In Smith’s SF novel, a college student finds herself experiencing increasingly bizarre incidents involving distortions of time.

At the University of Colorado, Boulder, Tiffani Taylor is a student resident advisor in the undergraduate dorms. One day, she lapses into a state of altered consciousness in which she observes an empty landscape, passes out in public, and is briefly aided by a mysterious older woman. An adoptee, Tiffani has dark skin, an unknown ethnic background, and a diagnosis of ADHD; she is consumed by curiosity over the incident and what implications may lurk in her genes. As a strong support group of friends and classmates helps her investigate, over successive days Tiffani’s weird episodes continue, usually in moments of emotional duress. In the course of these incidents, she appears to move at super-speed relative to her environment (“And then, it seemed like I ran like the wind or something even faster than the wind. I took a step, and the rest of the room slowed to a crawl. I took a second step, and everything but me stopped”), and catapult back and forth in time (making it a struggle to maintain continuity and hold on to her valued RA job). Nobody mentions Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), with its hapless hero “unstuck in time,” but Tiffani’s faithful friends make inquiries at the school’s physics department, and these detours take the plot into the universe (multiverse?) of the author’s previous books, including Reality Alternatives (2016) and Temporal Dreams (2016), with guest appearances from their own dimension-hopping characters. This nimble narrative maintains a flighty tone, even with mild elements of danger and unease. Near the end, things really take off with a madcap cascade of competing timelines, alternate realities, and duplicate Tiffanis. Smith, a physics researcher and blogger, concludes the book with a short piece on contemporary quantum-physics theories of multiple realities. While this novel is the first in a series, it can be read as a standalone story.

A pleasing, tongue-in-cheek SF romp through mischief in the multiverse.

A physics graduate student in a future Colorado wracked by climate change disasters faces multiple dangers when she attempts momentous experiments in clean-energy production and time reversal.

Smith offers this SF novel as a prequel to her parallel-universes adventure Kat Cubed (2016). The setting is an unnamed Colorado college campus in March 2098. Kathy Garcia is a 27-year-old grad student, part of a group of brainy folks recruited from all over the world. They are hoping to reverse the catastrophic effects of climate change by achieving fusion-based clean energy in a magnetic-field reactor called a “Tokamak.” But a freak avalanche (one of numerous altered-weather disasters) sweeps through the physics building, killing some of Kathy’s colleagues and devastating the technology—which, in an academic milieu destabilized by pandemics, wildfires, hunger, economic malaise, and increased mortality, was not the best anyway. Improvising with computers and gear salvaged from a nearby, relatively undamaged neutrino studies laboratory, Kathy and her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Jake Moretti—and Ellen, the protagonist’s helpful, phone-based software, personal assistant app who seems to be evolving into a true artificial intelligence—seek to continue the project. But they encounter unexpected opposition and professional jealousy from other members of the international research team. As the stakes escalate to the truly life-threatening, Kathy makes the amazing discovery of a Tokamak side effect that could effectively serve as a microcosmic form of time travel and a vehicle for reaching out to earlier generations for help. Readers already acquainted with Kat Cubed will know that the ultimate result is three alternating, dystopian-future realities, all afflicted to varying degrees by climate change. This prelude can be enjoyed as more or less a stand-alone even if readers don’t know a Tokamak from an autoclave. The author is a scientist in real life and a prolific author of largely whimsical romps incorporating concepts of physics and probability. Smith delivers a nicely casual voice, a hero whose concessions to swear words are minor things likeGaia, yikes!and flooding (instead of the other f-word), and highly advanced science in doses manageable and nonpedantic enough for general readers.

An engaging tale featuring cli-fi, college intrigue, romance, and particle physics.

In Smith’s SF series installment, an interplanetary actor/singer/rogue faces warlike cephalopod aliens using faster-than-light technology.

This series relates the zesty, comedic, and rather torturously plotted capers of Jack Jones, a crewman aboard the starship Shakespeare. The crew poses as Earth’s cultural ambassadors, performing human music and classic plays for various alien species, but in reality, they’re spies/troubleshooters looking out for humankind’s interests. Jack and the Shakespeare team were slow to realize that their faster-than-light drives are part of a fiendish plot by their inventors, the octopuslike Quihiri. After an “upgrade” issued from the Quihiri homeworld, the drives begin to fail, leaving many alien civilizations suddenly helpless before xenophobic Quihiri armies. The opening plunks the reader right down in the middle of all this, and over the course of the book, Jack tries to unite with Earth’s forces and share intel to thwart the villains without being separated from his Shakespeare friends in the fog of combat. His new compatriots—including Max, a superintelligent talking dog—are less than open-minded about Jack’s occasional Quihiri allies and unconventional methods. Readers unfamiliar with this complicated series should know that Jack is a young clone of the lawless original Jack (“Old-Jack”), who languishes in jail; the clone inherited Old-Jack’s cover job and his ship-captain romantic partner, Gina. A semi-endearing facet of the material is that the new Jack is truly a lover, not a fighter, who tries to solve things with kisses rather than gunfire. Early on, Jack meets Jax Jones, who looks and acts exactly like him—which oddly isn’t fully addressed until the closing pages. There are numerous quotes from Shakespeare as well as a famous Star Wars line and Cats lyrics. The author is a physicist at the University of Colorado, and she ably uses her expertise to spike her fiction with quantum theory. In a brief afterword, she also acknowledges her debt to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy cycle, which readers will notice—especially in the detail of improbability-powered star travel. Jack’s larkish antics may also captivate fans of Harry Harrison’s classic Bill the Galactic Hero series.

A frisky, if somewhat convoluted, SF satire with some Shakespearean knavery.

In Smith’s (A Jack in the Dark, 2018, etc.) latest sci-fi series installment, physics professor Madison Martin’s former student may be using her reality-bending technique for large-scale vandalism.

In the last book in this series, Boulder, Colorado–based college instructor Martin grappled with villains who misused her breakthrough technique, “q-lapsing.” It involves using mind power, adrenaline, and quantum physics to alter reality to a chosen outcome—such as disintegrating the door to a bank vault. Martin’s expertise resulted in her becoming a special consultant to the police and FBI, tentatively training lawmen to use her process for a range of tasks. Now she, as the “Quantum Cop,” must assist them again following another outbreak of mischief—this time involving the eradication of a mining ghost town and the dissolution of a highway. The apparent perpetrator is Luke Bacalli, Martin’s foremost ex-student-gone-bad, whom she thought she’d killed in a quantum duel. Despite the fact that the material universe is at risk, Smith’s tone remains chirpy and playful, and in side plots, Martin’s long-standing love affair with faculty colleague Andro Rivas cools and her attraction to police officer Ben Willis heats up. The motivation for the large-scale destruction isn’t explained, and the behavior of the villains, who alternate between being maniacal and panicked, seems inconsistent, but these questions may be addressed in a future installment. Q-lapsing, in narrative terms, feels very much like spellcasting despite repeated assertions that it’s all based in science (“I concentrated and collapsed the wavefunction, instantiating the reality in which I’d followed this particular improbability to its source”). As is her habit, Smith, a real-life physicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, concludes this flighty tale with a lucid nonfiction physics essay; this time around, it’s about neutrinos even though they only have a small cameo in the text.

A semiconclusive entry in a lightweight science-minded series.

In this second installment of a series, a rakish adventurer must unravel the riddle of alien technology while aboard a spaceship on an Earth cultural mission.

First-person narrator Jack Jones Jr.—actually a clone—is a randy, sybaritic youth, ready for lovemaking with all genders and species on the starship Shakespeare. The crew members are supposed to be Earth cultural ambassadors to various alien races, performing the classics in the ship’s theaters, but they are in reality conducting espionage on humanity’s behalf. In Smith’s (A Jack by Any Other Name, 2017, etc.) earlier novel, the protagonist discovered that his superspy clone sire—the original, 50-ish Jack Jones, presumed dead—had actually gone rogue and perpetrated all sorts of perfidy. With that mystery supposedly solved and the villain incarcerated on Earth, young Jack (and the book, for a while) feels a bit aimless, with little to do but have free-wheeling sex with gym-toned Shakespeare crewmates. But intrigue arises anyway. Jack is briefly abducted by an unidentified antagonist, and there is much unknown about the mysterious faster-than-light drive spheres that power the Shakespeare and other interstellar crafts lucky to get them. The machines are the result of shadowy ET trading and dealing. Nobody seems to know exactly how the FTL tech originates or works—except maybe nefarious “Old-Jack.” Smith’s lighthearted sequel continues her sci-fi Space Operetta series. The author is generous with the Shakespeare quotes (and, in places, David Bowie lyrics). As the tale grows more convoluted, though, Smith has to fall back repeatedly on a silly deus ex machina involving Jack’s “special skills,” a sort of quantum link he has with certain FTL drives that allows the clever clone to think unlikely events (like narrow escapes) into existence as needed. Even with this resourceful superpower, the smug, self-satisfied hero is on the shallow side, his distinguishing features including that he’s ever keen for rolls in the hay (or whatever) and he sometimes shows up for business naked. An abrupt cliffhanger ending announces this installment as a midchapter of the saga. While that’s a bit of a letdown, there should be genre readers prepared to keep up with the Joneses, much as a previous generation followed Keith Laumer’s dashing galactic diplomat, Jame Retief. 

A satisfactory sci-fi sequel that promises more cues to send in the clones.

In this sci-fi novel, a revolutionary new technology has unforeseen consequences as a young scientist creates a “quantum” computer that endows her with unusually good luck.

To earn her master’s degree, youthful Ella Hote, a researcher in the U.S. heartland, has built a suitcase-sized quantum computer. This heavy-duty calculating machine features microchips that, at the subatomic level, can occupy exponential states of being, not just the usual ones or zeroes. But there seems to be a macrocosmic side effect to the quantum components of the computer. When it is switched on and made to calculate, incidents befall Ella that seem especially well-timed and fortuitous—fluky hookups with handsome guys, a job offer, a casino jackpot, and a rainstorm ending a drought. But Ella notices that with each windfall for her comes bad fortune for somebody else—even injury and death at the casino (At one point, she reflects: “I might have been sort of lucky. It seems like people near me might be sort of unlucky”). Ella eventually theorizes that “luck” in the universe must be balanced out like any other force and that a q-computer in the wrong hands could spell disaster. And straightaway, hers gets stolen. If you use Carl Sagan as the benchmark of a scientist-turned–sci-fi author, then real-life physicist Smith (Reality Alternatives, 2016, etc.) might rate somewhat at the light-element end of the periodic table. Still, her novels and series that riff on quantum mechanics and Erwin Schrödinger strangeness are fun little mind tricks and thought experiments, part George Gamow at his more fanciful crossed with chick lit. Smith’s latest offering might be compared to a Rod Serling teleplay except it isn’t even that edgy. A good chunk of the seriocomic narrative takes place in gambling and card-playing milieus (there is only one passage of scientific jargon, plus a short nonfiction essay on principles of quantum computing at the end). But the material is more on the easygoing side of the spectrum rather than a thriller. The wrap-up suggests a variation on It’s a Wonderful Life with quantum mechanics replacing Clarence the angel.

Entertaining, femalecentric, escapist reading for poolside.

A murdered secret agent is cloned and sent back to the stars to undertake more missions—including investigating his own killing—in the first installment of Smith’s (Kat Cubed, 2016) Space Operetta series.

Fifty-year-old Jack Jones was a spacegoing entertainer—not only Earth’s greatest singer, but also its cultural ambassador to other civilizations in deep space, bringing them such things as Gilbert and Sullivan tunes. But while onboard the mighty starship Shakespeare with his wife, Gina, and a troupe of performers, Jones had another, more sinister role as an undercover assassin. After bullets cut him down, he’s quickly cloned by the Terran Cultural Committee—but in his downloaded memories, the last 32 years of recollections are somehow missing. Physically and mentally, he’s now a strapping, sexually active 18-year-old who must relearn his training and, if possible, solve his own murder. His masquerade as “Jack Junior,” his own long-lost son, doesn’t last long, though, especially with his baleful wife. Soon there are more mysterious deaths as the ship goes from planet to planet on a show circuit. Overall, Smith serves up a lot of sex, derring-do, and Shakespeare references in this pulpy sci-fi title. It’s certainly a lighthearted lark (complete with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shoutout), although it overdoes the adolescent humor, even if it is by design. In one twist, a faulty starship drive based on “quantum entanglement and improbabilities” may be causing unlikely events and out-of-character behavior—a cute idea but one that Douglas Adams hit first and better in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Still, there’s a great last-act reveal regarding Jack’s antagonist and even a concluding nonfiction essay on the physics used in the story, as polymath Smith has a doctorate in particle physics.

Skulduggery, sex, and Shakespeare abound in a sci-fi tale full of sound and fury, signifying fun.

In Smith’s (Reality Alternatives, 2016, etc.) sci-fi tale, an experiment opens portals to alternate universes and three variations of the same young woman struggle in environments warped by climate change.

The opening of this book lays out three permutations of the year 2100, after global warming has damaged Earth. “Universe 1” offers a scorched landscape where young, semiferal Kat Garcia scrounges for sustenance in the ruins with a few other survivors. In the more livable Colorado of “Universe 2,” college student Kaitlin Garcia anticipates a future with her meteorologist boyfriend while researching a remedy for climate change even as superstorms and rising sea levels batter the United States. In a police-state “Universe 3,” elite scientist Katherine Garcia aspires to create a machine that can generate limitless energy while she deals with swarming surveillance robots and pressure to join a government-mandated dating and breeding program. A quantum-energy fluke opens portals between the three realities. Now the triune heroines can not only communicate and assist one another, but also physically visit other universes—along with assorted lovers, persecutors, and pursuers. But the aftereffects of the rifts are starting to make the multiverse come apart at the seams. Although this isn’t a comedy, Smith delivers the sci-fi equivalent of a high-speed slamming-door stage play in the Lend Me a Tenor vein, full of scampering mix-ups, look-alike characters, and quick entrances and exits. As in such productions, things start off sedate but soon accelerate crazily. It’s an understatement to say that it’s tough keeping the characters, causes, and effects straight from universe to universe. Also, the plot relies increasingly on interventions of a sassy, deus ex machina artificial intelligence named Pandora, who learns to transcend universes and pull off godlike deliverance on demand. Despite the threat of Einsteinian, trans-dimensional total destruction, things wrap up a little too neatly. Overall, though, Smith, a physicist, effectively invests the tangled yarn with brio, imagination, and doses of real-life science.

A wheels-within-wheels yarn that isn’t perfect but sure takes readers for a spin.

In this sequel, a physics teacher becomes a prime suspect when a colleague’s death cues a new wave of crimes inspired by mental feats of quantum reality-bending.

Imagine if Janet Evanovich had given Stephanie Plum a science-teaching degree and you might have a handle on the series that began with Quantum Cop (2016). It’s been more than a year since young Boulder, Colorado, college instructor Madison Martin learned that with a little mind power, adrenaline, and physics, just about anyone can alter reality via “q-lapsing”: choosing a preferred outcome from quantum-uncertainty particle/wave duality. In practical terms, that means teleportation, transmutation of matter, telekinesis, and other wizardlike stuff (hard and fast ground rules of q-lapsing are weak at best). In the first book, a nationwide outbreak of “quantum crimes” resulted from a small number of Madison’s avaricious students misusing the talent. Now readers are told all of that has largely been forgotten or covered up (which seems almost as unlikely as q-lapse itself). Then a science colleague Madison didn’t even know turns up dead on campus, horribly murdered, and police suspect her. Meanwhile, Madison’s passionate faculty lover, Andro Rivas—whom she secretly taught q-lapse—has begun acting moody and distant without explanation. Is he a part of the crime? Are the undergraduate villains who were defeated in Quantum Cop somehow back again? Will the hunky new policeman with a stellar body who’s on the case exert a sexier gravitational pull on Madison than unpredictable Andro? There are some clever red herrings and feints here, if perhaps one too many trips to the well of characters and incidents from the first novel. Demarcations between rom-com silliness and the deadly serious are often as indistinct as the ones separating particles and waveforms. Smith (Kat Cubed, 2016, etc.) is a physicist in real life (following up the narrative with a short essay on quantum-mechanical weirdness), and she skillfully flavors the far-fetched stuff with references to such concepts as eigenvalues and the Bose-Einstein Condensate. The temptation is to say that things flip between the quirky and the quarky. But sci-fi fans who like their chick-lit thrillers blended with a Ph.D. should find the formula enjoyable.

A light and whimsical sci-fi whodunit with a college campus backdrop.

A college physicist uses computer technology to enter a parallel world in which she has a great family and an improved personal life—but also telekinetic superpowers that put all their lives at risk.

Smith (The Conservation of Luck, 2017, etc.), a physicist, here more or less asks: What is real life anyway? Thus she launches a series starring heroine Chloe Carsen, who is also Chloe Phillipson. Chloe C. is a science researcher/instructor at a university in Missoula, Montana, using virtual-reality technology to spend more and more of her time spectating on the goings-on in an alternative universe. In that cosmos, there exists a Missoula in which—as Chloe Phillipson—she is still a physics teacher, but one with a great “househusband,” Aidan, and two young sons, Trevor and Zach. Chloe C. realizes ruefully that her counterpart is a considerably happier and more fulfilled version of herself. But then odd things happen in the Phillipson household, as the two sons show telekinetic abilities (including levitating themselves), apparently inherited from their mom. It seems that Chloe P. can do “magic” as well, and it may be traceable to a dark-matter experiment gone wrong 15 years earlier and/or the Phillipsons unexpectedly being the next stage in human evolution. They try to keep their “dark energy” superpowers a secret, but ubiquitous cellphone cameras and social media put them in peril. Smith’s narrative voice, dominated by dialogue, is easy and brisk (rather like the one Ira Levin used for his female-paranoia masterworks, Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives), and even the science speculation comes in lightweight packets. Overall, the material reads like the kind of adventure novels that, in earlier eras, inspired Disney properties (especially Escape to Witch Mountain), but with some R-rated language and mistrust of authority. The big question for the reader is whether alt-reality Chloe C.’s eavesdropping on all this via VR is somehow creating the bizarre circumstances for the Phillipsons. The book’s concluding gimmick with parallel worlds feels like a distraction and not really necessary. But some readers may find it sets up the open-ended finale on a properly tantalizing what if? note.

Dark energy disrupts domestic tranquility in a pleasant sci-fi diversion with a family-hour vibe.

A Colorado university physicist learns she can warp reality with mind power alone, but when news of her talent leaks, a rash of “quantum crimes” hits Boulder and beyond.

Smith (Kat Cubed, 2016, etc.) announces the creation of a new sci-fi series with this takeoff on the notion that at the minuscule, quantum-physics level, an elementary piece of matter could either be a particle or a wave, open to the influence of an outside observer. What if that either/or quality of reality persisted on the macroscopic scale? In Boulder, Madison Martin, a young, newly arrived university physicist, impulsively avoids becoming roadkill in a car mishap by choosing a quantum outcome in which she wasn’t struck at all. To bystanders, the injured Madison simply blurs away and an untouched one appears among them. Madison never knew she possessed this ability. Lab tests determine it is (somewhat) reproducible and (somewhat) controllable—the somewhats contingent on the heroine’s mood and especially the presence of hunky fellow faculty member Andro Rivas, a distraction from Madison’s failing long-distance relationship with a boyfriend back East. At one point, her quantum concentration (“q-collapse”) creates a large, very symbolic opening in the cinder block wall to Andro’s office, making him a believer. But q-collapse can be wielded by anyone with training and physics moxie; soon Madison’s amoral students, having posted the secret online, are carving holes in bank vaults and otherwise perpetuating “quantum crimes” in Boulder and elsewhere. Incidental dialogue hangs a “quantum cop” tag on Madison (even though it’s her cousin who has the campus security job) as she and Andro fight the callow villains with energy bolts, teleportation, and telekinesis—all godlike stuff deftly explained as extrapolations of the quantum flux, including having boxed condoms materialize for a romantic interlude. Smith is a scientist (and sci-fi editor) and follows up the breezy narrative with a quick quantum mechanics essay. While it may seem stereotypical to spectral-analyze this lively novel as chick lit, there are indeed all the trace elements of the genre, including a college-science environment where nearly everybody is young and hot (just one humorless, gray-haired department chair) and game for making clothes dematerialize. Smith name-checks Arthur C. Clarke, whose Tales from the White Hart collection had similar playful takes on science but starred old, male fuddy-duddies.

A light sci-fi romance, apt reading material for watching the waves (or particles) at the beach.