Rewrite
Loops in the Timescape
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
In this thematic sequel to Gregory Benford’s award-winning bestseller Timescape, a history professor finds that he is able travel back to 1968, the year he was sixteen—here, he finds a slew of mentors with the same ability, including Robert Heinlein, Albert Einstein, and Philip K. Dick and becomes a successful Hollywood screenwriter until some wicked time travelers try to subvert him.
It’s 2002, and Charlie, in his late forties, is a bit of a sad-sack professor of history going through an unpleasant divorce. While flipping the cassette of an audiobook he gets into a car accident with a truck, and wakes up, fully aware as his adult mind, in his sixteen-year-old body in 1968.
Charlie does the thing we all imagine: he takes what he remembers of the future and uses it for himself in his present, the past. He becomes a screenwriter, anticipating the careers of Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, and then, in a 1980s life of excess, he dies, and wakes up again in his bedroom at sixteen in 1968.
Charlie realizes things he didn’t see the first time: that there are others like him, like Albert Einstein, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein. In fact, there is a society of folks who loop through time to change the world for their agenda. Now, Charlie knows he has to do something other than be self-indulgent and he tries to change one of the events of 1968 in this clever thriller.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Physicist Benford returns to the science of time travel first charted in his 1992 novel Timescape (coauthored by Hilary Benford) with this sometimes puerile but otherwise accessible look at specialized scientific theories and the emotional and moral quandaries they create for humanity. It's 2002, and disillusioned history professor Charlie Moment has apparently died in a car accident. To his shock, Charlie awakens in 1968 with his memories and intellect intact in his 16-year-old body. Eager to rewrite his life, Charlie becomes a screenwriter. An encounter with Philip K. Dick shows him he is a "reincarnate," one of a group that includes Casanova and Einstein. They die and reappear in order to redirect history. Though desperate to correct the future, Charlie finds himself pursued through time by an all-too-familiar villain from his first past. Benford's blend of hard science, pop culture, and character study is entertaining, but the hypersexualization and commodification of women throughout the book, coupled with Charlie's own misogynistic outlook, make the story as a whole feel dated and disappointingly immature.
