Rewrite
By Gregory Benford
- Release Date: 2019-01-15
- Genre: Science Fiction
“What Back to the Future might have been like if Robert A. Heinlein and Albert Einstein had been involved in its production.” —Gary K. Wolfe, Locus
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 . . .
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, and then, in a 1980s life of excess, he dies, and wakes up again in his bedroom at sixteen in 1968.
Charlie realizes things he didn’t see the first time: 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.
“With a clever, twisting plot, this sequel to Timescape presents a smart sf tale of second chances.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“A successful novel of true speculative fiction.” —Analog Magazine
