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The Traveler
Joseph Eckert
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The Traveler is the story of a reluctant time-traveler and his extraordinary son, and the bond between them that even millennia cannot break. An adventure full of heartbreak, hope, and futures beyond imagination.It’s a day like any other when Scott Treder first jumps forward through time. One moment, he’s on his way to work, fingers drumming the steering wheel. The next, he’s tumbling headlong down the road, his car gone, a dozen panicked voicemails from his wife waiting on his cell.7:51am. Monday, April 13th.A blink of an eye.7:52am. Tuesday, April 14th.An entire 24 hours, gone.This one moment—this first spontaneous slip—marks a change in the course not only of Scott’s future, but that of the world. From this point on, at precisely 7:52am every morning, Scott inexplicably travels forward in time in ever-doubling intervals. First one day lost in a blink, then two, then four, until weeks, even years, are passing him by in an instant.Meanwhile, his wife is left alone to pick up the pieces of the life they once shared together, and, before long, Lyle, Scott’s genius seven-year-old son, will surpass him in age.Because while his dad is rocketing forward in time, Lyle is growing up–graduating early, studying at Berkeley, becoming the foremost scholar of quantum physics, all in an attempt to bring his father back…Meet an extraordinary father and son in this captivating, heart-wrenching speculative debut.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Posts about this title from Tattooed Bibliophiles
Tattooed Bibliophiles\ \ Zee\ \ • Jun 5
\ \ OK listen, I can't keep up with this every week Tuesday releases shit, I missed all of May and I just realized it. I'm doing my best dahling, this is a hobby and nobody pays book influencers. And I don’t think you understand how long it takes to format these damn things with all the book pics, because I did it and copied it in here and lost it all, and that your attention span is already almost gone without a picture to distract your brain. I'm working on a really interesting article about the death of booktok, and I don’t want to suck more time away from that. You should watch out for it. (Hint hint)\ \ So I'm going to do a big slog into every month instead, tell you what's coming, give you a chance to get those preorders in and SUPPORT THOSE AUTHORS! So what's coming out this month? Well NOT Alecto the Ninth, my lamentatious lyctoral league.\ \ By genre:\ \ SPACE OPERA\ \ \ \ Recursion: Germinal Book 2 by Aric McBay (AK Press, indie) - June 9 – A pacifist society on a tiny green planet is invaded by Colonizers. I’ve had book 1 sitting on my shelf, because I cannot pass up fiction by AK Press, and I definitely need to pick up book 1 this week. It would be greeeeeeat if I could put down my phone and read a book. It’s summer and the kids need wifi free time too, so I guess I’ll be figuring out how to set up parental controls on the router this week, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay\ \ \ \ The Forgetting Navigations by Marlee Jane Ward (Interstellar Flight Press, indie) - June 9 – Our main character has eMoTiOnAl dAmAgE from being abandoned in a lifepod in space. A freight hauler rescues her and they bond over tea. Then the past comes a knocking, as it does in stories. This may be more of a litfic in space thing, but it’s honestly hard to tell without reading. I feel like Space Opera implies more action, but subgenres are not a science, so you will have to judge a book by it’s description.\ \ \ \ The Sixth Nik by Daniel Kraus (Simon & Schuster/Saga Press) - June 2 – In a bioship capable of reacting to a crew’s every need, a nine year old cultist with a brain enhancement investigates a planet infected with a plague. The crew also includes an assassin, an engineer who has been jigsawwed together with surgeries, an addict medic, and a “nonmodded” captain who doesn’t like the nine year old, this has all the makings of a found family space opera.\ \ POST-APOCALYPTIC\ \ \ \ Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth (Graywolf, and Indie Press) - June 9 – Kind of a romance between a woman raised in a pod in the ocean and a woman who may or may not be a robot. But also earth is now a charcoal briquette and everyone has gone to Mars except a handful of holdouts trying to construct a molecular collection of Earth stuff for people to eventually repopulate. And what the hell is a soul globule? You’ll have to read Earth 7 to find out.\ \ \ \ The Withers by Lee Upton (Regal House Publishing) - June 23 – I mean kinda dystopian but also kind of a thriller, this is a post epidemic book where scars from the disease are called withers. A woman is living with the surgeon who saved her and his preggo wife, in a world where organ traffickers roam the streets. They have to fight to protect the woman and her fetus, and they’re calling this a “Grimm’s fairytale” like story.\ \ SPECULATIVE / LITERARY SCI-FI\ \ \ \ Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim (Macmillan/Tor) - June 2 – Imagine you immigrate to a new country. But the rule is, you get cloned, and only the clone gets to go and you have to stay. You’re cut in two, and you can keep in touch with your other self or not. The MC of this book does not, until she’s called back to Korea for a funeral. She doesn’t know that her original self plans to switch places with her. Obviously, this is a deep dive into the psychological effects of immigration. Do you love the Doppelgängers trope?\ \ \ \ Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Macmillan/Tor) - June 2 – Genetically engineered animals do the work while humans relax in the sun. A racoon is hired to track down a very important mouse. Why is the mouse important? It has something everyone wants. A familiar story if told about humans, but I’m interested to see it told from animals perspective. I’ve never read an Adrian Tchaikovsky book, any of my scifi besties want to give me some opinions on whether I should?\ \ \ \ Our Sister's Keeper by Jasmine Holmes (Bindery/Mareas Books, indie) - June 9 – In a fantasy retelling of a 1920’s era all-Black free town, women known as “carriers” pull traumatic memories from men so that the town is populated with men free of their pain, while the remnants of the past haunt the women. In a world where we expect Black Women to save us all, this book is an exploration of what it’s like to live with that expectation.\ \ \ \ Voyagers by Meg Charlton (HarperCollins) - June 16 – a signal arrives from the edge of the solar system in a first contact story. While everyone on earth loses their collective shit, Alex’s old wounds are opened, because two decades ago, she and her friend Ana were abducted at age six. After which followed a media frenzy no child should endure, especially not after some trauma like that. Ana went on to be an advocate for the abducted while Alex tried to move on and forget. But now they are drawn back together in a story about friendship, family, and truth. \ \ \ \ A City Dreaming by Maurice Broaddus, Book 3 in the Astra Black series (Macmillan/Tor) - June 30 – This series follows a young political leader, a woman in an elite military unit, and a captain of a starship, who are all part of the Muungano empire, a coalition of city states that stretches from Old Earth to Titan, in their quest to form an empire free of endless wars and oppression. This Afrofuturist spec fic series deserves a lot more press than it gets. Come on Tor, do better in your promotion!!!\ \ \ \ The Moon Papers by Emmalea Russo (Arcade Publishing, Skyhorse) - June 30 – A controversial arts collective is going to launch a second moon from the Mojave Desert into Earth’s atmosphere in a project they are calling Moon 2. I am deeply concerned, but the book is coined as raucous, psychedelic, and humorous, which I am translating as publisher speak for, they think it’s funny as shit. But the description isn’t, so someone isn’t doing marketing properly. IDK, I need a preview to see if it’s any good.\ \ \ \ The Young Die Old by Nguyễn Bình Phương with Khải Q. Nguyễn (translator) (Major Books, indie) - June 30 – This may be more of a fantasy, but in my searches for sci-fi it keeps popping up so the author must have filed it this way somewhere. Two feuding families fight for control of a buried treasure, but there reality blurs with hallucination, as spirits, doppelgängers, and collective guilt haunt the living. A society grapples with the aftershocks of war, repression, and silence, with a generation of children who age prematurely under the weight of unspoken histories. You won't find this one on Amazon, and hells yeah, fuck Bezos! You can find it here.\ \ TIME TRAVEL\ \ \ \ The Traveler by Joseph Eckert (Macmillan/Tor) - June 2 – at 7:51am, Scott Treder slips forward through time 24 hours. And every day, he slips again, losing double the amount of time each time slip. And while everyone ages normally, he doesn’t. His son ages beyond him. Years pass by in his marriage. It’s giving Click with Adam Sandler. I wonder how different it will be. Yall, this cover sucks. Nobody is going to buy this book based on this cover, what are you doing Tor???\ \ \ \ Retro by Jessica M. Goldstein (Penguin Random House/Ballantine) - June 23 – An out of work actress takes a job as a time travel tour guide at a company called Retro, taking wealthy tourists on vacations to historical hot spots. She loves it, thrilling in the romance of an office crush and a 1937 private eye pursuing her. But slowly she notices some strange things happening to her memory and her relationships outside of Retro, and escaping into the past was never really an escape at all. I am wildly interested to see if this speaks to the escapism we justify with Netflix and doom scrolling and romance reading in the present.\ \ ROMANCE\ \ \ \ Moss'd in Space by Rebecca Thorne (Macmillan/Bramble) - June 30 – from the author of A Pirate’s Life for Tea comes this cozy sci-fi romance about a starship captain who purchases a ship covered in Moss with an organic computer inside with a snarky attitude who loathes it’s builder because the immortal alien abandoned it. NGL, snarky AI’s in ships used to be my jam, but the way I’ve been feeling about real AI may change my enjoyment of them.\ \ \ \ Plastic, Prism, Void by Violet Allen (LittlePuss Press, indie) – May 19 (shut your mouth, I missed this one and it deserves attention. It's pride month and this cover deserves praise alone, and that's before I've touched the book! Sue me. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.) Trans enemies to lovers in which a magical girl-gone-bad and a renegade mech pilot must find a way to stay on a date forever...even if it means destroying the world.\ \ THRILLER\ \ \ \ The Other by Annie Neugebauer (Shortwave Publishing, indie) - June 9 – this is a Book 2 Outsiders Sequence, which is a novella series. I’ve never read a novella series but I think I could get into that! Ten people head out on a backpacking trip, but the first night eleven set up camp. Everyone remembers everyone else. Who is the extra? That’s the premise of the first book. This one is about a couple on an outdoor retreat who meet their doppelgangers.\ \ \ \ Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer (Macmillan/Tordotcom) - June 2 – An out of work OBGYN who has gotten publicly crucified for offering abortion care is kidnapped by a cult to help birth their babies. And she gets kidnapped on page friggin 10. If you’ve been in a slump this one’s for you, I read it in a single sitting, and I have 3 kids at home for the summer while I’m trying to run a business. I generally don’t DO that. Crazy, seat of your pants, worth a read.\ \ \ \ Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay (HarperCollins/Morrow) - June 2 – So this semi professional gamer gets a nepotism job piloting a man in a vegetative state across the country, Weekend at Bernie’s style. He has an AI implant in his head and she can control his body using a cell phone. But he’s not dead. He’s living this grotesque hellscape where he doesn’t remember who he is or why there’s a rabbit tattoo on his arm. Their stories intertwine and they end up fugitives. Noooo, I didn’t give the plot twist away – it was right there in the book description!\ \ ANTHOLOGY\ \ \ \ Ring Shout on Saturn by Sheree Renée Thomas (Third Man Books, indie) - June 9 – Afrofuturist short stories that range from a prophet building a starship (very Noah’s Arc) to alien sisters navigating human complexities. And that cover? That’s an AMAZING cover and I’m here for it. This is actually book2 of the three book The Root and Sky series, but they're all short stories so there's no reason you can't go ahead and preorder this one, read it, then get the rest!\ \ \ \ And an honorable mention to Lovecraft: Selected Stories, one of the Chiltern Classics being released on June 9. If you want to know more about my obsession with this set, read this. Or don't. Sometimes I'm convinced I'm living in a silo and nobody is reading any of this anyway. Either way, it's good practice writing, no?\ \ See you next week. Because I'm still writing blogs, they just won't all be book lists of upcoming stuff. I need creative time as well as research time to feed my soul AND brain! (But not AI. Never that.)\ \ — Zee\ \
- *\ \ If you liked this and want more of whatever THIS is (unhinged book analysis, barely contained rage at the state of the world, and occasional Tamsyn Muir references and em dashes that I will never apologize for) consider subscribing for $5/month. Every cent goes to people who actually need it, because I have a day job and a cause, not a brand deal. This is my middle finger to Big 5 publishing, dressed up as a book blog. Come hold it up with me.](https://tattooedbibliophile.binderybooks.com/item/Qz2POvbnW0wbEMBxdWvR/)
6/3/26 - New Sci-fi Titles This Month
19 books
Posts about this book from across Bindery
Judging By The Cover\ \ judgingby_thecover\ \ • Jun 9
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New Release Roundup: What to Read & What to Skip
4 books
3
Judging By The Cover\ \ judgingby_thecover\ \ • Jun 7
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[Welcome back to After the Walk, where Link and I return from our weekly stroll, and I attempt to organize my thoughts about everything I've been reading.\ \ This week felt like one of those wonderfully reading weeks where the genres couldn't have been more different. I bounced from dark-humored fantasy to historical fantasy, from psychological thriller to speculative fiction, and somehow every book ended up circling the same idea: What do we do when life refuses to go according to plan?\ \ Some books answered that question better than others.\ \ DNF: Sublimation \ \ Let's start with the only book I didn't finish.\ \ Sublimation had one of the most intriguing premises I've encountered in a while. I was genuinely invested in the concept and wanted to know where the story was going.\ \ Unfortunately, I ended up setting it aside at 48%.\ \ The entire novel is written in second person and rotates between multiple points of view. Every character is essentially narrating events as "you." You woke up. You drank coffee. You entered the room.\ \ Second person is already a difficult narrative choice for me, but when multiple characters are all speaking in that same perspective, I found it increasingly difficult to stay grounded in the story.\ \ This was very much a case of "it's not you, it's me." The premise remained compelling right up until the point I stopped reading.\ \ Hopelessly Necromantic \ \ The elevator pitch alone sold me on this one: A burned-out royal necromancer grieving his wife gets dragged into another kingdom-saving adventure alongside a demon recruit and an unexpectedly charming skeleton brother-in-law.\ \ This book knows exactly what it wants to be.\ \ The humor is relentless in the best way. Bone puns. Self-aware fantasy jokes. Characters who seem vaguely annoyed that they're trapped inside an epic fantasy quest.\ \ Beneath all of that humor, though, sits a story about grief.\ \ Sikras is carrying enormous emotional weight, and the novel explores what it looks like to continue living after loss. Friendship, found family, and healing all become central themes as the story unfolds.\ \ My only criticism is that the emotional depth never quite matched the emotional potential. The ingredients were all there, but the story often skimmed the surface of ideas I wanted it to explore further.\ \ Still, this is a charming fantasy that succeeds because of its heart as much as its humor.\ \ Man of My Dreams \ \ Every reader has books where they can pinpoint the exact moment things stop working.\ \ For me, that happened about a third of the way through this novel.\ \ The synopsis promises one mystery. The novel gradually reveals that the mystery you've been following isn't actually the mystery the book cares about.\ \ Now, I normally love a good twist. I enjoy being surprised.\ \ The problem wasn't that the story changed directions.\ \ The problem was that I spent so much time investing in the first storyline that, once the switch happened, I couldn't stop wondering why I'd invested so much energy into something that ultimately felt secondary.\ \ By the end, the novel felt like two separate books competing for space.\ \ I suspect readers who love layered mysteries and constantly shifting narratives may enjoy this much more than I did. Unfortunately, I spent more time irritated than intrigued.\ \ The Unicorn Hunters \ \ At this point, I should probably stop being surprised when Katherine Arden writes something I love.\ \ The Unicorn Hunters takes the historical figure Anne of Brittany and asks a delightful question: What if folklore, prophecy, unicorns, and magic had been woven into her story all along?\ \ The result is exactly the sort of historical fantasy I can't resist and included magical forests, court politics, ancient legends, and clever women navigating impossible situations. Basically, real history viewed through the lens of myth.\ \ What impressed me most was Anne herself. Arden allows her to be ambitious, stubborn, strategic, intelligent, and flawed. She feels like a real person rather than a historical symbol.\ \ Historical fantasy can sometimes lean too heavily toward either the history or the fantasy. This book strikes an ideal balance between the two.\ \ Also, Louis repeatedly launching himself into danger for love deserves special recognition.\ \ Historical fantasy continues to dominate my reading year, and this may end up being one of my favorite examples of the genre.\ \ The Break-Up Retreat \ \ This is everything I wanted Nine Perfect Strangers to be. The plot centers around an isolated wellness retreat, a charismatic founder who feels increasingly suspicious, and an undercover journalist.\ \ The best part was the whole cast of flawed, messy people who were trapped together in an environment that grows more unsettling with every chapter.\ \ Camilla Sten excels at atmosphere.\ \ Long before the bodies start dropping, there's an overwhelming sense that something is wrong. The tension builds steadily through paranoia, suspicion, and psychological unease.\ \ I also appreciated the queer representation, which felt nuanced and naturally integrated into the story. The beginning is slower than the ending, leaning heavily into psychological suspense before transitioning into something much more explosive. Once the final act begins, the pace accelerates dramatically.\ \ Bonus: the epilogue was fantastic.\ \ If you enjoy Ruth Ware, Sarah Pearse, isolated settings, suspicious characters, and stories that make you question everyone's motives, this should absolutely be on your radar.\ \ The Traveler \ \ This is speculative fiction doing what speculative fiction does best: using impossible ideas to explore deeply human questions.\ \ On the surface, The Traveler is a story involving time travel and futures beyond imagination.\ \ At its core, however, it's about a father and a son. It's about the impossible balancing act of wanting what's best for your child while recognizing that their life ultimately belongs to them.\ \ The relationship between Scott and Lyle carried the entire novel for me. Even during moments when I wasn't entirely certain I understood the mechanics of what was happening, I remained invested because I cared so deeply about the people at the center of the story.\ \ By the end, I had tears in my eyes.\ \ The novel occasionally becomes so ambitious that it risks overwhelming the reader, and I did find parts of the ending difficult to fully grasp. But even when I felt slightly lost, the emotional core never let me go. That's a rare accomplishment.\ \ Final Thoughts \ \ If I had to summarize this reading week in one sentence, it would be this: Every book was asking what happens when our plans collide with reality. \ \
- A grieving necromancer trying to move forward.\ \
- A queen trying to avoid a future she doesn't want.\ \
- Characters trapped in a retreat they no longer trust.\ \
- A father trying to protect a son across impossible stretches of time.\ \ \ Even the books that didn't fully work for me were grappling with questions that lingered long after I closed them.](https://judgingbythecover.binderybooks.com/item/kU5qWrnfUn6D41OrHtxc/)
After the Walk: Five Books, Five Big Questions
3 books
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Tattooed Bibliophiles\ \ Zee\ \ • Jun 5
6/3/26 - New Sci-fi Titles This Month
19 books