"The Region of Unlikeness"

"The Region of Unlikeness"
by Rivka Galchen

Rating: 8.4



Short story, written in the first person, about a female graduate student who becomes involved with two older men who are interested in the science of time travel. Narrator describes meeting the two men, Jacob and Ilan, by chance in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side.

We know that the general theory of relativity is compatible with the existence of space-times in which travel to the past or remote future is possible. The logician Kurt Gödel proved this back in the late nineteen-forties, and it remains essentially undisputed. Whether or not humans (in our very particular space-time) can in fact travel to the past—we still don’t know. Maybe. Surely our world obeys rules still alien to our imaginations. Maybe Jacob is my destiny. Regardless, I continue to avoid him. ♦