Michael Burstein's review of "Loose Ends"

The special one-day sale for "Loose Ends" has concluded.   As indicated in this little screenshot, the novella did quite well, and I thank everyone who downloaded it.



But it's still selling for a reasonable price, and I thought, for those who might be interested, I would post Michael Burstein's Summer 1997 review of "Loose Ends" that appeared in Tangent magazine's SF by Starlight column.   Michael and I hadn't known each other all that long back then, but we went on to become good friends, and admirer's of each other's writing, and Michael served as Secretary when I was President of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1999.   The review was never posted anywhere online, and Michael was good enough to send it to me just yesterday for its posting here.

SF by Starlight: Michael A. Burstein
"Loose Ends" by Paul Levinson (ANALOG, May 1997) For my generation, the event is not the assasination of John F. Kennedy but the explosion of the *Challenger*; and the date is not November 22, 1963, but January 28, 1986.  I can remember exactly where I was when I heard the news: in my high school library, near the end of lunch.  I can still see my classmate Tina Sormani (now a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins) tell me the news; and I can still remember my face dripping with tears. Paul Levinson has taken the brilliant step of combining the emotional impact of these two tragic American events into his excellent novella "Loose Ends."  Time traveler Jeff Harris comes from a miserable future, one in which the *Challenger* explosion has been identified as the pivotal event that made things go from bad to worse.  Sent back in time to prevent it, he finds himself instead in 1963, a day before the Kennedy assassination, too early to prevent the later tragedy and effectively too late to prevent the earlier one.  Trapped in the past, he carves out a life for himself as a professor of philosophy, wondering all the while how he can manage to complete his original mission. Throughout the story, Levinson creates a nostalgic mood, one that even those of us born after the end of the sixties can appreciate.  Historical themes are developed through parallelism with the music of the time, especially that of the Beatles.  Levinson answers the question of why the sixties were such a turbulent time by postulating that that time period became polluted with freethinkers from the future, who ended up affecting history in ways they never intended.  It all ties in with the Kennedy assassination.  It may be true that preventing the assassination of JFK has become a cliche' for time travel stories, but Levinson manages to make it fresh again, with an explanation that could almost be used to explain why so many people write time travel stories about Kennedy in the first place. But Levinson does much more.  He creates a love story set against an evocative portrait of New York City, all the while never losing track of the main themes of his novella.  Harris continues to regret his missed opportunity in Dallas, and wonders how he can complete his original mission while almost a quarter-century before the disaster he needs to avert.  His explorations of the past are wistful and charming, even when the story must face up to some of the horrors of the time. Finally, Levinson ends the story with a logical surprise, and one that leaves the reader hopeful for the future.  The message for the reader is that one person can, in fact, make a difference. Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music