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Time Travel Geek-out #1
Misfits: Steve Jobs' One Last Thing plus Ada’s Universe
Now includes 2 time travel books!
The impossible happens, 500 light-seconds out from Earth. Paymonia, a trader on the probability exchange, can't believe her feed: Steve Jobs, Ada Lovelace, and William Shockley have returned and are working together.
For the first time, now includes the complete 2nd story, featuring Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie.
Interview with the Author
Q - Where did the idea for this book come from?
A - Not long after this universe lost Steve Jobs, someone said that he would probably come to fill a similar role in fiction as Nikola Tesla. That struck a strong chord with me. With the Silicon Valley angle established, the very colorful character of William Shockley came in as well. But the story needed something else, a character with a very different take on the multiverse...
Q - How did you come to include Ada Lovelace?
A - Earlier drafts of the first book had Marie Curie as one of the protagonists. But as the idea grew from just one story into an entire series, I realized that Curie would be important to the series longer-term. I did a lot of research into Ada Lovelace--read all her published letters. The more I read, the more I knew she had to be part of this. She was absolutely brilliant. It was only a short stretch to make her into a superhero.
Q - So you are working on book 3 and beyond in the series?
A - That depends on my readers! I have the next story in the series done, but beyond that it's still open. One thing readers can to is visit my web site and let me know what they'd like to read.
Q - Why should readers give this series a try?
A - The Time Travel Geek-out books are written for geeks, by a geek. It includes a very sympathetic depiction of autistic characters, with a mix of historical accuracy and rollicking adventure. In the end, this is a celebration of geek culture. Enjoy!
Thanks for reading!
The impossible happens, 500 light-seconds out from Earth. Paymonia, a trader on the probability exchange, can't believe her feed: Steve Jobs, Ada Lovelace, and William Shockley have returned and are working together.
For the first time, now includes the complete 2nd story, featuring Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie.
Interview with the Author
Q - Where did the idea for this book come from?
A - Not long after this universe lost Steve Jobs, someone said that he would probably come to fill a similar role in fiction as Nikola Tesla. That struck a strong chord with me. With the Silicon Valley angle established, the very colorful character of William Shockley came in as well. But the story needed something else, a character with a very different take on the multiverse...
Q - How did you come to include Ada Lovelace?
A - Earlier drafts of the first book had Marie Curie as one of the protagonists. But as the idea grew from just one story into an entire series, I realized that Curie would be important to the series longer-term. I did a lot of research into Ada Lovelace--read all her published letters. The more I read, the more I knew she had to be part of this. She was absolutely brilliant. It was only a short stretch to make her into a superhero.
Q - So you are working on book 3 and beyond in the series?
A - That depends on my readers! I have the next story in the series done, but beyond that it's still open. One thing readers can to is visit my web site and let me know what they'd like to read.
Q - Why should readers give this series a try?
A - The Time Travel Geek-out books are written for geeks, by a geek. It includes a very sympathetic depiction of autistic characters, with a mix of historical accuracy and rollicking adventure. In the end, this is a celebration of geek culture. Enjoy!
Thanks for reading!
- GenresScience Fiction
92 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 21, 2015
10 people are currently reading
21 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 2, 2016
Before beginning, I want to clarify that Micah Joel is a friend of mine, though I was surprised to find that he was writing novels. I am going to try to be as objective as I can here, however.
Misfits is a good freshman novel - it could use some polish, but it was quirky and fun, and yes, more than a little mentally challenging. The premise is that in the "relatively" near future, probability itself will become a publicly traded commodity - one can save probability, spending it to make more improbable things happening, or saving it (even at the risk of being subject to probability attacks by others). With this delightful premise in place, the logical extension is that you can buy and sell such probability on an exchange, and the person who controlled that exchange controlled the world. Pierpont Morgan, CEO of Morgan Stanley Facebook, is that person.
The novel starts with the late Steve Jobs (he of the reality distortion field) appearing at the Pearly Gates, where he is given the option of saving the world one last time. He takes it, finding himself aboard a space station with none other than Nikolai Tesla, genius inventor. Nikolai wants Gates to put together a team, and Gates proceeds to resurrect Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace, programmer and proto-programmer, and William Shockley, the brilliant but controversial inventor of the semiconductor.
What follows is a battle of wits between this improbable team and Morgan that gets into the multiple world hypothesis and plays heavily with the nature of artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics and, poignantly, surviving cancer.
The book is intriguing and fast paced, though somewhat flawed. I'm a fan of solid world building, and there were times throughout where I found the lack of description and details left me feeling confused - the characters and settings tended to be sketchy, at best. I also wish that the central premise could have been played with more - the idea of a probability market could have served as a springboard into any number of potential stories (in fairness Micah's follow-on books do explore this more). I could see this almost as a comic collection. Of course, as someone who tends towards overlong prose, my complaining about the terse staccato style of Micah Joel's writing is a bit ironic.
I will caution that there are some deep concepts hidden inside this gem of a book, and more than once I found myself on Wikipedia looking up some fairly technical terms in quantum physics especially. Not that this was even remotely a pedantic book, just that the author clearly knows that his primary audience will be tech geeks.
Overall, I think that Misfits is a solid first novel, one I would recommend especially to readers who like fast-paced, technically rich content. It makes me eager to see more from this author in the future.
Misfits is a good freshman novel - it could use some polish, but it was quirky and fun, and yes, more than a little mentally challenging. The premise is that in the "relatively" near future, probability itself will become a publicly traded commodity - one can save probability, spending it to make more improbable things happening, or saving it (even at the risk of being subject to probability attacks by others). With this delightful premise in place, the logical extension is that you can buy and sell such probability on an exchange, and the person who controlled that exchange controlled the world. Pierpont Morgan, CEO of Morgan Stanley Facebook, is that person.
The novel starts with the late Steve Jobs (he of the reality distortion field) appearing at the Pearly Gates, where he is given the option of saving the world one last time. He takes it, finding himself aboard a space station with none other than Nikolai Tesla, genius inventor. Nikolai wants Gates to put together a team, and Gates proceeds to resurrect Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace, programmer and proto-programmer, and William Shockley, the brilliant but controversial inventor of the semiconductor.
What follows is a battle of wits between this improbable team and Morgan that gets into the multiple world hypothesis and plays heavily with the nature of artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics and, poignantly, surviving cancer.
The book is intriguing and fast paced, though somewhat flawed. I'm a fan of solid world building, and there were times throughout where I found the lack of description and details left me feeling confused - the characters and settings tended to be sketchy, at best. I also wish that the central premise could have been played with more - the idea of a probability market could have served as a springboard into any number of potential stories (in fairness Micah's follow-on books do explore this more). I could see this almost as a comic collection. Of course, as someone who tends towards overlong prose, my complaining about the terse staccato style of Micah Joel's writing is a bit ironic.
I will caution that there are some deep concepts hidden inside this gem of a book, and more than once I found myself on Wikipedia looking up some fairly technical terms in quantum physics especially. Not that this was even remotely a pedantic book, just that the author clearly knows that his primary audience will be tech geeks.
Overall, I think that Misfits is a solid first novel, one I would recommend especially to readers who like fast-paced, technically rich content. It makes me eager to see more from this author in the future.
May 3, 2021
Bizarre short story where Steve Jobs, Ada Lovelace and William Shockley are brought back to life to solve a problem. Sadly, I feel that if my knowledge of physics was a little better I might have got more out of this. The writing was not always easy to follow, although there were some interesting concepts raised.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews