Author, Margaret Panofsky

Margaret Panofsky grew up in the rolling, live-oak dotted hills of Northern California before it became Silicon Valley. She could never resist the pull of home for long and bounced back and forth between the East and West Coasts for years before settling with her husband and two children in New York City. Margaret chose a decidedly odd career playing the viola da gamba, and the technique book she wrote for this lovely 16th- through 18th-century stringed instrument became a “bestseller” in the small sphere of early music. She taught at New York University for many years, founding and directing the accomplished performing group, Teares of the Muses, a consort of viols.

At the same time, Margaret Panofsky developed a professional life that involved writing of many kinds—from press releases and program notes to scholarly articles, fiction, poetry, and reviews. Her sci-fi novel, The Last Shade Tree, was published in 2017. She believes the writing in The Last Shade Tree and its stand-alone sequel Day of the Jumping Sun has a definite musical lilt. Her sentences tend to slip into the iambic pentameter of sonnets from the Elizabethan Age. And she does write sonnets. “The Sand Trap,” a political sonnet with a satirical bite, appeared in the New York Times in 2019.

Her travels aren’t over. She is currently spending a year or two in Vancouver, BC.

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What Margaret gained during her youth shines forth in Day of the Jumping Sun. Her father, Wolfgang Panofsky, was a physicist who advised the world about nuclear weapons and arms control, and she dedicates this book to him. Indeed, her post-apocalyptic story is shaped by the first chapter’s nuclear disaster of 2050 that reverberates a million years later. She also dedicates the novel to her mother, Adele Panofsky, an expert in natural history. Even though Margaret still can’t claim much expertise about flora and fauna, her mother’s awe and wonderment certainly made an indelible impression on her daughter. That wonderment animates the entire story.

As long as she can remember, Margaret Panofsky has loved myths. Therefore, she created a delightfully surreal mythology that is also filled with spiritual richness to give her characters new beliefs to fit their post-apocalyptic world. Margaret is all too familiar with the news, and some of the inhabitants of the futuristic Baffling Isle reflect the worst that present-day society has to offer. Other characters see firsthand the beauty and also the degradation of their land that echoes Margaret’s fears for our planet. She has put these and many other timely themes into her post-apocalyptic adventure story.

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An Amazon reader writes, “However alien that bizarrely transformed world feels to the reader, we connect to and identify with this small band of fellow humans as they confront challenges familiar to us—war, injustice, abuse of power, a degraded planet, cruelty and indifference to suffering, but also the values of loyalty, compassion, and the bonds of family.”