Terraform, March 9, 2015

“Springing Backwards” by Rick Paulas

Reviewed by Nicky Magas

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Or, in the case of Rick Paulas’s “Springing Backwards,” a campaign promise to end daylight savings time triggers a man to be late to work, which causes him to trip over a chair, which in turn knocks over a cup of coffee, resulting in a spill that the cleaning of which accidentally mutes the alarms that would have warned the operator who is playing an online game instead of watching his workstation that a dead satellite is about to crash into another dead satellite, which creates a domino effect that subsequently wipes out all satellite communication and plunges the current hyper-tech civilization into a world of darkness. That is one seriously bad day at the office.

The run-on sentences and lengthy tangents throughout this story make it a bit difficult to grasp and hold onto the actual relevant events. The characters Jacob and Marion are merely eyes through which to view this futuristic world, and have very little personality between them. Because of this, the final (somewhat farfetched) scene of the end of the world stirs up little emotion in the reader. Unfortunately, the humorous element of “Springing Backwards” is lost in the overblown attempt at humor and more often than not creates confusion rather than amusement at what is supposed to be a ludicrous series of events resulting in the apocalypse.