2019 Prometheus Award (nominee)
The Fractal Man has been nominated for the 2019 Prometheus Award for Best Novel!
J. Neil Schulman's fourth novel, The Fractal Man, could only be penned by a writer who wrote scripts for The Twilight Zone.
It’s a fictional autobiography of lives he never lived.
The story begins when David Albaugh is awakened by a phone call from his best friend, who’s been dead for nine years, telling him they’re late for a science-fiction convention panel.
David’s alternate realities only start there.
If only his abstract photography recommended to New York’s Museum of Modern Art by a photographer for Mad Magazine had been exhibited; if only General Electric had taken up his idea for a practical jet belt when he was 11; if only he’d had the money to execute his own business plan and corner the market on eBooks a decade before Jeff Bezos.
David’s journey to parallel timelines takes him to a world where people and cats can fly but dogs can't; commissions him as a battlefield general in a war between totalitarians and anarchists; as the bringer of music to a world that’s never heard it; as the head of a movie studio making the Superman/Spider-Man movie; as the explorer of a dead world and the real-estate developer of a new one.
What if there was a war where a loved one can be dead in one world and alive in another? What if different systems of social order were dominant in different universes resulting in extreme conflicts when they met? What if parallel lives could be fused into a melding of personalities and talents?
What if some of your favorite celebrities have entirely different lives in parallel worlds?
The Fractal Man asks and offers speculative answers to these questions.
A stand-up narrative establishes a central flow-through yet many vignettes can be read as stand-alone short stories.
Redefining theoretical physics into possible cosmologies, Schulman employs intrigue and suspense to rewrite everything we think we know about the rules of existence.
This is what science fiction was made for.
Early Praise for The Fractal Man:
“J. Neil Schulman’s The Fractal Man takes MetaFiction to a new level. It’s a wildly entertaining collision of the 20th and 21st Centuries. There is something new under the sun.”
— Brad Linaweaver, Author, Editor, Publisher, Filmmaker, Teacher
"Assuming you know what 'space opera' is, this is “timeline opera” done with the exuberance of a Doc Smith novel."
--Eric S. Raymond, "Armed and Dangerous"
Genre: Science Fiction
J. Neil Schulman's fourth novel, The Fractal Man, could only be penned by a writer who wrote scripts for The Twilight Zone.
It’s a fictional autobiography of lives he never lived.
The story begins when David Albaugh is awakened by a phone call from his best friend, who’s been dead for nine years, telling him they’re late for a science-fiction convention panel.
David’s alternate realities only start there.
If only his abstract photography recommended to New York’s Museum of Modern Art by a photographer for Mad Magazine had been exhibited; if only General Electric had taken up his idea for a practical jet belt when he was 11; if only he’d had the money to execute his own business plan and corner the market on eBooks a decade before Jeff Bezos.
David’s journey to parallel timelines takes him to a world where people and cats can fly but dogs can't; commissions him as a battlefield general in a war between totalitarians and anarchists; as the bringer of music to a world that’s never heard it; as the head of a movie studio making the Superman/Spider-Man movie; as the explorer of a dead world and the real-estate developer of a new one.
What if there was a war where a loved one can be dead in one world and alive in another? What if different systems of social order were dominant in different universes resulting in extreme conflicts when they met? What if parallel lives could be fused into a melding of personalities and talents?
What if some of your favorite celebrities have entirely different lives in parallel worlds?
The Fractal Man asks and offers speculative answers to these questions.
A stand-up narrative establishes a central flow-through yet many vignettes can be read as stand-alone short stories.
Redefining theoretical physics into possible cosmologies, Schulman employs intrigue and suspense to rewrite everything we think we know about the rules of existence.
This is what science fiction was made for.
Early Praise for The Fractal Man:
“J. Neil Schulman’s The Fractal Man takes MetaFiction to a new level. It’s a wildly entertaining collision of the 20th and 21st Centuries. There is something new under the sun.”
— Brad Linaweaver, Author, Editor, Publisher, Filmmaker, Teacher
"Assuming you know what 'space opera' is, this is “timeline opera” done with the exuberance of a Doc Smith novel."
--Eric S. Raymond, "Armed and Dangerous"
Genre: Science Fiction
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