Bøger af Paul Levinson

It's 1996, and in this alternate history novel about the Beatles, disc jockey Pete Fornatale travels downtown to Grand Central Terminal and finds the world of music that he inhabits is very different. The short story this novel is based upon won the Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fiction in 2023, and was a Finalist for the Sidewise Award (short form) for Alternate History 2022.

A painter desperate for money finds a way to collect what's owed him from his deadbeat clients -- via teleportation, the tunnels under Fordham University, and the train to Margaretville.

Writing science fiction and songs have been two of my lifelong passions. This anthology combines them, with a selection of my science fiction and fantasy stories that has music as a theme, and my lyrics that deal with far-off suns, robots, and time travel.

Sierra and Max arrive in 2062, and find the world has somewhat changed. Joe Biden was President from 2009-2017, and train travel is much more prominent. Was this due to the scrolls that she rescued from the Library of Alexandria? Heron's Chronica, which describes how to build a time travel device and was one of the texts Sierra saved from burning, has not yet been published, and Sierra soon realizes that Heron is doing everything in his lethal power to prevent that from happening. Her attempt to safeguard the Chronica, which she left in William Henry Appleton's keeping, takes her to the end of the 1890s, where she dines, plots, and otherwise interacts with John Jacob Astor IV, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, J. P. Morgan, film pioneers William Dickson and Edwin Porter, and other denizens of The Gilded Age.

When NYPD forensic detective Phil D'Amato takes a call from a lady physicist about her missing husband, he has no idea that her life, his life, and every other scientist working on a top-secret time travel project will soon be in dire jeopardy. As the number of dead begins to mount, D'Amato starts to realize that the suspect is not any one person or group but something much more sinister and dangerous."The Chronology Protection Case" was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Novelette of 1995. The story was adapted into a low-budget movie by Jay Kensinger, and an Edgar-nominated radio play by Mark Shanahan.

Ian's Ions and Eons is the name of a time-travel agency in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx. This anthology contains the three "Ian" novelettes published thus far: "Ian's Ions and Eons" (2011) "Ian, Isaac, and John" (2011) and "Ian, George, and George" (2013). The time travel stories involve Presidential elections, rock music, television and movies. Real historical personages who appear include Al Gore, George W. Bush, William Rehnquist, David Bowie, John Lennon, Dick Cavett, and Orson Welles.

Phil D'Amato, an NYC forensic detective (also featured in several of Levinson's popular short stories and two subsequent novels), is caught in an ongoing struggle that dates all the way back to the dawn of humanity on Earth--and one of his best friends is a recent casualty. Unless Phil can unravel the genetic puzzle of the Silk Code, he'll soon be just as dead. Winner of Locus Award for Best First Science Fiction Novel of 1999.

Dr. Phil D' Amato returns from The Silk Code, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Science Fiction Novel of 1999, with another blend of biological science fiction and hard-boiled police-procedural mystery.Memory itself is the suspect in The Consciousness Plague - more particularly, loss of memory, in slivers of time deducted from a growing number of individuals, which plays havoc with everything from the investigation of serial stranglings to candlelight dinners. D'Amato, NYPD forensic detective, investigates a spate of unusual cases and finds evidence of a bacteria-like organism that has lived in our brains since our origin as a species and may be responsible for our very consciousness.A new antibiotic crosses the blood-brain barrier and inadvertently kills this essential bug. Phil himself falls victim to this memory hole, and must struggle to get the proper authorities to pay attention before everyone loses so much memory that they forget that they forgot in the first place.

August 2016 brought news - real news, in our reality - that an Earth-like planet was discovered circling Proxima Centauri, the third star in the Alpha Centauri system, just over four light years from Earth. This is exactly what happens in Borrowed Tides, first published in hardcover in 2001, re-issued in Kindle this past April. It tells the story of the first starship to the Alpha Centauri system in 2029, employing a new technology which can move it through deep space at almost half the speed of light. But it requires an enormous amount of fuel, and can only carry enough for a one-way trip. A philosopher of science and his childhood friend, an anthropologist with a specialty in Native American culture, have a daringly bizarre plan, and talk the government into putting them in charge of the Light Through starship voyage.

This is my original doctoral dissertation, which I submitted to New York University and successfully defended in 1978. The dissertation presents my "anthropotropic" theory of media evolution (anthropo = human; tropic = towards) which argues that as media evolve, they become increasingly human in function. Thus, telegraph gives way to telephone (we hear words not dots and dashes), photography changes from black-and-white to color, etc. The theory also explains why some media survive the advent of successor media and others do not: radio survived the advent of television because hearing without seeing is a natural mode of human communication (it gets dark every night and we still hear, we can easily close our eyes and continue to hear), whereas silent movies were obliterated by talkies (it is very difficult in the natural world to see without hearing something or other). The theory also predicts the creation of media that will enable us to access all kinds of information from any place in the world, any time, regardless of where we and that information might be - or, exactly what we now do with smartphones.

It all started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jeane" ...

This essay explores the historical and current context of fake news - with comparisons to government propaganda, and professional and citizen journalism - as well as what impact it may have had on the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential elections, and the COVID pandemic, and what can best be done about it.

Last Dream before Morning features a movie PR agent who, a few years into his job, is implicated in an apparent drug overdose murder in a wealthy household in La. The victim is a young heiress who was his charge in his duties at the studio. Her family is old money. She was a rare starlet, who began her career with connections, both legal and illegal. The agent is conditionally discharged from his work without being directly charged by the police. However, he is driven to uncover her past life to narrow down a field of suspects so he can reestablish himself emotionally and socially. He has to reconcile differences among several stratas of society, people incongruous as friends, but who turn out to be conspiratorial allies in a bigger picture of corruption that needs support from all areas of society in order to exist. He has to review his own life, before and during his career before he solves the murder with the help of some friends, who were also implicated during the affair. Uncompromising, passionate society, past and present, is seen with its violence, hypocrisy and semi-private norms- high-rolling and prone to shootouts.

This seminal book highlights and explains the truly prophetic nature of McLuhan's theories. It shows us why and how the 'Wired' generation is now turning to McLuhan's work to better understand a global village in a digital age.

The Soft Edge is a book on the theories about the evolution of technology, the effects that human choice has on this (r)evolution, and what's in store for us in the future.