The Other Emily
- by Dean R. Koontz
- Novel
- Science Fiction, Horror
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- The Other Emily, as by Dean Koontz (Thomas and Mercer, March 2021).
A decade after David Thorne’s wife goes missing on a solo trip to northern California, her exact duplicate shows up—without having aged a day and claiming not to be Emily—at a bar in one of David’s favorite restaurants.
—Michael Main
Equally in the grip of dread and amazement, David Thorne began to awaken to a previously unthought-of truth, the ramifications of which were devastating and numberless.
Tags
(10)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 2000 to 2099
- Circa AD 2100 to 2199: the time of Anna and the other controllers of the “avatars”
- Timeline Models
- Outside of Time: “This was apparently some eddy in a river of time; the river rushed forward; but here, the currents circled in a side pool.” Inside the house, David’s watch stops, and when he emerges, no time has passed outside. And yet, there’s a complex bit of hand-waving going on, given that the timer on his bomb works fine, and moreover, he knows it’s going to work fine, even though it's run by a a clock.
- Resilient Timeline: “Time is a hard river to divert.”
- Time Travel Methods
- Time Portal: “The house is a bridge between then and now, two points a hundred years apart.” Despite being a house, the description has a feel of a time portal rather than a time habitat.
- Themes
- Clones: “[. . .] this clone of Emily.”
- Fix History!: “We’ve come back in time to change the future.”
- Long Sleep, Cryogenics, Etc.: “Your precious bitch is in a stasis chamber, suspended animation, unaware of her condition.” Because she did not age, we believe this was a true stasis chamber rather than suspended animation, although you could make an argument the other way.
- Save “Lois”!: Not a typical Save Lois story because the saver is not a time traveler, but David’s whole motivation revolves around saving Emily, so we’re using the tag anyway.
- Fictional Tags
- Dystopian World: Anna’s world: “horrors without equal in history.”
Variants
(1)
- The Other Emily, as by Dean Koontz (Thomas and Mercer, March 2021).
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
written by
Dean R. Koontz as by Dean Koontz