Genre: Short
Story Collection
Description:
“What if you had access to a time machine and could go back to visit a
deceased love... one more time. Would you?
In 1962, Bobby Newman’s Grandpa, a basement inventor, loses his wife
to cancer, then begins to lose his mind to grief. While tuning up his
not-yet-perfected time machine for one last visit with his wife, he ends up
going the wrong way... into the dystopian future of 2025. Inexplicably, he
sends the machine back.
Fourteen-year-old Bobby uses it to lead Mom and Dad on a mission to
find Grandpa and bring him back.
But Grandpa has other ideas...
This volume brings together five of Paul Clayton's most ambitious
stories to date, stories that juxtapose a familiar America of the very recent
past with ominous new versions of the country now coming into focus.
Clayton's concern is with ordinary people—their innate wisdom and
persistent foolishness, their capacity to do good or harm, and their
resiliency—with what happens when time travelers from the 1960s arrive in a
city dominated by criminal gangs and corrupt politicians, or when a woman opts
for a new procedure to avoid losing her cancer-ridden husband, or when a
soldier in Vietnam is granted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give his
elevator speech, or when a man, illegally alive, attempts to stay that way...
Clayton shows how people make choices that, collectively, point
civilization in new directions, be it toward forcible reclamation of vast
tracts of land as primeval wilderness or elimination of those deemed to be
nonproductive ‘useless eaters.’”
Author:
Paul Clayton is the author of several books ranging from historical
novels like his first, the award-winning Carol Melcher Goes to Vietnam,
to various subgenres of science fiction.
Appraisal:
The five short stories in this collection are each vastly different,
but paint a possible future that is … well, you can decide whether each of
these futures is good or not so good. These future worlds range from the almost-now,
when a family from 1962 uses grandpa’s time machine to chase him all the way to
2025. This one definitely hits close to home for the obvious reasons. It (more
or less literally) feels like it is happening right now, tomorrow at the latest,
as it looks at some of the dystopian possibilities of our current world.
The other stories feel like they’re a bit more into the future, but
not too far and, just like the first one, these stories get you thinking about
the direction the world is headed, or at least potentially could be. While the
future is far from predictable, what I look for in this kind of science fiction
is exactly what is delivered here, some visions of the future to trigger my
imagination and get me pondering the world of the future.
Buy now from: Amazon US Amazon UK
FYI:
Some adult language.
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues.
Rating: *****
Five Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate word count: 45-50,000 words
1 comment:
Big Al, thank you for your review. I appreciate it very much!
Post a Comment