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The Chaos Function Kindle Edition
Olivia Nikitas, a hardened journalist whose specialty is war zones, has been reporting from the front lines of the civil war in Aleppo, Syria. When Brian, an aid worker she reluctantly fell in love with, dies while following her into danger, she’ll do anything to bring him back. In a makeshift death chamber beneath an ancient, sacred site, a strange technology is revealed to Olivia: the power to remake the future by changing the past.
Following her heart and not her head, Olivia brings Brian back, accidentally shifting the world to the brink of nuclear and biological disaster. Now she must stay steps ahead of the guardians of this technology, who will kill her to reclaim it, in order to save not just herself and her love, but the whole world.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Voyager
- Publication dateMarch 19, 2019
- File size5181 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A compelling near-future thriller of hard choices and unintended consequences. This is science fiction that feels all too real. Highly recommended.” — Ramez Naam, award-winning author of the Nexus trilogy
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Across the street a cat slipped through a mountain of wreckage, its movement so sinuous and fleeting that at first Olivia thought the cat was the shadow of something passing through the air, like a bad omen.
She picked up her coffee, a potent Arabic blend spiced with cardamom. Holding the cup in the fingertips of both hands, she brought it to her lips. The luxury of fresh coffee equaled a minor miracle after the deprivations of war. Even in the heat, with sweat trickling from her hairline and her shirt sticking to her body, Olivia savored the scalding jolt of caffeine.
A little girl, maybe seven years old, came running down the street, the ragged cuffs of her trousers whisking up dust. She called to the cat, grabbed a bent spine of iron rebar, and hauled herself after it, climbing a potential avalanche. Her arms and legs were bird-bone thin. Olivia winced, sitting there on her comparatively fat American ass. She put her cup down, feeling irrationally guilty for the indulgence.
The cat darted under a slab of broken concrete. The little girl peered after it, calling, 'Qetta, qetta.' The gap was just big enough that she might be tempted to crawl after the damn thing. Olivia lifted her sweat-damp hair away from the back of her neck and looked around, hoping for some adult supervision. Good luck with that. The city was overrun with orphans. Olivia started to stand.
In the distance, a gunshot popped.
Olivia went rigid. Technically, hostilities had officially ended. But that wouldn't prevent a rogue sniper from taking up position. The shot had come from the direction of the Green Zone. By now, Brian and Jodee had left and would be out in the open. Jodee Abadi was her escort into the Old City, and Brian Anker was her would-be escort into a different kind of hazardous territory: a relationship impervious to her usual strategies of detachment. Brian wasn't the first guy to take on that mission, but he had already gotten farther than most. If Olivia's heart was a door, then Brian was the pushy salesman who had wedged his foot in the gap when she tried to slam it in his face. For that, she resented him a little. He was good about the resentment. He was good about everything. It really pissed her off.
Another gunshot popped. Where are you guys?
Suddenly she felt it, the brittle substratum of the enforced peace. It could give way at any time. Foreign military forces led by the Americans, barely held the city together. Soon something would break. A new insurgency, maybe. In the months since the end of the war, Olivia had gotten used to leaving her Kevlar vest in her room. She still brought her headscarf, though, even if at the moment she wore it loosely around her neck.
Two gunshots, and Brian (and Jodee) in the open.
By reflex, she reached for her phone, but there was no point. This district of Aleppo was a cellular dead zone.
The sound of something scraping and sliding pulled her attention back to the girl. A broken window frame surfed down the piled debris and cracked to pieces on the street. The little girl had her broomstick arm shoved all the way to the shoulder under the concrete slab. If the slab moved, it would crush her. Olivia quickly crossed the street. "Hey, kid! Be careful."
From the top of the mountain of rubble, the girl looked at Olivia and pointed down. "Qetta, qetta."
'Yeah, I get it. Your cat is under there."
'Qetta."
Olivia looked east, willing Brian and Jodee to be there. Instead, a couple of old men crossed the street, their summer white dishdashas seeming to float them above a haze of dust. Olivia hated that she worried about Brian. That's what you got when you let the salesman stick his foot in the door. She should have known better.
Product details
- ASIN : B07FK9MJWK
- Publisher : Harper Voyager; Reprint edition (March 19, 2019)
- Publication date : March 19, 2019
- Language : English
- File size : 5181 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 306 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,055,410 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,961 in Conspiracy Thrillers (Kindle Store)
- #3,917 in Time Travel Fiction
- #9,666 in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Since 2003 Jack Skillingstead has sold more than forty stories to markets including Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, F&SF, and Lightspeed, as well as various Year's Best volumes and original anthologies. In 2004 he was a finalist for the Sturgeon Award and in 2013 his novel Life on The Preservation was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. In 2019 The Chaos Function, a science fiction thriller, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / John Joseph Adams books. Jack has taught writing classes onboard ship in the Bahamas and in Seattle for Clarion West’s one-day workshop series. He lives in Seattle with his wife, writer Nancy Kress.
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The protagonist is one of the, if not the, most annoying tropes in literature. She’s the ‘plucky female reporter’ who makes her own way ignoring advice or direction from those who know better since she’s, by virtue of being a girl, superior. Here her way is blundering from one idiotic choice to another which does keep the plot going since her stupidity added to her stubbornness prevents a plot resolution or even a move onto the next stage.
Part of the plot is her supposed love angle with a fellow who just happens along. This affair is the least convincing love story I’ve ever encountered. I’d believe a love affair between two bags of frozen spinach before I’d buy into these two having any reciprocal passion. So the story goes on with her blundering about changing the past which alters her current time always to the worse. I will hand it to the author. Some of the futures he describes, nuclear war and pestilence are scary beyond most I’ve read. They really bring home the evil of mass destruction better than most.
I’m not going to downgrade this one nearly as much as my subjective opinion warrants because I know I’m in the vast minority in my distaste for the protagonist. Many will find heroism in her fumbling foundering which leaves billions dead in her wake with a few survivors on a ruined Earth. I mean she’s a girl who goes her own way, right? So that makes it ok in sum.
The book winds up with girlie making a series of idiotic moves which are capped by a decision she makes which is not just thoughtless but if you could quantify all her decisions, it would equal the sum of her past stupidity. Still, the book does clop along at a good pace with some truly terrifying scenarios which will convert at least a few readers into either warriors or pacifists. Definitely worth a read if you can stomach another outing of this trope.
It is not space fiction nor space opera (although I love that genre). In fact, I wasn’t even sure it was sci fi for a while. It is, and it is great. I thank the author for keeping me spellbound for hours, to my wife’s occasional annoyance.
Well done!
Doctors dig shell fragments out of Brian’s leg back in the safe zone. He needs a lengthy rehabilitation and is going to return to the States. Olivia, disturbed by her double vision of what had happened –Brian dead, Brian live-- decides to go with him. But before she goes, there are rumors that someone is trying to smuggle a weaponized version of anthrax out of the country and she notices someone following her.
It gets worse back home. There are rumors, and then more rumors, and then the reality that a virulent plague is spreading –man-produced, perhaps a vaccine-resistant version of small pox. Panic spreads. And she’s even more certain someone is following her. She’s kidnapped, taken to a hidden sanctuary. There it is unveiled: she is, inadvertently, a Shepherd, caretaker of an alien device from the far future that allows her to slip into the time stream and go back and tweak things, changing the course of future events. She’s in the middle of a deadly turf war because two cousins from the sect that has watched over this device for centuries are fighting over who should be the next Shepherd and it’s not her. The bug that flew from the old man to her head –it’s a connection to the future machine. If one of the cousins is to become the next Shepherd, she’ll have to die so the device seeks a new owner.
She finds allies in the sect. They help her escape and show how to gain access to the device –essentially, she needs to loosen reason’s hold over her will so she can envision the impossible. She goes back to a tune before the virus escapes Syria and makes a small tweak in the past. When she returns, it’s even worse: not just plague starting but plague everywhere and the specter of nuclear holocaust as nations turn against nations. She goes back again. Even worse. And then again. Finally, she gets it right. The plague is averted but the cost to her personally is heavy. But she’s learned something about the probability device: it’s not a tool to save the future but one to make it worse: every time it’s used, events are worse than they might have been otherwise. The future makers of the device have left the past a weapon, but it’s their weapon, not ours —intended to shape events toward their future. Olivia realizes she has one more journey to make: to destroy a device that is poisoning our future.
The book moves quickly and is absorbing. It’s not a knockout but the author has done a solid, professional job.