The Quantum Cop - Softcover

Smith, Lesley L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 098613502X ISBN 13: 9780986135026

Publisher: Quarky Media, 2016

Synopsis

A physicist discovers how to control reality and all hell breaks loose. When physics professor Madison Martin is smashed by a car, her quantum expertise and survival instinct enable her to rewrite reality and save her life. She's freaked about what happened but, luckily, the hot physicist from the office next door volunteers to help her decipher what the hell just happened. As their chemistry sizzles she's ready for some experiments of a more biological nature. Unbeknownst to Madison her smartest student witnesses the bizarro accident and learns how to control reality, too. He and his buddies go on a quantum crime spree starting with never-ending beer, sorority girls losing their shirts, and progressing to bank robbery and worse. Everything seems lost when the nature of reality is endangered as fundamental forces like electromagnetism and gravity start changing. Can Madison overcome the odds, thwart her evil student and save reality itself?

About this title

Review

A Colorado university physicist learns she can warp reality with mind power alone, but when news of her talent leaks, a rash of "quantum crimes" hits Boulder and beyond.Smith (Kat Cubed, 2016, etc.) announces the creation of a new sci-fi series with this takeoff on the notion that at the minuscule, quantum-physics level, an elementary piece of matter could either be a particle or a wave, open to the influence of an outside observer. What if that either/or quality of reality persisted on the macroscopic scale? In Boulder, Madison Martin, a young, newly arrived university physicist, impulsively avoids becoming roadkill in a car mishap by choosing a quantum outcome in which she wasn't struck at all. To bystanders, the injured Madison simply blurs away and an untouched one appears among them. Madison never knew she possessed this ability. Lab tests determine it is (somewhat) reproducible and (somewhat) controllable--the somewhats contingent on the heroine's mood and especially the presence of hunky fellow faculty member Andro Rivas, a distraction from Madison's failing long-distance relationship with a boyfriend back East. At one point, her quantum concentration ("q-collapse") creates a large, very symbolic opening in the cinder block wall to Andro's office, making him a believer. But q-collapse can be wielded by anyone with training and physics moxie; soon Madison's amoral students, having posted the secret online, are carving holes in bank vaults and otherwise perpetuating "quantum crimes" in Boulder and elsewhere. Incidental dialogue hangs a "quantum cop" tag on Madison (even though it's her cousin who has the campus security job) as she and Andro fight the callow villains with energy bolts, teleportation, and telekinesis--all godlike stuff deftly explained as extrapolations of the quantum flux, including having boxed condoms materialize for a romantic interlude. Smith is a scientist (and sci-fi editor) and follows up the breezy narrative with a quick quantum mechanics essay. While it may seem stereotypical to spectral-analyze this lively novel as chick lit, there are indeed all the trace elements of the genre, including a college-science environment where nearly everybody is young and hot (just one humorless, gray-haired department chair) and game for making clothes dematerialize. Smith name-checks Arthur C. Clarke, whose Tales from the White Hart collection had similar playful takes on science but starred old, male fuddy-duddies.
A light sci-fi romance, apt reading material for watching the waves (or particles) at the beach.--Kirkus Reviews

Edition details

• Publisher: Quarky Media
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 098613502X
• ISBN 13: 9780986135026
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 285