The Vacuum We Return To

In the Nevada desert there is a hole that light falls into and never leaves - a perfect hemisphere of absolute nothing, its edge turned as clean as if by a lathe the size of a mountain. The government offers no explanation. The sagebrush grows right up to its lip and stops.

Hope Valentine has spent sixteen years learning to listen to fire the way other men learn to fight it. Then, on a burning night at the Wilmington refinery, he watches a fire run backward - smoke folding into flame, ash returning to wood - and he cannot un-know what he saw. A thousand miles away, neuroscientist Sophy has given six years to a machine built to hear the faintest whisper a thinking brain makes, and to one impossible subject: the eleventh.

What connects them is the thing in the desert, and the bargain it seems to offer - that the arrow of time is not a law but a choice, and that what runs forward might be made to run back. But every crossing has a cost. The question was never whether the past can be rewritten. It is which version of a life, a marriage, a self you would choose to return to.

THE VACUUM WE RETURN TO is a hard science-fiction novel about entropy, love, and the geometry of an irreversible life.