In this episode, host Lucas Kitchen sits down with author Clint Hall to explore his path from making childhood comic books to publishing Christian science fiction and fantasy. The conversation tackles the shifting definitions of the faith-based fiction market and how authors balance genre expectations with their personal beliefs. Hall unpacks the thematic foundations of his major works, detailing the unique time-travel mechanics of Echo Nova, the exploration of spiritual crisis in Steal Fire From The Gods, and the decade-long world-building process behind his upcoming Worlds Collide trilogy. The result is a grounded, insightful look at the creative process and the realities of engaging with both faith-based and secular sci-fi audiences.
Echo Nova by Clint Hall takes a unique approach to time travel, holds up a mirror to our present reality, and dashes high-speed into the past.
As the protagonist Dash Keune is aptly named. The talented teen has an online following for his illegal rooftop racing persona. When he gets an opportunity to become a time star, the future equivalent of a reality TV personality who travels through time, he sprints toward the opportunity with wild abandon. Dominus, the organization that offers Dash his big break, turns out to be less than ethical and more than willing to exploit him and countless others.
The protagonist’s character arc balances admirable characteristics and room for improvement. Likable but conceited, he learns from the damage caused by his blind pursuit of glory.
Although the book is set in the future and takes the characters to the deep past, its themes mirror modern culture and the challenges faced today. It can be read simply as an exciting sci-fi adventure in the vein of Ready Player One, The Maze Runner, and Hunger Games, or it can be considered a critique of oversaturated digital obsession, the growing difficulty in discerning what’s real, the exploitation of the underprivileged, and the objectification of people who seem to exist only on the other side of the digital screen.
Echo Nova sports a truly unique approach to time travel, one that, once explained, is hard to imagine why other storytellers have not yet thought of it. There have, until now, been essentially three dominant approaches to most time travel stories. Clint Hall has invented a fourth that avoids the overplayed complications of the multiverse, present-overwriting, and fixed timeline approaches. The author presents something new, a hallmark of good sci-fi. A whole host of action, adventure, and plot twists are made possible by this novel concept, while avoiding the usual plot holes that the other methods can produce.
Most time travel tales take place near the beginning of the invention of time travel, and conclude that time travel must be destroyed for the good of humanity, but not so for Echo Nova. Because of this book’s novel approach to time travel, the author is able to set the tale in a world where time travel has become so embedded in society that commerce, war, commodities, entertainment, tourism, and a new caste system are all based on its long-term existence.
Being released by a Christian publisher, Echo Nova will have a surprising appeal to a broader market, as there are no explicit expressions of faith by any of the characters. Some brief openness to a Creator and afterlife is mentioned by the hero, but he takes it no further in this installment. The book leaves open the possibility for a sequel, which may be the place for more direct discussion of faith-based ideas, since the author mentions God and a relationship with Him in his after-story acknowledgments. Despite the lack of explicit mention, the book is full of the protagonist’s need for Christian virtues, and he is in constant motion toward those ideals.
Best For: Young adult readers of time travel, action adventure, and sci-fi with a male protagonist.
Discern: No profanity or lewd content, but there were some scenes of strong violence, battle action, and multiple deaths.
