The best science fiction writers are careful listeners. They hear the song we’re singing — our worries about the world that will exist for our children given the certainty of climate change, the accelerated pace of technology, and the COVID-19 pandemic — and select a few melodies to incorporate into their own song. In the best minds, the result is a remix that takes samples from the present and creates something known but novel, imaginative but conceivable.
Dina Santorelli’s The Reformed Man opens with the interior monologue of a character well known from our present day: a young man who is bitter about the state of the world and his place in it. At the moment Benedikt decides to kill himself, a catastrophic cosmic event occurs. As we later learn, on that day, two black holes formed and created a chain reaction: the moon was thrown off its orbit and the earth’s axis changed by eight degrees. A massive die-off, severe and unpredictable weather events, rising sea levels, and regular, devastating outbreaks of disease followed. These events changed life on the planet forever and instilled a hopelessness in the survivors about what would happen next.
Fortunately, another outcome of what is known as “the Shift” is an ability to travel into the future through a limited number of portals, one of which is located in Kansas. Because Benedikt discovered the first one, he develops a program to use these portals to investigate the future, learn about human beings there, and harness this knowledge to change the fate of the miserable people left in the present.
Using multiple perspectives, including that of Benedikt “the Great One” himself, Santorelli explores all that could go wrong when a desperate population clings to a tiny scrap of hope, and when the power to shape the future rests in the hands of one man. Given that we are regularly confronting the very real evidence of climate change, pandemics, mental health crises, and the persistent presence of strong men in politics, The Reformed Man spins out a sci-fi version that feels plausible enough to give the reader goosebumps. This version of the future might be too much to bear if it weren’t for Santorelli’s well-drawn helpers, like the underestimated brother of one of the boys chosen as a “Candidate” to travel through a portal, and a man whose sister disappeared when she went looking for another way into the future. As in the present day, Santorelli gives us number-crunching, astute scientists and bureaucrats who are methodically easing the characters’ burdens behind the scenes. Santorelli’s skills as a thriller writer — she is the author of the Baby Grand Trilogy and a romantic thriller, In the Red — are on display here, too, with fast-paced fight scenes and anxiety-inducing tension, such as when my favorite character, Agnes, a ghostwriter sent to lionize Benedikt in his memoir, evades the thug sent to kill her.
The Reformed Man will draw you in with its familiar notes, but keep you dancing as the beat twists and turns.