Out of Place in Time and Space - The book is a collection of anecdotes that indicate that the consensus definition of sequential time is flawed, since there are objects,beliefs, practices, and knowledge that show up well before you?d expect them to. The moons of Mars were described 151 years before they were discovered, the Apollo Program about a century before it took place, and the Pacific War 16 years before it began. There is a religious painting in a museum in France, done in 1460, where the Christ Child is depicted as playing with a flying toy helicopter. The Roman Army was once defeated in battle by an assemblage of machines that then drop from history. Each example has an individual explanation, and there is no need to invoke irrational forces. But, admittedly, some of the explanations are pretty weak, and taken as a whole they indicate that there is something about time that we are missing. The book invokes the term ?reverse anachronism? to describe many of the anecdotes. It presumes that a conventional anachronism is a modern phenomena incorrectly depicted as being present in the past (like people in films about Ancient Rome who ares peaking English.) A reverse anachronism, therefore, concerns modern phenomena that were actually present in the past. As soon as you start looking for them, you find them. And there are some things that are simply puzzling, like the Voynich Manuscript, a hand?made medieval illuminated book written in no known language. Such examples indicate that there may be reverse anachronisms from the future, and we will not understand then until they come into synch with the present. As a journalist and freelance writer of wide experience, Lamont Wood is familiar with the sometimes arbitrary distinction between cause and effect, and the subsequent gulf between what happens, what is experienced, what gets written, and what is understood. He has been freelancing for nearly three decades, writing for publications ranging from American Heritage to trade journals in Hong Kong. He has also been a newspaper reporter, a publicist, and a welder. He lives in San Antonio, Texas. - www.warwickassociates.net