The Plot to Save Socrates

THE PLOT TO SAVE SOCRATES: Paul Levinson: Tor Books (2007): Sci-Fi: 272 pages.

This is a time travel tale with many twists. Sierra Waters, a student of the classics, fluent in Greek, is shown a recently discovered copy of a dialogue by Socrates that suggests that someone from the future tried to save Socrates from death. The professor who gives her the dialogue promptly disappears and Sierra becomes a major actress in the mysterious plot. Who is trying to save Socrates, who invented the time machines that carry Sierra and others trying to save him back to Greece, and can he be saved without changing history? The twists and turns of this plot reveal and explore a variety of paradoxes that demand to be considered when time travel is at the heart of a story. In addition, modern characters interact with highly intelligent and influential people from the past making this book an intellectual challenge on another level, too.

However, I thought the author spent much more time developing the themes at the beginning of the book and not enough time unwinding the twists at the end. The characters are pursuing the solution to a mystery but the mystery is so big that the reader can easily get lost and characters that you come to care about disappear into the past – or maybe the future – without explanation. This is a very clever book and a challenging read that leaves you hanging at the end – probably so the writer can publish a sequel.

SH