Feynman & Boyd: Volume 1 : Manhattan

"This was a spectacular first book of the year! An alternate ending to WWII leads to high seas survival, a desert mystery and a quirky scientist’s take on the mayhem..." - Goodreads

"...a mix of science fiction, second world war history and of course, a post-catastrophe dystopian world. Unique, thought provoking and eminently readable." - Goodreads

Sitting alone in his truck, Richard Feynman watches the Trinity Test fail. A year later, months after the celebrations that follow the end of World War Two, Lottie Boyd drifts alone on the Atlantic with a sniper rifle over her lap, one of the few to have escaped the Silent Zones.

The fear that a large scale nuclear event would kick off a chain reaction of much more stable elements going into a fisson-state, burning the planet away, was real in the formative years of atomic testing. In Feynman and Boyd, the reverse occurs. The Trinity test fails due to a previously unidentified counter-reaction, where something in the natural world snuffs out combustion. The dusty by-product of this reaction, nicknamed "Deaden," is found to stabilize any combustible form, rendering weapons useless. The Manhattan Project quickly becomes a facility for creating Deaden. It is this anti-weapon that wins World War II. Within weeks of discovering Deaden, and using controlled reactions to manufacture it, it's then discovered that Deaden eventually also stops cellular combustion, killing every surrounding living thing. These areas are the Silent Zones. Despite this, manufacturing keeps being developed, and a massive, singular Silent Zone befalls most of the world, killing most living things in it's grip. Most.

Lottie Boyd is in her twenties, a chronically ill woman whose illness has made her immune to the suffocation of Deaden. She has struck out for warmer climate after everyone and everything she has ever known has been killed. She sails on her father's sailboat, the Slocum, a replica of Joshua Slocum's Spray. The novel follows Lottie down the Atlantic Seaboard to Cuba, then out onto open ocean to Bermuda. She navigates the unspoiled Caribbean islands, their inhabitants, other survivors, pirates, and eventually, journeys to Bermuda and Feynman.

More at www.feynmanandboyd.com