Rewrite: Loops in the Timescape

Product Description

In this thematic sequel to Gregory Benford’s award-winning bestseller Timescape, a history professor finds that he is able travel back to 1968, the year he was sixteen—here, he finds a slew of mentors with the same ability, including Robert Heinlein, Albert Einstein, and Philip K. Dick and becomes a successful Hollywood screenwriter until some wicked time travelers try to subvert him.

It’s 2002, and Charlie, in his late forties, is a bit of a sad-sack professor of history going through an unpleasant divorce. While flipping the cassette of an audiobook he gets into a car accident with a truck, and wakes up, fully aware as his adult mind, in his sixteen-year-old body in 1968.

Charlie does the thing we all imagine: he takes what he remembers of the future and uses it for himself in his present, the past. He becomes a screenwriter, anticipating the careers of Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg.

Charlie realizes that there are others like him, like Albert Einstein, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein. In fact, there is a society of folks who loop through time to change the world for their agenda. Now, Charlie knows he has to do something other than be self-indulgent and he tries to change one of the events of 1968 in this clever thriller.

Review

“No one has ever been better than Mr. Benford.”,
Wall Street Journal

About the Author

Gregory Benford is a physicist, educator, and author. He received a BS from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD from the University of California, San Diego. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. He has served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA, and the White House Council on Space Policy. He is the author of over twenty novels, including 
In the Ocean of the Night,
The Heart of the Comet (with David Brin),
Foundation’s Fear,
Bowl of Heaven (with Larry Niven), 
Timescape, and 
The Berlin Project. A two-time winner of the Nebula Award, Benford has also won the John W. Campbell Award, the British Science Fiction Award (BSFA), the Australian Ditmar Award, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature. In 1995 he received the Lord Foundation Award for contributions to science and the public comprehension of it. He has served as scientific consultant to the NHK Network and for 
Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rewrite

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

—William Wordsworth, The Prelude

1 Charlie’s body jerks backward against a mattress. His arms and legs snap inward to clasp his gut. Panic squeezes the air from his lungs with a grunt, and he can hear his heart pounding raggedly. His skin is clammy with sweat. A tight fear clamps his chest.

Reason returns in slow pulses. The car. The truck. Where am I? Hospital room? No. My apartment. A nightmare.

Dark silence all around him. The fear eases, loses its grip, and his legs relax, so his feet can touch the bottom sheet of the bed. He makes his fists unclench.

But something isn’t right. His body feels wrong. His hands look for his gut—and find it gone. Where his comfortable paunch and frizzy mat of hair were, he finds smooth skin and taut muscle.

Faster than thought he grabs for his genitals. Still there, limp. He is still a man and himself. He starts to relax again, his breathing slower. He slowly runs his hands over his body, discovering hard, smooth surfaces that are strange yet oddly familiar.

He reaches for his jaw with both hands. The beard is gone. Am I dreaming? Charlie wonders. He chuckles. What a joke—first I die, and then I have my teenage body. Still dreaming. Charlie swings his legs out of the bed and sits up quickly. I’m moving so fast in this dream, he thinks. He rubs the side of his head and finds long, wavy hair, slightly greasy.

He