This change of scenery is not a change of location but rather of time, from 1940 to today to be exact. Riggs describes the shock of this time change on page 389: “The circular staircase we were descending was also gone, replaced by an escalator. A scrolling LED screen hung above the platform: NEXT TRAIN TIME 2 MINUTES. On the wall was a poster for a movie I had seen earlier that summer, before my grandfather died. We had left 1940 behind us. I was back in the present" Many of the main characters in the novel have never experienced time beyond 1940, so traveling to a world set more than fifty years in the future poses many challenges, including One would simply be to adapt to new technologies. and lifestyle. The main characters must deal with this stressful new environment and must learn to adapt very quickly because this change of setting occurs at the climax of the book where some of the most unforgiving plot changes.