The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook, available from AOL Time Warner Book group, (link on left) proclaims the long concealed wellsprings of the branching worlds in literature. Neither sequel nor prequel, the forthcoming companion volume Reckoning, an other book of The Fan-Shaped Destiny, flanks FSD from the side.
Reciprocal histories warp and twist around the years--to frame turbulent decades that are only imagined to be an orderly march into an uncertain new millennium. Worlds collide as this work of non-linear storytelling reveals what we, a lifetime into the elaboration of quantum mechanics, have yet to admit about our existence in an other-than-unitary cosmos.
Reckoning orbits everywhere from 1932 to 2013, spiraling in upon pivotal events during the Sixties. Unsanitized by flower-power fantasies, that decade seems an alternate world in itself. It's a dangerous time when sex and drugs represent escape from war, hatred, and arbitrary rule by a vicious gerontocracy.
Longing after a time before, and a future that might yet be, a man returns to avert an assassination. Conundrums surround the murder of his best friend, the women of his life liberated from their temporal sequence, the consequences of roads not taken--all haunted by remembrance of tragedies that haven’t happened, may not happen, or might be prevented from happening.
Can he establish, even to his own satisfaction, that he’s not delusional? A world turning strange, he learns the hard way that it is not his private little heaven--this is not your father’s time-travel fantasy.
This is real.
But, what of the ambiguous emanation he comes to call his “angel?” Is it an archetype from a mythic night in his youth, or his first, all-too-human, lost love? A disturbed and dangerous older woman from a dark yesterday, or the specter of a daughter who was never born?
Who are the metem, beings utterly out of place in any plausible historical scheme? Might these ghosts made flesh be bending a history to their own agendas? As he struggles to get a grip on sanity and self in a history stuck on replay, a frightening suspicion is lingering.
He is not alone.
Excerpt
Who the hell was “he,” then--here, at this very moment--apparently going on twenty-one years of age, hot, sweaty, in a gritty Austin apartment somewhere in the summer of 1966? Possibly a bit hung-over, he might presume, from a slight throbbing and a mouth that tasted like the bottom of a birdcage. But, the causal stream resulting in those sensations would smack of hops--beer from triangular holes punched by a “church-key” through the heavy metal cans on the dresser!
He had to get his mind around the concept that his foul breath and headache could not derive from tequila the “night before.” The particular incarnation of Jose Cuervo imbibed at Big Richard’s wake was yet generations removed in the biological time of agaves! He would, instead, have been beer-drowning some orgy of self-pity over, say, having forfeited his girlfriend to George. That younger self, built on immediate awareness of those circumstances, had remained within him as his life had moved on.
Further revolutions of the sun had deposited more layers of accumulated loves and losses, disillusionments and disappointments, not to mention a buttload of great kinky sex. Generating what? Another self, more elaborate, more mature? Was he “remembering” that man, too? Was it like a future, or a set of possible future moments, that was now present within him?
The seriously weird notion was: had that future been there always, not lying before him but beside him, just as this “past” had clearly not been left behind? Moments in time standing side-by-side, discrete but equivalent actualities. If that were so, then there would exist no overarching temporal framework, no “arrows of time”--just an eternal, ever-present nonce... Would that make all this--he giggled, feeling slightly hysterical--noncensical? The mind boggled...
Oh God! His throat then knotted painfully. In a distant Asian land, his friend Richard was alive. His parents would be living in Fort Worth. So, George must be alive, not on some farther shore but only blocks away! His eyes clouded at an inexpressible mélange of feeling, but he was dominated by a giddy exhilaration. Son-of-a-bitch! You really could do this...
Let’s try and run this by again... The boy was part and parcel of the man, okay? So ... remembering the man "simply" amounted to adding additional dimensions to the perspective. Was he, sitting naked on the floor of a dusty past, the older man “gone back?” Or, was it more like the boy was having a precognitive vision of his possible future?
Did it matter?
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Reviews for "Reckoning"
Reviewed by Charles
5/19/2002
Oh Yeah!! Have we all not pondered the possibilities of "What if I could go back and do it right this time?" This hits the nail square on the head!!
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