Meeting the Sculptor
Floris M. Kleijne
61 pages
published in 2004

Here is why it pays to follow SFF authors on Twitter; because otherwise I'd never had known about Meeting the Sculptor being free on Amazon, which is of course the perfect price to try out a new author with. Not that Floris M. Kleijne is exactly a new author: according to his autobiography he sold his first story, to legendary dutch anthology series Ganymedes backl in 1986, only to see the series fold before it could be published. After that false start it took a while for Kleijne to get back in the habit of writing, deciding in 2001 to start aiming at the English language market instead, in which he has been relatively successfull, though he's still not a very prolific writer.

Meeting the Sculptor is his biggest success so far, as he won the 2004 edition of the Writers of the Future competition with it, the annual writing competition organised by the scientologists in honour of the pulp writer origins of L. Ron Hubbard. I can see why it won. You'd think that more than a century after H. G. Wells' The Time Traveller it wouldn't be possible to come up with new ideas for a time travel story but Kleijne has managed to do so.

The story starts with Mark. Mark isn't a nice guy, a thirthysomething alcoholic who has wasted most his life chasing women. One morning, after a particularly bad evening with one of his few remaining friends had ended in disaster and he drowned his sorrows in his favourite bar, he wakes up in the flat of the woman went home with to find a strange man standing in her kitchen who wants to know if Mark knows the exact moment his life went to shit. When Mark gets angry and threatens to call the cops, he stops him with one simple sentence: "April 24th, twelve years back, at eight minutes after three, pm."

That is a date that Mark knows, the day that he started to lose perhaps the one woman in his life he truly loved and it convinces him to hear the stranger -- who introduces himself as "I'm Jolo. I sculpt." -- out. Who promptly shows Mark he's a time traveller by taking him to a historic scene Mark knows very well, one that anybody with interest in the American Civil War would recognise, so familiar in fact that it's not even spelled out for the reader if "four score" isn't enough of a clue. But what has time travel to do with Mark's life?

As Jolo explains, there are times in anybody's life where with the right nudge, they can go one way or another. In Mark's case, what happened twelve years ago could, with a slight interference by Jolo, be put right and Mark could've remained with the love of his life forever. It would mean altering only a small detail, but there would be a cost, a price to pay...

Who will pay that cost is obvious from the moment Jolo outlines his solution and the rest of the story elegantly sets up this denouncement, at which time you also realise that the flashbacks to that fatal date that interspaced the story weren't Mark's own, but those of his counterpart in the new timeline...

What impressed me the most about Meeting the Sculptor was just how tight and well constructed the central timeloop in the story is, how well done that moment of revelation where you realise that what you thought were flashbacks, was instead the second, changed part of the loop. What also struck me --and I'm not sure this was a thing already in 2004-- is the irony of the sculptor's name: Jolo, or YOLO?

Meeting the Sculptor can be bought via Floris M. Kleijne's own website.