The Plot to Save Socrates

ISBN: 0765305704

Title: The Plot to Save Socrates

Author: Paul Levinson

KDL Description:

Reading a new Socratic dialogue that reflects a time traveler’s argument to the great philosopher that he can escape death by traveling to the future, graduate student Sierra is astonished when the elderly scholar who showed her the document disappears.

Amazon Description:

Paul Levinson’s astonishing new SF novel is a surprise and a delight: In the year 2042, Sierra, a young graduate student in Classics, is shown a new dialogue of Socrates, recently discovered, in which a time traveler tries to argue that Socrates might escape death by travel to the future! Thomas, the elderly scholar who showed her the document, disappears, and Sierra immediately begins to track down the provenance of the manuscript with the help of her classical scholar boyfriend, Max.

The track leads Sierra to a time machine in a gentlemen’s club in London, where she is vaulted into the past and encounters an enigmatic time traveler from an even more distant future, posing as Heron of Alexandria in 150 AD. Complications, mysteries, travels, and time loops proliferate as Sierra tries to discern who is planning to save the greatest philosopher in human history, or to do so herself. And she finds that time travel raises more questions than it answers.

Fascinating historical characters appear, from Alcibiades (of the honeyed thighs) to Thomas Appleton, the great nineteenth-century American publisher, to Socrates himself. With surprises in every chapter, Paul Levinson has outdone himself in The Plot to Save Socrates.