DOUBLE SHADOW, second Splinter Effect series time-traveling archaeologist story

DOUBLE SHADOW (Splinter Effect #2)
ANDREW LUDINGTON
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this thrilling installment of the Splinter Effect series, time-traveling archaeologist Rabbit Ward returns to the past to help save his former adversary and track down a murderous thief in first century Jerusalem.

ROME, 2019. Time-traveling, Smithsonian archaeologist Rabbit Ward is back in the present, but not for long. Helen, his former adversary and growing ally, is in trouble with the law after being framed for a murder she didn’t commit. Stuck in hiding and running out of other options, she turns to Rabbit for help. "Help" in this case involves a trip to first century Jerusalem to track down a mysterious man named Einar Eshek.

But Rabbit won't have to do this mission alone; as soon as he arrives in 68 CE, he meets a younger version of Helen, one who has never met him before. Together, they work to track down Eshek, who turns out to be not only a time-traveling thief, but a murderous psychopath.

As they pursue Eshek through time, Rabbit and Helen feel something even bigger pulling them together. Torn between the two versions of the woman he knows, and with the clock ticking down on Helen’s fate in 2019, Rabbit might have no choice but to betray her past self to secure Helen’s safety in the future. Tensions rise as Jerusalem prepares to go to war with Rome, and Rabbit races to capture Eshek, clear Helen’s name, and make it back to 2019 in one piece—a feat that’s proving to be easier said than done—before everything falls apart.

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My Review: Author Ludington...are you stark staring mad?! In this absolutely bonkers passage in world history, which no matter how long the editing process on this story took you were writing while the US political landscape's ablaze with AIPAC news, you release a book set in a rebellious Judea! It's a choice....

So, aside from the geopolitical timing seeming to my eyes a bit on the nose, I was verschmeckeled at the twist of Rabbit...I really wish his nickname wasn't evocative of Rabbit bloody Angstrom, that pusillanimous milquetoast...encountering a younger version of his frenemy Helen from the first book. I know a lot of people who find time travel stories not to their taste for this very trope, to the point of not watching Doctor Who despite the glorious beauty of Alex Kingston as River Song, if you can imagine such masochism, because she meets the Doctor at asymmetric moments in each of their lives. "It can't happen! It's never happened!" Maybe...but don't you crave a Jake-and-Sadie moment from 11/22/63? I, clearly, do not share this cavil. In this particular iteration of the trope, I found a real aha! moment for some things in the first book. I really like that in a series story. I want to feel there are webs of interconnection that I sense but don't yet see because that happens in life as well.

So all that to say I found this story as much to my liking as it's ever gonna get when there are straight people centering it. Rabbit and Helen's dynamic in particular feels richly textured with powerful emotions clashing and shifting in each of them every time they meet. In this story, as Helen does not know Rabbit yet, we get the unedited version of her responses to him. If the fact she's trying to kill him says anything, it's something *good* about her character...she is a professional with clear goals. I admit that, as the story began, I was a bit surprised that Helen reached out to Rabbit for this specific kind of help, but it made perfect sense as I was swept along in the tides of developments. Einar Eshek, our villain, was villainous. Rabbit, our hero, was resourceful, determined, and required always to think on his feet; that's a feat any author who's using this character trait gets kudos from me the more successfully they pull it off. I didn't notice Rabbit navigating his altered relationship to Helen as awkward or forced into convenient resolutions to knotty conflicts. That is a rare compliment from someone like me, very experienced in reading series stories.

I found the resolution to the central conundrum...chasing Einar, exonerating *2018-Helen...fit the facts, satisfied the overarching plot, and resolved the immediate story tensions with a very clear intent to publish more of these characters' stories in the future.

Bring it. Soon, please and thank you.

SPLINTER EFFECT, watch out St Mary's! New kid is in town

SPLINTER EFFECT (Splinter Effect #1)
ANDREW LUDINGTON
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this action-packed debut, time traveling archaeologist Rabbit Ward maneuvers through the past to recover a long-lost, precious menorah hiding out in ancient Rome.

Smithsonian archaeologist Rabbit Ward travels through time on sponsored expeditions to the past to secure precious artifacts moments before they are lost to history. Although exceptional at his job, Rabbit is not without faults. In a spectacular failure twenty years ago, he lost both the menorah of the second temple and his hot-headed mentee, Aaron. So, when new evidence reveals the menorah’s reappearance in 6th century Constantinople, Rabbit seizes the chance for redemption.

But from the moment he arrives in the past, things start to go wrong. Rabbit quickly finds out that his prime competition, an unlicensed and annoyingly appealing “stringer” named Helen, is also in Constantinople hunting the menorah. And that’s only the beginning. The oppressed Jewish population of the city is primed for revolution, Constantinople’s leading gang seems to have it out for Rabbit personally, and someone local is interested enough in the menorah to kill for it.

As the past closes in on him and his previous failures compound, will Rabbit be able to recover the menorah before it's once again lost in time?

With new and old dangers alike hiding behind every corner, time might just be up for Rabbit’s redemption—and possibly his life.

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My Review: Jodi Taylor's St Mary's series might need to smarten up their extremely British...let's be honest, English...monomania if Rabbit of the Smithsonian catches on. Much as I love Max, Peterson, and Markham, they need some competition, and here they've got it.

Opening at (one of the several events leading to) the burning of the Library of Alexandria was a genius bait-and-switch. By itself that is an event I would, and have, eagerly read a book about, but here it's only a teaser for Rabbit and his relationship to the Smithsonian. Time travel, inherently threatening to powerful people, is here presented as a tech tightly wrapped in rules. Of course these favor the status quo, and the very, very rich. But I repeat myself...Rabbit's a nepo baby with some time-travel failures behind him including a search for the maguffin in this book, the menorah stolen by Rome from the Jews. It's a real white-whale tale, and not just for Rabbit.

Helen, his antagonist, is also hot for this (solid-gold) candelabra of god's. She's not at all as well-developed as Rabbit is, and frankly I hope they drop her in any future iterations of the book...I didn't like Clive Ronan either (IYKYK). Their reasons aren't explored. I don't think they matter. After all, it's made of gold so greed's more than enough. Here's probably a good place to note that the world as we know it is part of a multiverse. In this splinter (note resemblance to title), there's legal-but-restricted time travel. In others, there's none whether legal or not. You see how immense this storyverse is? Imagine for a moment the things a writer can do in this sandbox!

Earlier versions of this idea have mostly centered around the Time Patrol (Poul Anderson) or The Paratime Police (H. Beam Piper) tasked with preventing anyone from causing time loops or retrocausal gubbins or generally being dickish to our hominin ancestors. (I think it's telling that intertemporal stories about Homo sapiens interacting with any earlier species, or even earlier time in history, all contain some fraud or slavery elements.)

Here the only thing remotely criminal is, arguably, the richest benefiting from Rabbit and his ilk going into the past to retrieve things that're lost to history by idiotic violence, sheer human stupidity, or Earth's natural processes (eg, earthquakes or fires). I'm not squeamish enough about this to give the book a black mark. I *am* squeamish about young, hot Helen being Rabbit's nemesis and Doctor PJ being his girlfriend, because absolutely nothing can be left un-romance-ified and of course that means heterosexual. Ugh. There went a half-star. (Though, to be fair, there are hints that Rabbit himself might be, um, heteroflexible.)

The other half-star disappeared because, though I liked the richly detailed world of 536 Constantinople a lot, I'd've liked more people instead of labels talking. It feels more like infidumping when I have no idea who "the customs official" or any of the other so-yclept faceless ones are. Still, four stars is the absolute minimum a book with this ending could possibly receive. Even moreso because, if this isn't a series-starter, I'll eat my hat for breakfast without ketchup.

I'll be right here waiting for more Rabbit. Without a ketchup bottle.

INTO SIBERIA: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, a sort of anti-travelogue

INTO SIBERIA: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia
GREGORY J. WALLANCE
St. Martin's Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a book that ranks with the greatest adventure stories, Gregory Wallance’s Into Siberia is a thrilling work of history about one man’s harrowing journey and the light it shone on some of history’s most heinous human rights abuses.

In the late nineteenth century, close diplomatic relations existed between the United States and Russia. All that changed when George Kennan went to Siberia in 1885 to investigate the exile system and his eyes were opened to the brutality Russia was wielding to suppress dissent.

Over ten months Kennan traveled eight thousand miles, mostly in horse-drawn carriages, sleighs or on horseback. He endured suffocating sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter. His interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed how Russia ran on the fuel of inflicted pain and fear. Prisoners in the mines were chained day and night to their wheelbarrows as punishment. Babies in exile parties froze to death in their mothers’ arms. Kennan came to call the exiles’ experience in Siberia a “perfect hell of misery.”

After returning to the United States, Kennan set out to generate public outrage over the plight of the exiles, writing the renowned Siberia and the Exile System. He then went on a nine-year lecture tour to describe the suffering of the Siberian exiles, intensifying the newly emerging diplomatic conflicts between the two countries which last to this day.

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My Review: Russia always seems to have vicious, cruel, authoritarian governments. George Kennan documented the horrifying repressions of the tsarist regime of Alexander III, father of the ill-fated Nicholas II. The adventurous man whose trip through Siberia Author Wallance is epitomizing first went to Siberia, governed by our then-close ally Russia, to lay a telegraph line across the country beginning in 1864 and eventually have it reach Western Europe. There was an Atlantic cable to England, but the Atlantic has these terrible, damaging things called "hurricanes" every so often, and then there's that big line of volcanoes up the middle of it that periodically erupts here and there...think Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull, 2010...so it has always made sense to have a backup.

Kennan spent a couple years doing the work, and was in love with Siberia by the end of it. The US and Russia, after a long period of close ties that peaked after we bought Alaska from them in 1867, began getting terrible reports about the political prisoners being abused in Siberian prisons. Kennan, by now a professional journalist, was widely thought to be the best possible person to investigate the situation on behalf of the US. He was vocal in his love for Siberia. He said publicly that he felt the complaints of terrible conditions were unlikely to be true...prisoners' families could join them there, after all!

Kennan and artist George Albert Frost traveled through the tsarist penal system, documenting conditions as they found them. Kennan wrote an eleven hundred-page exposé of the horrors they witnessed; Frost's drawings and photographs were included. Frost himself suffered a breakdown—what we would call today PTSD—and really was never quite the same again.

Kennan never lost his love for Siberia and its people but he became an implacable detractor of the Imperial Russian government. He had the evidence to back his outrage and disgust up. He devoted his next decade to a lecture tour enlightening audiences to the facts of what was euphemistically called "the Exile System" of political repression. When, decades later, the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, Kennan famously said that "the Russian leopard has not changed his spots."

I read this fascinating history of events I'd had only a passing awareness of in the context of Kennan's report to Woodrow Wilson about the Bolsheviks and his subsequent criticism of the Wilson Administration's pusillanimous response to them. His 1885 trip was touched on, but I now know why he was tasked by Wilson with preparing the ignored report. This book, not at all a long read, brings the full awfulness of Kennan and Frost's experiences to life. It is nothing short of gut-wrenching at times. It is extremely carefully footnoted and supplied with an admirable bibliography. I believe Author Wallance has done everything except invent time travel to bring us the best report of the facts possible. His contextualization was emotionally honest, but not of the sort that leads me to mutter, "don't try so hard."

I recommend it highly...but with the warning that delicate fleurs who don't enjoy details of physical cruelty should pass right by. I did, to be honest, feel as though these facts were rather more abundant than was strictly necessary. I had a half-star knocked off for feeling like I was being knocked in the teeth. As Frost's art exists, I wanted to see it, or some of the photos, just to see the realities behind the descriptions of the place itself, though not the abuses!

Not always an easy read, but a wonderfully immersive and interesting historical light on a country whose past binds it to the US.

FOLLOWING CAESAR: From Rome to Constantinople, the Pathways That Planted the Seeds of Empire, armchair travel with the best kind of guide

FOLLOWING CAESAR: From Rome to Constantinople, the Pathways That Planted the Seeds of Empire
JOHN KEAHEY
St. Martin's Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A travel narrative following three ancient roads and looking at more than two thousand years of history of Ancient Rome through the modern eye.

In 66 B.C., young, ambitious Julius Caesar, seeking recognition and authority, became the curator of the Via Appia. He borrowed significant sums to restore the ancient highway. It was a way to curry favor from Roman citizens in villages along the route, built from Rome to Brindisi between 312-191 B.C. He succeeded and rapidly grew in popularity. After achieving greatness in Rome and the far reaches of Gaul, he led armies along this road to battle enemies in Roman civil wars. And then, across the Adriatic Sea, he joined Via Appia's sister road, the Via Egnatia that began in today's Albania. Other armies followed these two roads that eventually connected Rome to Byzantium, today's Istanbul. Octavian, who became, in 27 B.C., Rome's first emperor, and his friend and later enemy Mark Antony traveled portions of both roads to defeat Caesar's murderers Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in eastern Macedonia. The great Roman statesman Cicero, the Roman poet Homer, the historian Virgil and many other notables traveled along one or both of these roads. In the first century of the Roman Empire in the earliest years of Christianity, the apostles Peter and Paul traversed portions of them. Pilgrims, seeking salvation in far-away Jerusalem, followed them as well throughout much of the Middle Ages. In the early second century A.D., the emperor Trajan charted a new coastal route between Benevento and Brindisi, later called the Via Traiana.

Today, short stretches of the original three roads can be seen in the ruins of ancient Roman cities, now preserved as archaeological wonders, and through the countryside near, and sometimes under, modern highways. Following those routes is the purpose of treading along the path that Caesar and so many others took over the early centuries. Modern eyes, seeing through the mists of more than two thousand years of history, lead the traveler along these three roads coursing through six countries between Rome and Istanbul. It is a journey full of adventure, discovery, and friendship―one one worth taking.

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My Review: I enjoy history for itself, and the many present-day echoes of historical events just add texture to my pleasure. This historical-tourism book was as deeply involving to me as a standard historical narrative because the conceit...following the Roman roads...is my idea of a great adventure vacation. The author was my guide on this escape from home. It worked as well as anything could because I knew I was in experienced hands (he has written four other books on touring Italy as a history buff.)

While I was very interested in his veteran-journalist's observations of the world traversed by the Roman roads he then traversed himself, and by his reports of his companions' responses to the modern world as well as the archaeology of the paths they traveled together, I was very disappointed that the book contained NO maps or photos.

Don't let that lapse stop you from enjoying the informed, intelligent voice of this forty-five-year veteran reporter as he shares his observations of the world he's moving through. His lifelong fascination with Italy and Rome (men really *are* obsessed with Rome!) gives him a very full view of the countries and regions he takes us through. This book is one of those rare books that, just as a reading experience, solely for the way the author builds an image and creates a simile, is a pleasure to read.

That his trip in Turkey, Asia Minor that was, coincided with COVID and its joys was very evocative for him. Plenty of plagues to meditate on. His religious ruminations are interesting to my deeply, faithfully atheist self...the road network of ancient Rome, and its internal postal connections enabled thereby, are largely responsible for the spread of the religion all across the empire. (There were christians in Pompeii...they found a ROTAS square there! By 79AD there were christians in Italy!)

I do want to mention that the "Caesar" of the title is not Julius; remember that Caesar was a title during the empire, and Trajan, whose Via Traiana is followed, was also a Caesar.

Self-gifting for a lovely time on #Booksgiving, as you settle down in your favorite reading spot, a beverage and a snack close at hand...Italy is involved, there is going to be food talk...and immerse yourself in a part of the world that could not possibly be richer in cultural highlights.

One star off for the absence of photos and/or illustrations.

PROJECT HAIL MARY, a true Andy Weir-fest ***SPOILERS***

PROJECT HAIL MARY
ANDY WEIR
Del Rey Books
$14.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY 2021 BEST BOOK FOR ADULTS RECOMMENDATION!

WINNER OF THE SCIENCE-FICTION NOVEL 2021 DRAGON AWARD!

The Publisher Says: Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that's been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it's up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance.

Part scientific mystery, part dazzling interstellar journey, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian—while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.

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My Review: There is absolutely no chance that I will not write something, I can't be sure what, that will piss off some delicate fleur of a spoilerphobe. This entire review is herewith declared to be a SPOILER ZONE

SPOILERS AHEAD

SPOILERS AHEAD

SPOILERS AHEAD

SERIOUSLY

SPOILERS AHEAD

SERIOUSLY

SPOILERS AHEAD

On your own head be it from here on. You've been warned and I do not want to hear a peep from you.

Okay. We're in media res with a man who has amnesia and, blessedly, is a scientist capable of working out that he's on a space ship. He isn't at all sure why he is where he is, has no idea who he is, and is in wherever this spaceship is with two dead people. That, my olds, is a fine, fine way to start a book.

The man is being tended by machinery. The machinery is hooked to a computer that wants to know his name, and asks him things like "What is two plus two," and won't *tell* him anything! He needs to remember stuff, to work on what the problem of his self-ness presents in the space he find that self-ness. As he moves through his space, as he eats and drinks and eliminates, he recovers himself bit by bit.

The Earth is dying. Like, overnight the Earth is dying...and it isn't humanity's doing. The Sun is dimming. A lot. And really, really, really fast...in less time than it takes to raise a kid, the Sun will fall below the energy output needed to sustain the ecosystems we need to eat and breathe properly.

Quite the conundrum, no? And this is no way resembles the present climate-change crisis! Nay nay nay! This is science FICTION, y'all.

So, as those who read The Martian will recall, there is hope for a good outcome until the very very last second...and even then there's always someone who can MacGyver up some-damn-thing that ain't elegant but it'll work. In this case, it's a woman named Stratt (she has a first name, and she's a doctor, but call her Stratt from the beginning because believe me it fits) who is given the powers of what the Roman Republic called a Dictator and the Greeks called a Tyrant to extra-politically cope with solving this unprecedented and way-beyond-urgent crisis. That's the simple truth: Working inside a political system would doom us to extinction. So Stratt sets about finding the people who can do the job of solving the Earth's terminal diagnosis.

Enter Ryland Grace—a name! he's remembered his name! He's a former rising star turned enfant terrible of evolution science...his "kiss-my-ass" paper about how "The Goldilocks Zone is for Idiots" ensured no August Academic Institution ever hired him...and now Stratt wants him to work on the subject of the apparently living thing that is somehow or another ?eating? the Sun.

Him. Dr. Failed Grace, the unemployable bad, bad boy, is the one and only person Stratt wants to figure out the life cycle of what we're now calling "astrophage." And what the hey, it's an Andy Weir book, let's make sure he knows the entire future of the planet relies on his success. So, no pressure, you know?

There's a sweet spot in science fiction, really we need to stop calling it that, where its fantasy roots (there is no FTL and there can never be; also, "gravity" ain't happenin' on space stations and the like) drop so far behind it just doesn't matter any more. Disbelief is suspended like a sacrificial god on a tree (real or artificial). Slightly more fun than that is a book that accepts science, does only a little violence to it (more about this anon) and makes the reader accept the author's expertise by simply overwhelming us with checkable details. (Have Google open, boomers and Xers; tap frequently, young'uns.) This is, like the aforementioned Martian, one of those cases.

Much hard work for Grace results in his cracking the problem of what the hell is eating the Sun, figuring out what it can do and how to make that part of the solution to the problem of what it's doing, and then teaching some astronauts with a rare genetic marker (that Grace also remembers he was tested for...does he have it?) how to use the information he's so incredibly lucky as to be able to learn so they can go to the closest star Earthlings can see where this stunningly awful thing is NOT happening to the star.

Again...Andy Weir book...the monkey wrenches arrive clutching monkey wrenches. A Truly Horrible Thing happens and there needs to be a truly terrible solution enacted, which Stratt does. This does not get told until almost the end of the book. I won't spoiler it. But it is a TRULY TERRIBLE SOLUTION and you will be rocked to your foundations.

Back to Dr. Grace. He's awake, bits of himself are floating back into his head, and while I'm usually against heavy use of flashbacks because if they were that important why the hell didn't you start the book there to begin with? I was a little hmmf-y about the structural choice for a while. I realized, though, as we were moving forward in the story as it is, that these moments did not *just* slow the narrative momentum (though they did do that), they also gave me insight into Ryland Grace that wouldn't have been as clear in any other structure.

But now it is anon. The scientific violence begins when Grace detects another ship around his target. It isn't a backup Earth ship. It is an ALIEN ship.

I was willing to skip gaily past astrophage...every story needs an antagonist. The way Grace came to be a failed academic was by positing that Life does not need liquid water, so SOMEthing was going to arise that made this relevant. Fine fine fine, I got it, this is a *really* cool speculation and the waterless life hypothesis makes at least some sense given the extremeophiles we already know exist on Earth now. Plus it meant there was a reason to have this funny exchange between Grace and Stratt:

"How did you do it? What killed {the astrophage}?" {Stratt asked}

"I penetrated the outer cell membrane with a nanosyringe." {Grace replied}

"You poked it with a stick?"

"No!" I said. "Well. Yes. But it was a scientific poke with a very scientific stick."

This is why I enjoy Andy Weir's books. Say what you like about the science, say what you will about the plots and characters and mechanics...this is a writer with full command of the Absurd and the resulting perspective in how to deploy it to best advantage.

But aliens. Sentient aliens. Alive right now in our galactic neighborhood. Like us; so like us that we can, with some work communicate and understand what is being communicated. And yet enough UNlike us that we haven't had so much as a whisper of a hint as to their presence, nor they of ours.

Yeah...no.

But then! Then!! There comes the "are-you-effin-kidding-me-with-this" moment: The alien he meets is a brilliant engineer (which Grace is not) and possesses some miracle material that withstands stunning pressures, heats, etc etc and doesn't ever fail! Or, as I've always called it, "handwavium"—"no no, Bob, as you know your puny titanium is no match for my indestructible handwavium, so we will use its enormous superiority to do the thing."

Ugh.

Well, okay, it's not my favorite item on the menu...but I shall go with it and trust that the story Author Weir is telling me will make my occasional headache worth it. (Unlike what happened in Artemis of which least said, soonest mended.) And you know what? It was worth it. I invested in the character of Rocky the Eridian (from an exoplanet super-Earth close to 40 Eridani, hence the demonym...toponym?) from the get-go. Yes yes yes, aliens aren't real, at least not ones near us in time and/or space or the Fermi Paradox would already be answered, roll with it! Rocky is, without exaggeration, the coolest guy in Known Space, and if all the other Eridians are anything like him, I hope their Party Bus is on the way already. Their handwavium is awesome!

These two Boy Scouts get on the job of figuring out why the star they're at isn't being eaten, unlike Sol and 40 Eridani; they do the job; they make a breakthrough that, let me tell you, had me on the edge of my seat. Cool science stuff bursts from the pages...Grace does a lot of biological fun stuff (though I confess that parts of me clenched at the words Krebs cycle) and even does my blood pressure the favor of eliding the serious math bits. There is enough of the good ol' info-dumping about it to keep me happy, but nowhere near enough to cause eyegraines.

We're treated to several pulse-pounding disasters that Rocky and Grace fix together, and the boys...we have no Earthly analogue for how Eridians reproduce, the subject of Rocky's gender gets solved by Grace calling him male and (in an appropriate moment) his mate back on Erid (Grace's name for Rocky's homeworld; a great deal more euphonious than "40 Eridani b" innit?) the human genderfluid name "Adrian," and merrily we roll along...seem to have the salvation of Earth and Erid solved. Parting is now the hard thing they will need to do. You don't work closely with someone who has saved your life and your species without feelings of strong friendship developing!

Andy Weir book, remember?

I won't go into the ending. I will say that I was absolutely riveted and deeply invested in the solution, because there was a deeply, deeply revealing character flaw foregrounded within Grace that made his actions in this new and unpredictable situation uncertain...and while I was certain they would turn out more or less as they did, I was also unsure if it would be a bitter, bittersweet, or simply too sweet ending.

I really strongly encourage you to go and get this book even if you don't like science fiction or even science. If I can get past my allergy to handwavium applied by sentient aliens, you can set aside a little genre prejudice.

Whether at a bookery of your choosing or a library near you, get yourself this tale into your mind and let it make its story-pearls for your pleasure.

11/22/63: A Novel...a wish-fulfillment...and a warning

11/22/63
STEPHEN KING
Scribner
$10.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, THREE SHOTS RANG OUT IN DALLAS, PRESIDENT KENNEDY DIED, AND THE WORLD CHANGED. WHAT IF YOU COULD CHANGE IT BACK?

In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King—who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer—takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it.

It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away—a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life—like Harry’s, like America’s in 1963—turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there’s Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.

My Review: Review republished in observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination this week.

If you had the chance to change the course of history, would you? Would the consequences be what you hoped?

Jake Epping, 35, teaches high school English in Lisbon Falls, Maine, and cries reading the brain-damaged janitor's story of childhood Halloween massacre by their drunken father. On his deathbed, pal Al divulges a secret portal to 1958 in his diner back pantry, and enlists Jake to prevent the 11/22/1963 Dallas assassination of American President John F. Kennedy. Under the alias George Amberson, our hero joins the cigarette-hazed full-flavored world of Elvis rock 'n roll, Negro discrimination, and freeway gas guzzlers without seat belts. Will Jake lurk in impoverished immigrant slums beside troubled loner Lee Harvey Oswald, or share small-town friendliness with beautiful high school librarian Sadie Dunhill, the love of his life?

So does a modestly successful high-school English teacher with a bad, broken marriage to an alcoholic behind him, a future of great sameness before him, and a date with destiny that cannot be foreseen, step up? What happens to Jake is, he actually gets that chance to change the world. Seriously. No spoilers here, Jake gets a chance to make 11/22/63 just another date on the calendar Pope Julius invented for us. How? Through a little rabbit-hole in time that a friend of Jake's finds, uses, and tries to accomplish the salvation of Kennedy through the use of: Living from September 9, 1958, until he can get rid of Lee Harvey Oswald before November 22, 1963. But the past, you see, doesn't want to be changed. So the guy gets terminal cancer, comes home to 2011, and zaps Jake with the job of changing the future by changing the past.

Jake does. Boy, does he ever. Way big does he change the future.

Nothing in life is free. Remember the first time you heard that? Was it your mom or your dad who laid it on you? How hard did you kick against knowing it, and for how long?

Jake takes a week. I aged a hundred years in the week Jake took. So will you.

And that's all I'll say. Well, no, not all.

Every life has its losses, mine included. They're not so interesting to other people, of course, because folks are mostly interested in their own miseries and haven't got a lot of energy to spare for the troubles of others. Okay, fine; what fiction does is, it gives us a chance to have a catharsis, in the ancient Greek sense, the reason they invented plays and melodrama and tragedy and comedy. It was therapy to go to a play and scream and cry and howl with laughter. The whole point was to get it all out. Catharsis.

I experienced many moments of catharsis in reading this book. I was wrung dry of tears on several happy and several sad occasions. I relived the might-have-beens of my own little life. I redrew the contours of history a couple times, inspired by King's redrawings.

I was swept up in a story that I so wanted to be told, and I was completely aghast when it was over because I didn't want it to be over, and I didn't want the finality of the ending to step on my gouty toes the way I thought it would.

But, like so many before me, I stubbed my toe on the stair of King's story and said ouch, before I realized it was a stair. Stairs go up, or they go down, but you'll never know which in the darkness until you feel for the next one.

But the deal is, once you know which way you're going, you're already there, committed to the movement. Exactly, in other words, like living life.

This is why Stephen King is our own Mr. Dickens. I hate Dickens' bloated, boring prose and his tedious, ridiculous plots, but he and King both write the books that offer catharsis to the audience of the age. (Just for gods' sweet sake, quit trying to pretend Chuckles is still speaking to you! And those gawdawful dull Shakespeare plays, stop it! You know you hate 'em like the rest of us do!)

The ending of the story was, for this reader, a catharsis of epic proportions. I hate and envy Jake, I bleed inside for him, I want to comfort him and slug him. I am undone by jealousy for his last harmony between past and present. I want one, too.

I got it, my last harmony, and you might too, if you'll read the 840pp of exciting and fast-paced life in 11/22/63. Please do.

Today's Review Posts for 16 April 2013

It's an all-science Tuesday. Five memorable science/environmental issues titles:

THE VIEW FROM LAZY POINT well, let's say it gets better from here

WICKED PLANTS I may never stop scratching!

THE BIG NECESSITY time we stopped squirming and started talking about sewerage issues

THE LOST CITY OF Z adventure, discovery, death!!

HOW TO BUILD AN ANDROID the chronicle of the loss of PKD's head. Even odder than it sounds

Stop by and see what takes your fancy!

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