Margaret Panofsky
A post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel
Wars are never good for anyone, not in 2050, not a million years later.
Day of the Jumping Sun, the Story
They’re odd; their craft is an old Greyhound bus. 20th-century time travelers arrive on Baffin Island a million years after the total nuclear devastation of WWIII in 2050 to find a peculiar landscape of pines and more pines, and strangest of all, an oddly invincible foe.
The travelers’ time machine, a Greyhound, materializes 1,000,000 years in the future.
A lot has changed in a million years. Within the isle’s caverns and forests the time travelers find people, ailing and angry, tortured into submission by prairie dogs—hardly the cute creatures from the Time Before. The human-animal barrier has been breached; these five-foot-tall anthropomorphs are brilliant, treacherous, but oddly endearing, all traits they learned eons ago living alongside WWIII’s few human survivors. They run the place they call Baffling Isle with impressive efficiency.
The time travelers, three families who are all heart without much common sense, have plenty of their own problems, including the disappearance of Sequoyah, their beloved leader. But what they have in abundance is something the occupiers of the isle seem to lack—an innate understanding of how to conquer the unloved, the unloving, and the unlovable with love. As the story unfolds, four factions, prairie dogs, Shade People, Sun People, and the time travelers themselves, edge ever closer to a second armageddon.
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The travelers meet prairie dogs, the dominant species, who aren’t cute like these.
Margaret Panofsky’s post-apocalyptic page-turner tells the time travelers’ tale with satirical wit and tender compassion, and her future world teems with startling images and improbable creatures. Picture Terry Pratchett crossed with Neil Gaiman and Ursula Le Guin.
Day of the Jumping Sun, for grown-up readers of any age, is a stand-alone tale meant to be enjoyed with or without the previous novel, The Last Shade Tree. That epic adventure conveyed the three families from the twentieth century to their troubled start on Baffin Island.
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Strange pine forest against a starry sky
An Amazon reader writes, “Wildly creative, brilliant. Sorry, I can only give Day of the Jumping Sun 5 Stars. If I had it my way I’d give Day of the Jumping Sun all the Stars in the universe. But I can’t because of all the radiation it would cause.”
On Amazon, offered in Kindle and as a handsome large-format 6”x9” paperback.
Barnes and Noble lists the book; click here. Support independent booksellers by ordering Day of the Jumping Sun through their IndieBound book-sales service. Find your local Independent Bookstore and ask them to order copies to sell.
———— Look Inside! ————
Late afternoon in a blue-hued pine forest of the future
Day of the Jumping Sun is published by the superb All Things the Matter Press, a no fee, royalty paying small press, providing expert editing and design. ATTMP’s motto for authors is “Share your Self with the world.”