What if you had access to a time machine and could go back to visit a deceased love... one more time. Would you?
In 1962, Bobby Newman’s Grandpa, a basement inventor, loses his wife to cancer, then begins to lose his mind to grief. While tuning up his not-yet-perfected time machine for one last visit with his wife, he ends up going the wrong way... into the dystopian future of 2025. Inexplicably, he sends the machine back.
Fourteen-year-old Bobby uses it to lead Mom and Dad on a mission to find Grandpa and bring him back.
But Grandpa has other ideas...
This volume brings together five of Paul Clayton's most ambitious stories to date, stories that juxtapose a familiar America of the very recent past with ominous new versions of the country now coming into focus.
Clayton's concern is with ordinary people—their innate wisdom and persistent foolishness, their capacity to do good or harm, and their resiliency—with what happens when time travelers from the 1960s arrive in a city dominated by criminal gangs and corrupt politicians, or when a woman opts for a new procedure to avoid losing her cancer-ridden husband, or when a soldier in Vietnam is granted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give his elevator speech, or when a man, illegally alive, attempts to stay that way...
Clayton shows how people make choices that, collectively, point civilization in new directions, be it toward forcible reclamation of vast tracts of land as primeval wilderness or elimination of those deemed to be nonproductive ‘useless eaters.’
This is a first-rate collection of stories by a serious writer.—Stephen Gallup, author of What About the Boy?
Genre: Science Fiction
In 1962, Bobby Newman’s Grandpa, a basement inventor, loses his wife to cancer, then begins to lose his mind to grief. While tuning up his not-yet-perfected time machine for one last visit with his wife, he ends up going the wrong way... into the dystopian future of 2025. Inexplicably, he sends the machine back.
Fourteen-year-old Bobby uses it to lead Mom and Dad on a mission to find Grandpa and bring him back.
But Grandpa has other ideas...
This volume brings together five of Paul Clayton's most ambitious stories to date, stories that juxtapose a familiar America of the very recent past with ominous new versions of the country now coming into focus.
Clayton's concern is with ordinary people—their innate wisdom and persistent foolishness, their capacity to do good or harm, and their resiliency—with what happens when time travelers from the 1960s arrive in a city dominated by criminal gangs and corrupt politicians, or when a woman opts for a new procedure to avoid losing her cancer-ridden husband, or when a soldier in Vietnam is granted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give his elevator speech, or when a man, illegally alive, attempts to stay that way...
Clayton shows how people make choices that, collectively, point civilization in new directions, be it toward forcible reclamation of vast tracts of land as primeval wilderness or elimination of those deemed to be nonproductive ‘useless eaters.’
This is a first-rate collection of stories by a serious writer.—Stephen Gallup, author of What About the Boy?
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Paul Clayton's Escape From the Future and Other Stories