Jack Skillingstead’s Harbinger was nominated for a Locus Award for best first novel. His second, Life on the Preservation, was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. He has published more than forty short stories to critical acclaim and was short-listed for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His writing has been translated internationally.
The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead
Jack Skillingstead’s latest novel, The Chaos Function (2019), has a fairly straightforward premise: a young journalist accidentally receives the ability to shift reality from one possible timeline to another, though not without disastrous consequences. The first time she performs this shift, it’s purely by accident, though that doesn’t make the new future any less grave. Each time she shifts to another possible timeline without returning to the original, the consequences become more and more dire, until she is left with a terrible choice: return reality to its intended course or watch the entire world destroy itself.
At its heart, it’s a gripping conceit, and watching the various permutations of reality spin farther and farther out of control was enough to keep me turning the pages to see how things could possibly become more dire. What sta... Read More
