Weighing Shadows

by Lisa Goldstein

Overview

A new time-traveling fantasy from National Book Award-winner Lisa Goldstein.

Ann Decker fixes computers for a living, and in the evenings she passes the time sharpening her hacking skills. It's not a very interesting life, but she gets by—until one day she's contacted with a job offer for a company called Transformations Incorporated. None of her coworkers have ever heard of it before, and when Ann is finally told what the company does, she can hardly believe it: TI has invented technology to travel in time.

Soon Ann is visiting a matriarchy in ancient Crete, and then a woman mathematician at the Library of Alexandria. But Transformations Incorporated remains shrouded in mystery, and when Ann finally catches her breath, there are too many troubling questions still unanswered. Who are Transformations Incorporated, and what will they use this technology to gain? What ill effects might going back in time have on the present day? Is it really as harmless as TI says?

When a coworker turns up dead, Ann’s superiors warn her about a covert group called Core out to sabotage the company. Something just isn’t right, but before she has time to investigate, Ann is sent to a castle in the south of France, nearly a thousand years in the past. As the armies of the Crusade arrive to lay siege, and intrigue grows among the viscount’s family, Ann will discover the startling truth—not just about the company that sent her there, but also about her own past.

Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597808408
Publisher:	Night Shade Books
Publication date:	11/03/2015
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Lisa Goldstein is the National Book Award-winning fantasy author of The Red Magician. Her stories have appeared in Ms., Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and her novels and short stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. Her most recent novel, The Uncertain Places, won the 2012 Mythopoeic Award, and her short story “Paradise Is a Walled Garden” won the 2011 Sidewise Award. Goldstein lives with her husband and their Labrador retriever, Bonnie, in Oakland, California.

Editorial Reviews

11/16/2015
Mythopoeic Award–winner Goldstein (The Uncertain Places) stumbles with this poorly-paced time travel action story, which is stuffed with thin, uninteresting characters, predictable twists, and a thoroughly uncompelling narrator. Ann Decker is a high-school dropout who works at a local computer store. She's recruited by a mysterious stranger into a company called Transformations, where she and other people—all of whom seem to have very few connections or close friendships—learn that time travel really exists, and that agents from a devastated future are travelling back in time to try to fix small mistakes to make the world a better place. After Ann's colleague Gregory dies on a mission to ancient Crete, Ann starts to get hints that there's something wrong with Transformations, and that the company doesn't have a wholesome future in mind as she'd been told. Goldstein's plot is surprisingly neither layered nor original, and Ann offers little for readers to love as a character; her backstory of foster care and poverty is dashed off with little regard to verisimilitude or emotion, which undercuts everything moving forward. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"It's so rare to see somebody doing something really interesting and different with time travel. Goldstein always impresses me, and Weighing Shadows is one of her best."
—Jo Walton, Hugo Award-winning author of Among Others and My Real Children

"Weighing Shadows shimmers with intelligence and intrigue. It is that rare phenomenon: a science-fiction novel that faces squarely the hard trade-offs between compassion and self-preservation. This is story-telling at its best."
—Nancy Kress, Hugo and Nebula-Award winning author of Beggars in Spain

"Weighing Shadows passes the acid test of time-travel fiction with flying colors—it makes you think about the past in a brand new way, both in a personal sense and in terms of the weight of history. It turns out Lisa Goldstein's time travelers are just as fascinating as her travelers in magic."
—Charlie Jane Anders, author of All the Birds in the Sky

From the Publisher

11/15/2015
Marginally employed hacker Ann Decker gets a job offer that seems too good to be true. She's been recruited by Transformations Unlimited, a company in the time-travel business. The firm uses operatives like her to go back into the past to alter small details that they say will somehow fix a blighted 24th-century future. At first, Ann is excited by her missions, but she starts to question the motives of her employers after she meets a splinter group that believes the trips have an ulterior motive. VERDICT While Goldstein's (The Uncertain Places) writing is quite fine, this time-travel scenario never quite hangs together. Authors such as Kage Baker with her "Company" stories or Connie Willis with her time-traveling Oxford researchers have done a much better job at both painting a picture of the past and giving readers a solid reason for the traveling, rather than a vague conspiracy theory that never makes it all the way onto the page.—MM

Library Journal

2015-09-02
Goldstein takes a break from fantasy (The Uncertain Places, 2011, etc.) and returns to science fiction with this brief tale of a corporation seeking to diminish the role of women in society by altering the timeline. Socially awkward 21st-century hacker Ann Decker is recruited by Transformations Incorporated, a company that uses time travel to improve what they say is a bleak 24th-century future. But while Ann's new employers are happy to supply her with all the information she needs to fit into past society—including history, culture, language, and clothes—they're extraordinarily reticent about just what her missions are meant to accomplish and why the mysterious organization Core would want to foil them. Goldstein's style is, as usual, beautifully spare; what she doesn't say is as important as what she does. Mood is more important than establishing logic or picayune detail. Unfortunately, that style doesn't serve this plot very well. Current conventions for the time-travel story demand a richness of detail; it's simply not plausible that a few weeks of language and history study and a costume would allow a person to blend into the past—there are too many mores and habits that would make the traveler stand out. Writers like Kage Baker, Connie Willis, and Deborah Harkness have brandished their research to address this point. Plots about sinister time-traveling organizations are not new, and there's already a novel about worshipers of the goddess Kore battling time-traveling chauvinists (Sheri Tepper's The Family Tree, 1997). In addition, Goldstein's ambiguous ending may be poetically true but still comes across as unfinished. Lovely, disturbing, and intriguing in spots but ultimately, just not enough.

Kirkus Reviews