Book 1, Physics, Lust and Greed Series
Date Published: June 15, 2020
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
The year is 2044. Housed in a secret complex beneath the eastern Arizona desert, a consortium of governments and corporations have undertaken a program on the scale of the Manhattan Project to bludgeon the laws of physics into submission and make time travel a reality.
Fraught with insecurities, Marshall Grissom has spent his whole life trying not to call attention to himself, so he can’t imagine he would be remotely suited for the role of time travel pioneer. He’s even less enthusiastic about this corporate time-travel adventure when he learns that nudity is a job requirement. The task would better match the talents of candidates like the smart and beautiful Sheila Schuler, or the bristle-tough and rattlesnake-mean Marta Hamilton.
As the project evolves into a clash between science and corporate greed, conflicts escalate. Those contributing the funding are mostly interested in manipulating time travel for profit, and will stop at nothing, including murder, to achieve their goals.
About the Author
Mike Murphey is a native of eastern New Mexico and spent almost thirty years as an award-winning newspaper journalist in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest. Following his retirement from the newspaper business, he and his wife Nancy entered in a seventeen-year partnership with the late Dave Henderson, all-star centerfielder for the Oakland Athletics, Boston Red Sox and Seattle Mariners. Their company produced the A’s and Mariners adult baseball Fantasy Camps. They also have a partnership with the Roy Hobbs adult baseball organization in Fort Myers, Florida. Mike loves fiction, cats, baseball and sailing. He splits his time between Spokane, Washington, and Phoenix, Arizona, where he enjoys life as a writer and old-man baseball player.
Review:
I enjoyed this book! It’s not the most standard of story formats (in terms of plot and pacing) but that doesn’t really bother me. I don’t think I would call it humorous science fiction. Maybe if you find dick jokes funny, but I don’t. (And if you really don’t, this is not the book for you. To be honest, if they’d gone on much longer at the beginning, I would have put it down.)
The story follows three candidates selected to be some of the first humans to travel through time: Marshall, Sheila, and Marta. The formatting in the review copy I received was a little wonky, missing things like page and chapter breaks (and italics) and sticking page numbers and the book title in between paragraphs, which was a little distracting (and sometimes hard to tell when points of view changed) but I figured it out eventually. Marshall, Shiela, and Marta are very different in personality, but all of them are likable and easy to follow along with. There are also sections from other characters.
The story follows the time travel program from when the potential time travelers arrive on campus as the program evolves as they discover more about how time travel actually works.
The story is very readable. The time travel is interesting though not terribly revolutionary if you read a lot of time travel-related stories. The characters are believable and sympathetic. It’s also a fairly quick read, all things considered, and it’s easy to keep reading.
So, if you like time travel stories, don’t mind stories that are a little more meandering in their plotlines, and can withstand dick jokes, you might consider picking this one up.
