Book description
Far into the future, Hartstein's graduation present from his
grandparents was a wonderful trip into the past. He had a long future in
the doughnut industry to look forward to but this trip was the icing on
the cake. It had been a long time since that first experiment in time
travel was successfully pulled off, although not without its flaws.
Now, in the future, time travel was a lucrative tourist industry. But
the time travel industry was keeping one little fact to itself: two
percent never came back. This cover-up was the work of the Agency. The
Agency knew what others did not: that the past wasn't really the past
but a complicated dynamic of individual perceptions of what the past
might have been. The past isn't real and reality becomes a state of
mind.
While selling their particular brand of escapist entertainment and
vacation packages, the Agency didn't bother to tell its clients or the
populace in general that a war was going on - a time war. The Agency was
spending its time in a neck-and-neck battle with the Temporary
Underground. The battlefield was none other than the space-time
continuum, the weapons were time-shifts and theoretical mathematics.
Hartstein had no idea what his trip would be or where it would take
him. George Alec Effinger was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1947. He
attended Yale University, where an organic chemistry course disabused
him of the notion of becoming a doctor. He had the opportunity to meet
many of his SF idols thanks to his first wife, who was Damon Knight and
Kate Wilhelm's babysitter. With their encouragement, he began writing
science fiction in 1970. He published at least 20 novels and 6
collections of short fiction including WHEN GRAVITY FAILS and THE EXILE
KISS. As well, he also wrote and published two crime novels, FELICIA and
SHADOW MONEY. With his Budayeen novels, Effinger helped to found the
Cyberpunk genre. He was a Hugo and Nebula award winner and a favorite
amongst fellow SF writers.
