Blog Archives
COULD YOU WIN AT YOUR OLYMPICS?
Many people endure competition in athletics, sport, music, dance, debating and other performance. The key to success is training.
Time is Gold, a novel by Martin Knox, tells a story how a schoolgirl Maxi Fleet trains to break the World marathon record coached by a team of technical specialists and her boyfriend physicist Jack Cram. It takes them years of effort, but with a new technique she is confident of winning.
Reviewed by Romuald Dzemo for Readers’ Favourite.
‘. . .This is a wonderful story with elaborately developed themes, including love, ambition, hard work and pain, drive for success, performance and friendship. Set in the future, it has strong psychological and scientific underpinnings. . .’
Available from Amazon.
martinknox.com
BY RADICAL AUTHOR MARTIN KNOX
ANIMAL FARM 2 is an exciting sequel to George Orwell’s satire Animal Farm (1945). Pig control on Caruba island involves the farm animals in the Cold War and collapse of Soviet government. When the animals discover coal and mine it, they become embroiled in environmentalism and superpower climate politics. They seek liberation and learn science, contesting energy policies with a paradigm shift in climate science and an optimistic outcome.
TIME IS GOLD is a fiction novel in which Maxi, an Australian marathon runner, is determined to win Olympic Gold and break the world record. Her training is guided by her partner Jack, whose neuroscience research discovers that Einstein’s Special Relativity can plausibly enable her to stretch her time in ‘flow’. Will Maxi break the record with a new concept of performance time? This is nail-biting entertainment.
SHORT OF LOVE At Liverpool University in the Beatles era, Tom is an engineering student who falls for Vicki, a psychology student. When she tricks him, he puts her off for later with a satirical trick of his own: a commodity short. It backfires and they try to get back together but his work as CEO of a Canadian oil company causes friction. This is a biofiction page-turner.
PRESUMED DEAD is a crime fiction thriller when a heinous crime is committed in fictional Alexandra against Jane, an iconic sassy young woman politician, amid corrupt city hall partisan politics. The crime is reconstructed in a novel forensic process by her partner Phillip who closes in on the perpetrators with chilling precision.
THE GRASS IS ALWAYS BROWNER is an epic story speculating on Australia’s dystopian future, extrapolated from recent conditions of: population growth, migration control, religious conflict, industrial collapse, deurbanisation and rising sea levels with scientific objectivity.
Available on Amazon. Details and reviews on my blog martinknox.com
NEUROLOGICAL TIME IS RELATIVE
Time is Gold is a novel by Martin Knox. Maxi Fleet trains and improves her personal best time to compete in the Olympic Games marathon. Her boyfriend Jack Cram develops a neurophysical theory based on Einstein’s Special Relativity theory that she uses to stretch her performance time. This is a story about ambition, creativity, persistence, trust and love.
martinknox.com
THE ART OF BODY MAINTENANCE AND PERFORMANCE
I compare my novel Time is Gold (2019) with a book I love, Robert Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), reputed to be the most popular philosophy book ever written, selling over 5 million copies.
Time is Gold is fiction with a similar philosophical underpinning.
The genre of Persig’s novel is a roman-a’-clef, in which real people or events appear with invented names, in much more than a travel story. Time is Gold is a coming-of-age epic adventure thriller.
Both books are steeped in Zen philosophy applied to adventuring.
Robert Persig cared for his motorbike, often taking it to pieces and reassembling it, the way people care for their horses. In his book The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance he demonstrates his Zen philosophy of ‘quality’ living, with care as a compromise between mechanical classicism and romantic spirituality. His son, Chris, goes with him as pillion passenger on a long journey and learns his philosophy of ‘quality’.
In Time is Gold, Maxi is a schoolgirl with running talent whose training is taken over by a team of expert coaches from whom she learns ‘extreme flow’, a philosophy of optimal performance time. Jack Cram is a university research student who helps his girlfriend Maxi to combine, physiology, physics, psychology and neuroscience and Zen in her training. Her story is punctuated with marathon race reports in high level competition.
Maxi tunes up her body for marathon running like a complex technology, in the Zen way, with her attention on goals and processes but not outcomes. Maxi balances physical and mental demands as she approaches Zen mastery.
The protagonists’ journeys are seldom downhill. Phaedrus, Persig’s autobiographer, contends with the aftermath of an earlier nervous breakdown. Jack’s career in industry gets off to a rocky start. These experiences open them to radical experimentation to achieve their personal needs. They have successes, becoming euphoric, with some poetic descriptions.
Maxi’s racing is punctuated by coaching dialogues, whereas Persig’s protagonist Phaedrus reflects between adventures.
Readers interested in endurance and resilience in any field of performance or problem solving will be enlightened by Time is Gold. Why do athletes inspire us so much?
Available from Amazon. Reviews at https://martinknox.com
