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Light On Light Through

You'll hear a little of this and lot of that on Light On Light Through - my reviews of great television series and movies, my interviews with authors and creative media people and their interviews of me, my media theory and political commentary, thoughts about my favorite cars and food and space travel, discussions of my music, and a few of my readings from my science fiction stories. In the first years, starting in 2006, I put up a new episode at least once a month.  More recently, it became more or less often than once a month, usually less often.  But in the Summer of 2020, I began getting more in the mood to podcast, and on 17 October 2023, I began publishing a new episode of the podcast every Tuesday at 12:01 pm -- a minute after Noon (New York time).  - Paul Levinson 

24 October 2021: Interview about Light On Light Through podcast

26 December 2023: Chuck Todd interviews Paul Levinson about Alternate Realities on The Chuck Toddcast  

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Redshift Rendezvous

Sep 6, 2007


File this under a novel I'm almost positive you never heard of.  But I thought I'd mention it here because, who knows, maybe years from now, someone will read this and look further into one of the best unknown science fiction mystery novels I've ever read.

Redshift Rendezvous by John Stith was published in 1990.  It wasn't his first or his last novel.  But it's his best.    It tells the story of a murder and subsequent investigation on an interstellar space ship.

Nothing so extraordinary about that.  But the ship is traveling faster than the speed of light, and Stith posits that the speed of light inside the ship is therefore reduced to about ten meters per second, which would be about 30 million times slower than its usual speed - or the speed we're used to.

The murder investigation must take this incredibly slow-moving situation into account... Can eyewitness testimony be trusted?  What is evidence when light bouncing off objects moves so slowly...

Most science fiction/mystery hybrids take place in worlds with alien names, or space ships, in environments which are otherwise pretty much like ours.   Redshift Rendezvous makes the speed of light and its bending an indispensable part of the puzzle, and thus is one of the truest - and most satisfying - hybrids ever written.

If you like your science fiction rigorous, and your rigor mortis mysteries exotic, grab this novel if you can.