Hello Folks,
An average turnout at our most recent meeting, with opinions of our book,
Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss, decidedly mixed. For our next book, we’ve chosen a
thriller across universes in Dark Matter by Blake Crouch.
The next meeting of the Science Fiction club will be on Thursday, March 9, 2017.
Place: Book Nook at:
http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs7867a2369e0e
Time: 9 PM Eastern, 8 PM Central, 7 PM Mountain, 6 PM Pacific, and 2:00 UTC.
Our book, Dark Matter, is available from both BARD and Bookshare.
The BARD version is at:
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.nls/db.85205
The Publisher Quality Bookshare version is at:
https://www.bookshare.org/browse/book/1316891
The NLS Annotation reads:
After being kidnapped, Jason Dessen wakes up to
an unfamiliar life in which his wife is not his wife and he
has no son. Rather than a college professor, Jason finds he
is a celebrated genius of remarkable achievement. He
struggles to determine which life is real.
Here is Bookshare’s Long Synopsis:
A brilliantly plotted, relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller from the
author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy--"Are you happy with your life?"
Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks
him
unconscious. Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney,
surrounded
by strangers in hazmat suits. Before a man Jason's never met smiles down at
him
and says, "Welcome back, my friend." In this world he's woken up to, Jason's
life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born.
And
Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who
has
achieved something remarkable. Something impossible. Is it this world or the
other
that's the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason
possibly
make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous
and
horrifying than anything he could've imagined--one that will force him to
confront
the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly
unbeatable
foe. Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and
intimate,
mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human--a relentlessly surprising
science-fiction
thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we'll go to claim the lives
we dream of.
Finally, here’s a brief review from Publishers Weekly taken from Amazon’s page
for Dark Matter:
Excellent characterization and well-crafted tension do much to redeem the
outlandish
plot of this SF thriller from Crouch (the Wayward Pines trilogy). Jason Dessen,
a
quantum physicist, once had a brilliant research career ahead of him. But after
a
girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy and the birth of a son, this future was
derailed.
Now Jason is a professor at a small Chicago college, content with his warm and
loving
family life until he’s abducted into a world in which his quantum many-worlds
theory
has become a fully realized technology for inter-dimensional transfer. In this
world,
Jason didn’t marry his girlfriend and never had a son. Jason is determined to
get
back to his family and his own world, but nefarious powers in the alternate
reality
conspire to stop him from revealing the criminal lengths they have gone to
create
the world-hopping technology. Crouch makes little attempt to justify the
underlying
science fiction MacGuffin, but a rousing and heartfelt ending will leave readers
cheering.
Come join us next month to talk about what sounds like a very exciting and
thought provoking story, and anything else in SF literature.
Evan
