Time travel is hard to get right. It bristles with paradoxes, whichever way you travel, to the past or the future, and they’re the great fun in reading time travel stories. But if you ignore them or present them illogically or frivolously, it can ruin the story, at least for me.
Cosmain provides an ingenious treatment of these paradoxes in a 500-page novel I couldn’t put down, and along the way, provides a breathtaking ride, replete with philosophic conundrum, inspiring and heartbreaking characters, and a scientific rigor right down to the DNA. Easily the best novel I’ve read not only this year, but probably in the past decade.
In the year 1996, David Singh, a time traveller from the future, coaxes a group of experts to the desolate farmstead of Blackwell's Rest in remote Australia. He achieves this by showing each recruit an object which convinces them beyond doubt to follow him.
Their mission is to construct a time machine using advanced wormhole-generating and quantum computing technology sent to them from the future. However, as the group begin their task, they learn a grim truth.
Events of the past and future are unalterable. Free will is an illusion. Travelling back in time with knowledge of one's own future,…
I was born in the Bronx and lived there with my wife and kids until we moved to the suburbs in my mid-40s. I swam with the carrots in the water at Orchard Beach, roamed the NY Botanical Gardens, went to Yankee games, sang harmony under the El on Allerton Avenue and White Plains Road, and have been a professor at Fordham University since 1998.
William Helmrecih, who succumbed to COVID-19 in 2020, left us this wonderful walking guide to the Bronx, in which he goes into neighborhoods and side streets and nooks and crannies even I didn’t know about.
A neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide to New York City's northern borough, from the award-winning author of The New York Nobody Knows
Bill Helmreich walked every block of New York City-some six thousand miles-to write the award-winning The New York Nobody Knows. Later, he re-walked most of the Bronx to create this one-of-a-kind walking guide to the city's northern borough, from Mott Haven to City Island. Drawing on hundreds of conversations he had with residents during his block-by-block journey through this fascinating, diverse, and underappreciated borough, Helmreich highlights hundreds of facts and points of interest that you won't find in any other guide.…
I rode the New York City subways on a daily or more frequent basis as a kid and through my 20s. There’s a culture all its own on those subway platforms and trains – do you hold the door open, and how long for people rushing to board in rush hour? Do you eat a slice of pizza on the train? Do you complain when someone squeezes into the seat you’re sitting in?
R. J. Nobleman treats us to the treasure trove of his own experience in this under- and above-ground world, and will have you laughing, shaking your head in disbelief, and even sometimes crying.
"Well, I hope you enjoyed the stories—all are TRUE—that I wanted to share with you in this book! I promise to keep tabs on things that occur from this point on so that I can put them into the ‘sequel’. Like I stated in the Preface, anyone can write a book of this kind—about the crazy, exotic experiences they have experienced or witnesses on subways, buses, cruises, tour buses, elevators, and the like. It’s just a matter of putting your experiences to paper, or computer files. Throughout this book, I made references to the fact that many people who also…
It's 1996, and in this alternate history novel about the Beatles, disc jockey Pete Fornatale travels downtown to Grand Central Terminal and finds the world of music that he inhabits is very different. John Lennon is alive and well, and The Beatles never disbanded. The short story this novel is based upon won the Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fiction in 2023, and was a Finalist for the Sidewise Award (short form) for Alternate History 2022.
