Paradox Effect: Time Travel and Purified DNA Merge to Halt the Collapse of Human Existence

In 2554, the World is Coming to its End, unless an impossible mission through 600 years of time travel succeeds. Maternal instinct knows no boundaries, including the nano-neural-net intravenously installed in Dannia Weston's mind to repress her identity, allowing her to perform a mission 300 years before her time. Transported to the year 1954, Dannia becomes a woman with a mid-twentieth century persona, college educated with an aptitude for mechanical invention. Due to her work during the war, she is employed by the U.S. government on a secret project. But what no one knows-including Dannia or those who sent her back to tinker with the mechanical past to reduce future pollution-is what might happen should she become emotionally involved in 1954. The 2254 science team programmed the nano-net to prevent the possibility of pregnancy, but each person reacts to strong emotional stimuli differently, and using birth control not available in 1954 is out of the question. When Dannia falls in love with Peter Hersh and becomes pregnant, her hormones erode a small section of the nano-chained network that stabilizes her new identity, triggering a mild memory rebirth...and threatening her mission and the fate of the world.Review Paradox Effect: Time Travel and Purified DNA Merge to Halt the Collapse of Human Existence Gabriel F.W. Koch Outskirts Press, 274 pages, (paperback) $26.95, 970-1-4787-5622-4 (Reviewed: March 2018) Author Gabriel F.W. Koch folds a love story, a savior arc and a noodle-bending time travel story into this compelling and unusual novel. The story opens in Manhattan circa 1954, as Naval intelligence officer Peter Hersh meets beautiful contract engineer Dannia Weston, a woman suffering from headaches and hallucinations. The narrative then rockets forward to 2254, where General Patrick Buckwalder struggles to hold together the "Return Egress Project," an experiment using time travel to try to correct damage inflicted during the "Chaos Wars," a series of cataclysmic conflicts in an unspecified timeframe that obliterated civilization as we know it. Gradually, it's revealed that Dannia was Agent 476 in the time travel experiment, sent back in time to retroactively improve the atmosphere of the future. However, her romantic liaison with now-husband Peter results in a pregnancy that alters the genetic modifications that enabled her time travel and kept her future memories intact. The result is a woman exiled from her own time, protecting a child with DNA from both the past and the future who cannot safely exist in either era. In fact, the child's very existence creates a temporal anomaly that begins to wreak havoc on the world of 2254 and puts both mother and child in grave danger. It's a bit of a tightrope to walk between the dizzying post-apocalyptic world of the future and the noir-ish setting of the past (Koch's fictional private eye Marlowe Black and real-life crime writer Mickey Spillane make cameos). This is an ambitious work of speculative fiction that doesn't deign to hold the reader's hand. That said, although the gyrations between past and future can seem jarring at first, persistence proves rewarding. The book's believable love story between Dannia and Peter, strong supporting characters, tight pacing and visceral threats are equally satisfying. For readers who enjoy movies like The Terminator or Minority Report mixed with a dash of private-eye intrigue, this will be a welcome anomaly indeed. Also available as an ebook. From the Author If ever there was a "what if" all of us might desire more than almost anything else (except really good chocolate, and caffeine) time travel fits perfectly. Imagine returning to that one moment you think about at 3 a.m. and changing the outcome? I've thought about it often.However, there's a complication or two that must be considered. If you succeeded, every event directly related to the original outcome would be erased. If a child was born, that child would no longer exist. If you moved to a new location to avoid the consequences of the original outcome, you wouldn't and everything you'd done the first time would be erased.Paradox Effect takes a look at what happens when people in the future are determined to alter the past to save themselves from the results of their ancestors' behavior. They know they may possibly make things worse, but with thorough planning. . . About the Author Gabriel FW Koch is a winner of the 2004 L. Ron Hubbard Writer's of the Future AwardParadox Effect won a 2016 CIPA EVVY award for Science Fiction, the second-place winner of the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year; a 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist.