Strange Attractors

Grade 7 Up-- In the scientific world's currently popular chaos theory , "strange attractors" are mathematical things that drag systems into chaos. In Sleator's richly imagined fictional treatment of this theory , the strange attractors are people from a parallel universe: a brilliant scientist, Sylvan, and his beautiful daughter , Eve, whose reckless manipulation of time travel has plunged their timeline into chaos. Their search for a stable timeline brings them to our world, where they must destroy their doppelgangers, the "real" Sylvan and Eve, or drag this world into chaos, too. Max, a teenage science student, is forced to become their unwilling ally or be destroyed himself. Sleator's marriage of chaos theory and the convention of time travel is an ingenious literary conceit beautifully executed and--in the scenes of time travel and of a future world in chaos--brilliantly imagined. To an exciting plot Sleator has added subtexts involving troubling considerations of morality and sexual tension, for despite himself Max finds Sylvan and Eve strangely . . . attractive while being simultaneously repelled by the moral corruption which the power of time travel has visited on them. The equation of chaos with immorality and the difficulty of Max's moral choice add a rewarding dimension to one of Sleator's strangest and most attractive novels. --Michael Cart, Beverly Hills Public Library
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