REGINA'S IMAGINATION UNIVERSE

by Joram Piatigorsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Centuries in the future, a science-minded youth enters the research field bearing the standards of her grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather, two maverick scientists who experienced career disgrace over their unorthodox theories.

With this volume, Piatigorsky concludes his SF trilogy that began with Jellyfish Have Eyes (2015) and Roger’s Thought Particles (2021). This installment’s setting is about 250 years in the future. Young Regina Resin and her worldview are affected less by her mundane mom and dad than by Roger, her 90-year-old grandfather. A retired scientist, Roger proposed the existence of human thoughts—or any thoughts, really—as actual physical phenomena, at least on a quantum scale. He envisioned them as tiny, indivisible “particles,” or wavelets, that may even be “infectious” and affect others without direct communication. This notion left Grandpa branded as something of a kook, not unlike his own ancestor Ricardo Sztein, who was jailed over misappropriation of funds when he tried to prove that jellyfish possessed advanced visual sensory networks and could actually see the temporal processes of evolution. Regina tries to coax Roger out of his isolation to talk to a journalist about an infamous incident he survived, “the Obliteration”—an inadequately explained, deadly explosion 30 years prior that destroyed the elaborate Bethesda, Maryland, research complex where he (and long before him, Ricardo) had laboratories. The tragedy, whether intentional terrorism or not, was said to have left a 9/11–type wound on society. But entering the public eye again, however slightly, does Roger no good. Regina decides to attend Caltech and study the basic-science field, specializing in invertebrate brains—but actually championing the cause of imagination in scientific endeavors as a powerful force. Secretly, she hopes to vindicate the long-buried work of Ricardo and her Grandpa.

Piatigorsky should know a thing or two about the inner lives of scientists, having worked for decades as a molecular biologist at the National Institutes of Health before retiring to write memoirs and fiction. In this trilogy, he essentially leapfrogs across generations to highlight three congenitally deep and sensitive thinkers in one family. Will Regina’s against-the-grain ideas suffer derision and marginalization, as those of her ancestors did? This volume is more of a coda/epilogue to the previous two installments, heavier on philosophizing than strong conclusions and plot twists (the Obliteration mystery winds up a multiple-choice solution at best). In this narrowly focused tale, readers get no gee-whiz SF visions of the future two centuries hence other than a general sense of malaise from a world that has devalued and politicized science, or at least the author’s concept of what the discipline should be. Dogmatists will have bones to gnaw over Piatigorsky’s/Regina’s position that outlier ideas merit value based on their sheer imagination, which perhaps constitutes a type of alt-facts reality, not just the usual constraint that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. These are paradigm-bending proposals on a level exemplified in the nonnarrative novels of Daniel Quinn and the nonfiction of Fritjof Capra. But the easy-to-read (and YA-friendly) voice of Regina barely scratches the surface of her theory’s profound implications.        

A slim but inventive science parable that challenges conventional views of reality.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Manuscript

Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2022

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION