Author: Robert A. Metzger:

ISBN: 0441008992

Genre: Science Fiction

The following review was contributed by:  Paul Lappen & CLICK TO VIEW Paul Lappen's Reviews

Set in present-day America, Katie McGuire and her ex-husband Horst Wittkowski
are nuclear physicists working on a potential fusion generator called a sonomak.
Right after their federal funding is eliminated, they are approached by
Alexandra Mitchell, a mysterious woman with unlimited resources, to keep the
project going.

It seems that the sonomak can be used to create new universes, copies of this
universe but much smaller, called picoverses. Alexandra is actually a
super-robot who wants to escape her masters, the Makers, in one of these new
universes. In another of these universes, Anthony, Katie and Horst's young son
and super-prodigy, has grown into an immortal and powerful being called Alpha.
He enters this universe to destroy it.

In another universe, in the 1930s, America is on the verge of being conquered by
a Soviet-German alliance. The east and west coasts are already in foreign hands
due to some well-placed nuclear weapons. The only thing keeping the rest of
America from falling into enemy hands are things like particle beam weapons to
shoot down enemy aircraft, developed by Nikola Tesla and a teenaged Anthony.
Albert Einstein has become an anti-science religious zealot, mostly due to his
wife, Nadia, who is an exact duplicate of Alexandra Mitchell. The only stars at
night are from the other planets, because the whole universe is the size of the
solar system.

This novel is based on very high-level physics, so parts of it will go right
over the head of the average reader. The rest of the novel is excellent. It does
really well in the "mind-blowing" department. Get past the science, and the
reader will have plenty to think about, while staying involved in the book. Well
worth reading.