Lora Hates Spam

by Irving Belateche

This is a fascinating story with enough fact mixed into the fiction to make the reader wonder where one stops and the other starts.

When Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955, his last words were uttered in German to a nurse who did not understand the language. He had been writing something, and this is where reality and fiction diverge. In the story, what he had been writing was a series of equations and the story is told from the point of view of Jacob, a university professor, who believes that those equations hold the secret to time travel.

The early chapters relate his experience of obsession with Einstein's theories and attempts to track down clues that might shed light on the equations and those elusive last words that were never recorded.

Jacob isn't the only person with an interest. In a mind bending series of alternate realities and changed time sequences, contemporaries of Einstein as well as university researchers known to Jacob crisscross time paths, discovering that small changes in events don't have the far reaching effects depicted in science fiction, but change the personal histories of those directly involved.

This is the kind of time travel I like best, because it makes me think and presents theories of time travel Physics that seem just plausible enough to make a good story. There is an aspect of espionage in this one that makes it gripping and fast paced in the later chapters, while making the reader question the nature of reality. An easy five stars!