{"id":657,"date":"2021-02-24T14:05:38","date_gmt":"2021-02-24T14:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=657"},"modified":"2021-02-24T14:05:40","modified_gmt":"2021-02-24T14:05:40","slug":"ripples-in-the-dirac-sea-by-geoffrey-a-landis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=657","title":{"rendered":"Ripples in the Dirac Sea by Geoffrey A. Landis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ripples in the Dirac Sea<\/em><\/strong> by Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, October 1988) is about a time traveller who spends most of his time in 1965 San Francisco with a hippy friend called Dancer, and a woman called Lisa:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Dancer] never locked the door. \u201cSomebody wants to rip me off, well, hey, they probably need it more than I do anyway, okay? It\u2019s cool.\u201d People dropped by any time of day or night.
I let my hair grow long. Dancer and Lisa and I spent that summer together, laughing, playing guitar, making love, writing silly poems and sillier songs, experimenting with drugs. That was when LSD was blooming onto the scene like sunflowers, when people were still unafraid of the strange and beautiful world on the other side of reality. That was a time to live. I knew that it was Dancer that Lisa truly loved, not me, but in those days free love was in the air like the scent of poppies, and it didn\u2019t matter. Not much, anyway.\u00a0 p. 93<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Woven around this central relationship thread (which eventually ends with Dancer\u2019s premature death) are various other snippets of information and narrative: the Dirac science (or hand-wavium) that enables the time travelling device\u2019s operation; other trips the narrator undertakes (the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the crucifixion of Christ\u2014where he almost dies); imaginary lectures that answer questions about time paradoxes; and so on.
This plods along until the climax of the story, which sees the narrator in a hotel room the night before he is due to unveil the time travel device to a group of scientists. However, before that can happen (spoiler), he wakes up to find his room is on fire, and we learn that he only has thirty seconds left to live\u2014and that he has been using (and extending) that time by continually travelling to the past. He now has about ten seconds left.
I thought this was okay, and certainly improved by the climactic gimmick, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s worth an Nebula Award (it won the 1990 award for short story).1<\/sup> I can only assume that the 1960\u2019s hippie nostalgia vibe did it for some readers.
I also note in passing that it is a gloomy piece, which was fairly typical of Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em> during this period if I remember correctly.
** (Average). 5,400 words.

1. The story was second in the annual Asimov\u2019s Reader\u2019s Poll, third in the Hugo, and 11th<\/sup> in the Locus list. More information on ISFDB<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ripples in the Dirac Sea by Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov\u2019s SF, October 1988) is about a time traveller who spends most of his time in 1965 San Francisco with a hippy friend called Dancer, and a woman called Lisa: [Dancer] never locked the door. \u201cSomebody wants to rip me off, well, hey, they probably need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[190,17,4,189,12],"class_list":["post-657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geoffrey-a-landis","tag-190","tag-17","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-geoffrey-a-landis","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=657"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":662,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions\/662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}