Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/19

Here I am once again, to tell you about the book that arrived in my mail last week. Yes, this time out it's "book" -- singular rather than plural. (Saves me some time on a Sunday morning, which is no bad thing.)

And that book is the new SF novel by Hugo-winner Robert Charles Wilson, which is pretty darn great even before we look at the book itself.

That book is Last Year, one of those SF stories in which time travel exists, but each portal connects to a different alternate universe -- and that new universe is, obviously, immediately altered by the connection and starts to move further and further from recorded history as future people change things up.

One such gateway has been opened to 1876 Ohio, but it's been open for about a decade, and the locals have gotten more familiar with future people -- even jaded, you might say -- and its days as a tourist attraction are numbered. Which means that gateway -- the only possible link between those two worlds, unrepeatable and unique -- might just be severed forever sometime soon.

Jesse Cullum is a native of that 1876 Ohio, but he's in love with a woman from the other side of that gate. And so he needs to get through it while it's still there -- no matter what that takes.

Last Year is a Tor hardcover hitting shelves and electron-dispensing apparatuses on December 6th. Check it out.