The Black Hole Express: A Novel

The Perfect World exists in the far distant future and is ruled by an old man called the Grand Exterminator. In this heavily polluted world people wear oxygen masks and silver vinyl jump suits. They’ve never seen flowers or grass. Robots do their work and their thinking. Many laws exist, but the chief prohibition is against passion. Anyone who talks of love or acts on feelings of love or passion is exterminated—reduced in seconds to a few particles of dust. Jack Goddard, a young physicist, a disheveled guy who sports an unruly mop of curls, has committed the ultimate crime in the Perfect World: he’s fallen in love. The object of his forbidden passion is a young redhead named Julia. The Grand Exterminator has learned of Jack’s crime, and he sets out to destroy this threat to the existence of his Perfect World. Jack’s punishment will be severe. But Jack acts decisively. He successfully activates a black hole and teleports to New York City, 2010, where he survives, thrives, and is happy. His quest for a genuinely perfect world is only beginning. The world he’s landed in is not perfect either—and besides, the Grand Exterminator has followed him here. Jack and his beloved Julia, who manages to find Jack, now have an alternative quest: to save their new world and fight the repulsive exterminator.