MULTIVERSE

In Rothman’s SF novel, a physicist experiences fragments of possible futures resulting from his particle experiments.

Princeton University physicist Michael Salomon suffers occasional visions of a life in which his wife, Maria, has left him and/or their baby daughter is dead. Salomon doesn’t immediately connect these incidents with his physics research involving theoretical faster-than-light particles called tachyons. After a breakthrough in tachyon detection and interaction, Salomon’s lab suddenly falls under tight government oversight. People close to Michael die or disappear, and ominous FBI agents descend. It transpires that the tachyon tests are leading to time travel—the consequences of which could mutate the United States into an Orwellian police state where even potential crimes are punished. Alicia Yoder, a graduate student whose studies also factor into the time-meddling, finds that her future self is sending data streams back in time to help defuse the dystopia. Her and Michael’s fight-the-future plight receives deus ex machina assistance from the Outfit, a supersecret agency with vast resources to thwart abuses of power. Rothman, a physicist himself, lists Michael Crichton as one of his influences in an author’s note, and there’s an echo of Crichton’s Sphere (1987) in this story’s too-easy resolution. However, as in many other Crichton works, there’s fast-paced prose, fit-for-Hollywood characterizations, science with a wow factor, and accessible descriptions of complex quantum concepts and experiments. He also connects this brand-new yarn to his cloak-and-dagger series featuring underworld troubleshooter Levi Yoder. The notion of a multiverse of parallel realities and alternative timelines has been richly explored elsewhere, and it only makes a brief appearance here; for the most part, the novel reads like a techno-thriller. An addendum addresses some of the novel’s scientific concepts in more detail.

Hard science meets pop-science time-travel in this entertaining thriller.