A light sci-fi romance, apt reading material for watching the waves (or particles) at the beach.
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.Pub Date: May 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9861350-2-6
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Quarky Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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