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Review by Larry Woods
What happens to our present when you tamper with the past? In an immortal Lester del Rey story, time travelers who return to the Paleozoic era to hunt dinosaurs in fact kill only a butterfly by stepping on it, but the disappearance of that beautiful insect changes the entire world. Robert Heinlein seemingly wrote every possible variation of the time travel theme, and Robert Silvaberg wrote our time frame's greatest time travel short story, but now John Kessel may have topped all of them with his combination of themes from H.G. Wells to Mark Twain to Dr. Who to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Time travel and its implications have provided a rich vein of adventure, philosophy, and trouble.
In another fantastical love story gone wrong, Corrupting Dr. Nice (Tor, $24.95) relates the story of Owen Vannice and Wilma, Alma, Emma, Genevieve in Jerusalem in A.D. 40, Connecticut in A.D. 2063, and finally in Jerusalem in A.D. 41. It's an old story often told, but ever intriguing when written with imagination and style by author John Kessel. Due acknowledgments are made in this story to those literary masters and their renditions, but Kessel's time as master of the time travel story has come in this powerful and entertaining comedic novel.
Space adventure in the twenty-first century is a noble although hazardous enterprise in Catch the Lightning (Tor, $24.95), the second hard science/science fiction novel by physicist Catherine Asaro.
Catch the Lightning returns to the intergalactic Skolian Empire created in author Asaro's first novel Primary Inversion to tell the story of Tina, a 17-year-old Hispanic woman from California with bio-enhanced memory who is sent into the future as the focus of a byzantine plot to destroy the Empire. Perhaps it should have been a warning that her friend Althor, who claimed to be a futuristic fighter pilot, had eyes with no pupils, no irises, no whites, that would shimmer and become "vivid purple." Using genetics, psionics, cybernetic enhancements, this is a universe of intriguing characters. Avoiding the usual problem common to many hard science fiction novels, author Asaro succeeds in developing the reader's empathy for her characters and their future.
Larry Woods is an avid collector of science fiction. He is an attorney in Nashville.
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