Patriots: A Patriots Christmas

[dgatwood]

This week, I released a Christmas-themed short story in my Patriots sci-fi book series. You see, there comes a time in every series of books, TV shows, or movies when you have to write a Christmas special. Sometimes, they’re funny; sometimes, they’re sappy; sometimes they’re entirely standalone stories that have no real impact on the story's universe as a whole.

This story is all three of those things.

Except the last one. I can pretty much guarantee that our Robot Santa will make an appearance at some point in the future, as the ultimate deus ex machina, played entirely for laughs, in the middle of some utterly unimportant subplot. That’s just how I roll.

In this story, Tessa (the marginally sane android) builds a robot Santa Claus and sends him back in time to meet (Saint) Nicholas of Myra. The story is a touching Christmas story, laced with both liturgical and general humor, and peppered with bits of Latin, often to humorous effect.

“So I realized something,” Tessa said. “Time travel only causes paradoxes if you change things. If you send a robot back in time, it can observe without changing things, and as long as it doesn’t tell you not to send it back in time, you’ll still send it back, so there’s little chance of a paradox.”
“You’re assuming that paradoxes are even possible,” Joseph replied. “I’ve often suspected that the very fact that you’re sending someone back in time to change the past means that the person your sending back not only has failed, but also will fail. So you don’t need to worry about changing things, because it isn’t even possible to do so.”
“Quite possible, Tessa said. “Either way, it isn’t as though a robot Saint Nick is going to change the past in any meaningful way. “I mean, it isn’t as though he got back in time to slap Arius at the First Council of Nicaea.”
“Are you sure?” Joseph asked.

You can buy “A Patriots Christmas” today from the iBooks Store [affiliate link], Google Play, Kobo [affiliate link], Barnes & Noble [affiliate link] or Amazon [affiliate link], among others.

For more info about me, the series, and so on, see my book page at http://www.patriotsbooks.com/.

[dgatwood]

Shameless bump.