THE DENT IN THE UNIVERSE

Time travel and big business converge in Parris’ SF novel.

Clarksdale Crossroads, California Police Chief John Banks gets a strange message from his old friend, Stephen Lucas, who’d served with him in Afghanistan years before. Speaking over the chief’s tablet, Lucas arranges for Banks to go to a local restaurant, where he stages an eye-opening demonstration: “Here’s the deal,” Lucas tells Banks, referring to the Giants-Astros game playing on the restaurant’s TV. “If the next at-bat proceeds precisely as I say, take the time to listen to the sit-rep.” When his predictions turn out to be uncannily true, Banks is drawn into the remarkable story of the @Once app and the OneFTL network, the technological brain children of Lucas’ One Corporation, which has made a fundamentally unsettling breakthrough: sending a signal into the past. “Most science fiction gets spacetime wrong,” says Walrus Roberts, one of the founders of One Corporation. “We’re not sending anything into the past but information. Signal. Not matter. Not mass.” What follows is an intricate synthesis of SF and a business-world thriller. It’s an often very effective combination, due to the author’s skill at crafting sharply drawn characters—particularly Stephen Lucas himself, the focal point of the book (“The CEO of One Corporation had willed his success into existence from a foundation of self-confidence and certainty,” readers learn. “Self-doubt was not a muscle he stretched often”). The narrative can be overly talky (“For the test, Walrus coded a simple command-line interface,” reads one such passage among many), but Parris generally keeps things moving briskly along to a satisfyingly twisty ending.  

An effective thriller in which The Time Machine meets The Firm.