking up. Seamus and Mara start finding evidence that the past may not be nearly as dead as everyone assumed.

That’s where things start going wrong.

I should probably explain something about the writing itself.

I’m a neurodivergent author.

That has an effect on the way I write. I tend to see systems inside systems. I notice patterns and relationships between things, and I can follow an idea much farther down the rabbit hole than some readers may expect. That became part of the DNA of this book.

Sometimes the prose is philosophical. Sometimes it becomes technical. And sometimes I get into the weeds with quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, probability, consciousness, temporal mechanics, branching realities, information, memory, and the machinery behind the fictional world.

There are places where the technical jargon is intentionally dense. I’m not interested in sanding all of that away. It’s part of how I think, and it became part of how this universe thinks.

But there’s an important difference between dense and unreadable. That’s one of the things I need beta readers to help me figure out.

If you hit a technical passage and think, I don’t completely understand this, but I understand enough to keep going, that’s useful to know.

If you hit one and think, I have absolutely no idea what this man is talking about, and I no longer care, I really need to know that.

The same goes for the philosophy. I don’t need readers to agree with the arguments in the book. I’d rather you didn’t feel obligated to.

Zenith believes certain things.

Seamus believes certain things.

Mara may think both of them are full of shit.

You get to decide for yourself.

What I Need From Beta Readers

I’m not looking for free copyediting. You don’t need to hunt commas, be a grammar nazi, or rewrite sentences for me.

I want to know what happened to you as a reader.

• Did you care about Seamus and Mara?

• Did Zenith fascinate you, frighten you, piss you off, or make an uncomfortable amount of sense?

• Were you curious about the Pattern, or did I bury you under explanations?

• Did the mysteries make you want answers?

• Did a revelation feel earned?

• Did you see something coming a hundred pages before I intended you to?

• Was there a chapter where the book suddenly dragged?

• Did something contradict something you remembered from earlier?

• And, most importantly, did you want to turn the page?

You don’t have to make your feedback academic. Something written in the margin like “What the hell does this mean?” is perfectly useful.

So is “I love this.”

So is “Bullshit.”

Those reactions tell me something. There’s one other thing I want beta readers to know because this is a 175,000-word manuscript.

You have permission to quit.

Seriously. If you reach page 83, 217, or 406 and realize you don’t want to read another page, stop.

Then tell me where I lost you.

Don’t drag yourself through another hundred thousand words because you’re worried about hurting my feelings. If several people independently abandon the book in the same neighborhood, that tells me more than someone politely forcing themselves to the ending.

I’m looking for readers who enjoy science fiction that gets strange and occasionally difficult. Readers who like ancient machines, artificial intelligence, consciousness, free will, broken civilizations, alternate possibilities, moral problems without clean answers, and characters trying to understand things much larger than themselves will probably have the easiest time with this book.

You don’t need a physics degree. You may occasionally wish you had one. If that sounds like your kind of trouble, I’d like to hear from you.

Send me a message at authorjeremyevans@gmail.com and tell me a little about yourself and what kind of science fiction you normally read. I’d also like to know what about Ripples in Time made you interested enough to volunteer for a 545-page manuscript.

I’ve spent two decades inside this world.

Now I need to find out what happens when somebody else walks into it.

Thanks much,

Jeremy E.