A Scientific Romance - Hardcover

Wright, Ronald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312181728 ISBN 13: 9780312181727

Publisher: Picador USA, 1998

Synopsis

Because David Lambert has nothing to lose, he travels from 1999 into England's future in H. G. Wells's time machine, discovers a bleak world decimated by a mysterious civil war, and explores the questionable future of his own life.

About this title

Review:

In London at the turn of the 20th century, H. G. Wells's time machine mysteriously appears--empty--in a squatter's flat. Whence did it come, and for what purpose was it sent? The answers to these questions--though not to an even greater mystery connected with the machine's appearance--are contained in a letter written by Wells on May 2, 1946, which falls into the hands of one David Lambert on the eve of the millennium. Lambert, an industrial archeologist, reads the letter foretelling the arrival of the machine and, half convinced the whole thing is a hoax, goes to the address Wells provides, where, at the appointed hour, the time machine materializes. Thus begins Ronald Wright's fine and fantastical novel A Scientific Romance.

Romance can refer to an affair of the heart; it can also describe a heroic tale of extraordinary events. In A Scientific Romance, Wright plays on both possible meanings as he weaves a tragic story of betrayal and lost love into a larger narrative of time travel. Lambert, having lost the woman he loved, is reckless enough to test Wells's machine himself, catapulting 500 years into the future, where he finds London--indeed, all of England--a deserted, semitropical landscape. As David explores the future, he also sifts through his own past, creating in this Möbius strip of time and relationship a chilling cautionary tale about the limits of science and human ambition.

From the Publisher:

A SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE has won Britain's prestigious David Higham Award for Fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0312181728
• ISBN 13: 9780312181727
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352