The Fold

The Fold
By Peter Clines

The transporter – whether it’s being used to beam people around on Star Trek, or to mix human and fly DNA – is one of the iconic technologies of science fiction. And in Peter Clines’s The Fold a group of scientists in southern California have actually invented one: a set of rings that creates an electro-magnetic wrinkle in the space-time continuum, allowing people to step from one place to another as easily as walking through a door.

Ah, if only things stayed that simple. But as Leland “Mike” Erikson finds out when sent to report on the dimensional doorway, there are more than a few bugs in the machine. Luckily, Mike has a super power up his sleeve in the form of a genius IQ meshed with eidetic memory: complete, instantaneous recall of anything he’s ever seen or heard. He’ll need that awesome mental computing power as things get woolly.

Clines’s novel has a slow fuse, but it lays the ground well for a crazy, page-flipping final act that has everyone trying to shut the door before the universe gets folded into space-time origami.