The Plot to Save Socrates - Tapa dura

Paul Levinson's astonishing new Sf novel is a surprise and a delight: In the year 2042, Sierra, a young graduate student in Classics is shown a new dialog of Socrates, recently discovered, in which a time traveler tries to argue that Socrates might escape death by travel to the future! Thomas, the elderly scholar who has shown her the document, disappears, and Sierra immediately begins to track down the provenance of the manuscript, with the help of her classical scholar boyfriend, Max.
The trail leads her to a time machine in a gentlemen's club in London and in New York, and into the past--and to a time traveler from her future, posing as Heron of Alexandria in 150 AD. Complications, mysteries, travels, and time loops proliferate as Sierra tries to discern who is planning to save the greatest philosopher in human history, or to do so herself. And she finds that time travel raises more questions than it answers. Fascinating historical characters from Alcibiades (of the honeyed thighs) and Thomas Appleton, the great 19th century American publisher, to Socrates himself appear. with surprises in every chapter, Paul Levinson has outdone himself in The Plot to Save Socrates.

A past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a Hugo and Nebula Award nominee for his short fiction, and the author of several distinguished scholarly works in the field of media studies, Paul Levinson has already demonstrated a unique perspective on the future in such novels as The Silk Code, Borrowed Tides, and The Consciousness Plague. Now, in his wisest, most important novel yet, he reminds us that the future is always shaped by the present.

Paul Levinson lives in White Plains, New York.