The One-Way Time Traveler
About this book
Welcome to the future. Women are in charge. Of everything.""Thought-provoking and unabashedly erotic." - Harvey Ardman (author of The Final Crossing)"A Handmaid's Tale in reverse."American astronaut John Donegal makes a desperate decision: with his damaged orbiter spinning away from the earth he floods its cabin with liquid nitrogen from the reserve air supply to freeze himself in the hopes of eventual rescue when next passing near the earth, decades or even centuries in the future. His last thoughts before the sleeping pills and cold overtake him are of his lifelong love, Jill. When he is awakened, Donegal finds himself in what is surely a hospital, but seems more like a lavish manor house. He is in the care of two doctors and two nurses, all women. He seems to have been gone for something more than three hundred years. The patriarchy of his past has been replaced by a powerful and aggressive matriarchy. After an initial exuberance at being alive at all, he is overcome with a mounting sense of loss: Jill, has now been dead for centuries. Can he even grieve for someone who has been dead for so long? And yet, in his own frame of reference she was alive only weeks ago. He believes he knows her well enough to be sure of one thing: She would not have let him go off into the unknown future without something from her. There must be a message somewhere waiting for him, a message from Jill. He sets out to find it. The traces of the past are so long forgotten that he begins to lose hope of finding anything about Jill and how the rest of her life played out. He has only a few dreams to sustain him, dreams in which she tries and fails to tell him something. On the brink of defeat, he hears a haunting melody in a fairground, a song one of the performers tells him is "as old as the hills." The words make no sense to him at all, but as he encounters it again and again he comes to suspect that the song is the message, a cryptic love note that has reached out to him across the centuries.