Rooting for Time

Living in an alternate version of the contemporary US, Ruth is barely managing the combination of her academic career, sandwich-generation caregiving, and the threat of a rising authoritarian regime. Her heart is skipping beats, and her nearly-superhuman sense of time begins to lag. Ruth suspects time itself is speeding up, but the best place to study it would be a new think-tank run by her estranged father Karl, and there’s no way she’s exposing her vague hunch to his harsh scientific scalpel. When fertility rates crash worldwide, putting all life at risk, and Ruth’s job teaching sociology is threatened by already-declining enrollment, she collapses from the stress. She convalesces at a Wiccan-Jewish commune where her brother and sister-in-law claim to be able to slow time and communicate with long-dead ancestors. Despite their guidance, it isn’t until a “chronofascist” is elected president that Ruth finally decides to face her father. At his institute she learns about time, including how ADHD interferes with her stepson’s sense of time and how premature aging of cells lowers fertility. But when Ruth’s absence from home threatens her family life and Karl rejects her theory that time is speeding up, she agrees to join her husband at a meditation retreat in Nepal. There Tibetan Buddhism and her stepson’s computer obsession yield a surprising new hi-tech map for her quest to slow time—if she can convince her father and his colleagues of its merit, and keep it out of the wrong hands.