The Plot to Save Socrates (2006) by Paul Levinson
Good Reads meta-data is 272 pages, rated 3.56 by 488 litizens.
Genre: Sy Fy +
DNA: [See title.]
Tagline: Socrates did it!
Verdict: Tour de force kickoff return…fumbled!
A grad student is completing a PhD dissertation on the introduction of Ionic Greek in written form about 500 AD. She is an archive rat and burrows into files undisturbed, perhaps for centuries, she finds…a whomping great mystery. It is the year 2542 AD and the tech is even more techie than today but recognisable.
What she finds, well, in fact, it is given to her by a mystery man, seems to be a fragment from a hitherto unknown Socratic dialogue by Plato. It comes with several hallmarks that suggest authenticity. The papyrus fragment is a copy of that lost dialogue in Ionic Greek from 500 AD, so declares a carbon dating certificate in the same file. The Greek text certainly reads like Plato. Could it be? (By this time, I certainly wanted to know!)
Aside: There have been many spurious Platonic dialogue since the days of Aristotle. Forgers made them to sell to libraries and collectors. Intellectuals made them to pass off their ideas as Plato’s. Students made them to see if they could. Women made them to get published in a man’s-only world. These frauds, no doubt, continue to this day.
But, wait, there is more. SPOILER! The fragment is a conversation between Socrates and … a time traveller come to rescue him from the hemlock. Holy neurons!
That sets her off on a chase to find the rest of the dialogue. Authenticate it. Find the original. Trace the mystery man. Identify the time traveller. Six directions at once!
Now about that time travel. You sit in a chair in a secret room and use a remoter built-into the chair’s arm and whoosh. Well, no whoosh. You’re just there in the chair, but the calendar on the wall has changed. Back-and-forth they go through time. Aside: a time travelling sofa features in (T)Raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1 (2004).
After that whiz-bang start it descends into thriller mode, cutting back and forth, proliferating characters, and generally confusing me. The ease with which ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Nineteenth Century Americans, and others accept time travel undercut that plot line. The ease with which the time travellers surround themselves with minions and have plenty of money wherever they pop up likewise let the air out of the balloon. Oh, and one them, his frequent time traveller allowance depleted, sailed in a Greek trireme to the Americas.
Instead of dwelling on such matters as above, we have a hidden hand conspiracy that envelops one and all. Boring.
It is written as a thriller and that spares the author much and places all the responsibility on the reader to make sense of the to’ing and fro’ing, and this reader declined that onus.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk’s suggested it, for which thanks.
P.S. I tried vol 2 and gave up: impossible to follow
Plot by Salvator Dali.