Time Squatters

Time Squatters: The Secret of the Cosmographer is a YA science fiction novel that takes place in the future on an earth altered by climate change. The poles have melted, and the continents are submerged with only a few isolated island city-states remaining. One of those islands is Virtos. 

Alex (15), Phoebe (14), and her brother Max (9) are fugitives from the city orphanage. Siblings Phoebe and Max have adopted Alex, the boy that helped them escape, into their family. The group hold up in the basement of the city’s largest museum, the Ark, a depository for old objects and memories of the time before the floods. This is owned by billionaire Forsten. (More about him later.)

To survive, Alex uses Max’s unique understanding of computer software to start an operation in which they hack, copy, and distribute illegal software that offer dreams and forbidden experiences like racing air vehicles or traveling back in time through the memories of dead people. 

Max can do more than create illegal software. He hacks one scanner device used during museum tours, a chrono-set. His scan determines an object’s age and projects images from its life on a timeline that produces a holographic video. Max figures out a way to be physically transported into the history of the artifact in its own time and geographical location. 

Time travel is fun for the time squatters until they uncover a secret device created centuries ago that could meet the energy needs of the entire planet. If they could access that device, perhaps history would change bringing their parents back to life?

Author Jannos Eolou has created a future world where three of its poorest citizens have figured out how to travel back in time as they meet historical figures like Rudolf II in 1600s Prague, visit the Tower of London in the 1300s, or experience the violence of the French Revolution in 1789.

When the time squatters travel to 1600 Cambridge, England they meet Rosie, who gets them involved in a dangerous search for the Cosmographer, a device that has the potential of solving the planet’s energy needs. 

Unbeknownst to the squatters, Forsten, CEO of Forsten Enterprises—Power for the Future, is watching and waiting until all the parts for the Cosmographer are in place before he reaches out to steal the ancient invention for himself. 

Time Squatters: The Secret of the Cosmographer (published in 2015) is the first and only novel in the Time Squatters Saga. Though the author had expectations of adding books to the series, it never materialized. (Huge disappointment!) With that said, Eolou does a wonderful job of world building, creates a plot filled with excitement and has an ongoing theme of adventure, science, and history. It’s a fun read for any lover of time travel stories. 

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