The Revelations of Time and Space

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Zephaniah Corcoran has just returned to Earth after a seven-year jaunt to Jupiter where his special--some would say dubious--talents were put to the test in attempted communication with the Jovian cloud-whales. With no time to adjust to life on an Earth half alarmed and half fatalistic at the prospect of final catastrophe, he is headhunted for a reprise of his old job: being projected by the brilliant but asocial Walter Halleck's Coincidence-driven Sling into the far future to make empathic contact with the various successors to the human race.

In the meantime, he is discovering a close and mysterious bond with Denise, a doctor of evolutionary biology and the younger sister he has hardly known, who has been noticed by the same big players who have noticed Zeph. But nothing goes quite according to plan, and as the fate of humanity dangles on a thread grown very frayed, Zeph's empathic skills are expanded in unexpected ways, not so much by coincidence, as by Coincidence, bringing Zeph and those around him into contact with what are perhaps only the beginning of ongoing revelations of time and space whose grandeur match the universe that Zeph and his colleagues must now begin to explore.

Published by Snuggly Books in June 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64525-030-2

Review by Sally Startup

A fascinating work of science fiction, and also a story about love and empathy. This is both a recycling of many previous stories and a completely new extrapolation of ideas.

I found this novel gripping; plausible and scary. It is, after all, a description of the end of my own world. Part one is told from the point of view of Zephaniah Corcoran, who finds conventional social interraction with his own species problematic, yet has a unique gift for empathising with non-human beings. In part two, the viewpoint switches to that of his sister Denise, who has had to live in the shadow of her brother’s fame. Together, they are facing an apocalypse, yet there are still various important personal choices to be made.

The author took my imagination in directions I would never have found on my own. Though filled with some very intricate explanations of invented future technology, the novel is about people. It is also about who, and what, our understanding of people might expand to include. I enjoyed it with relish. It also had the delicious effect of returning into my thoughts many times after I had come to the end of the last sentence.

The Brian Stableford Website