THE FLIGHT OF THE SILVERS

Both the innovative and the enjoyably familiar mark this hefty, intriguing introduction to a multivolume, multiversal saga.

An apparently omniscient, oddly threatening trio place silver bracelets on a small group of people in San Diego; the jewelry protects these “Silvers” as the sky comes crashing down and our world is utterly destroyed. The Silvers find themselves in an alternate San Diego in an isolationist America, where scientists have gained mechanical control over some of the forces of time—cars fly, and serious injuries can be instantly healed, but the Internet isn’t nearly as cool a place. Oncology nurse Amanda and her actress sister Hannah, sardonic comic-book artist Zach, awkward teen Mia, burnt-out genius Theo, and dangerously precocious, possibly sociopathic David don’t know why they were saved, but it all becomes somewhat clearer when they begin displaying their own personal abilities to control time. They’re forced to hone those powers quickly when they face threats from a rival group of chronokinetic adepts, a vengeful stranger from our world, government authorities and an even greater danger that they only gradually come to understand. It all reads like a better-written combination of the defunct TV series Sliders, The Fugitive and the novel Escape to Witch Mountain, plus a healthy pinch of an exotically conceived vision of time travel and its implications. Usually, stories of this kind involve a search for the way home, but that possibility is apparently eliminated within the first 30 pages, adding a nice, dark jolt to a well-established trope. Price (Slick, 2004) is occasionally guilty of some inappropriate word choices (“leer” doesn’t quite mean what he thinks it does), but on the whole, he provides an absorbing adventure with a fresh take on both the parallel-universe and the paranormal subgenres.

You'll get pulled in.