Here, There & Everywhere [Paperback]

Chris Roberson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2005

When Roxanne Bonaventure is eleven years old, a dying woman gives her a gift that changes her life utterly. With the strange device called the 'Sofia', she is granted the ability to travel anywhere in space and time, not only through times that were and will be, but also through the worlds that could have been and might someday be.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If Roberson tends to tell in his first novel rather than show as he does in his short fiction (his stories have been finalists for World Fantasy and Sidewise awards), this episodic romp through the Myriad, where literally every version of events plays out, offers many felicities, not least a spunky heroine. As a schoolgirl, wisecracking Roxanne Bonaventure stumbles across a wounded old woman, who gives her a bracelet. After the woman disappears, Roxanne accidentally discovers that the bracelet, the Sofia, permits travel to any point in the multiverse. Roxanne slowly learns to use the Sofia, and later, with the help of her scientist father, to control it. Her travels then begin in earnest. But several questions dog her: Was the old woman a future version of herself? Where did the Sofia come from? And why are there so few other venues that permit cross–time stream travel in the Myriad? Just when Roxanne believes her life is over, she finds herself in the far future, with one more adventure before her—one that may answer all her questions. Clever popular culture references, amusing showdowns and true human feeling lift this well-crafted debut.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–Roxanne Bonaventure, a precocious 11-year-old, leaves school one day to find a woman sprawled on the sidewalk. The stranger gives her a silver bracelet she calls the Sofia and promptly dies. Although shaken and puzzled by the encounter, the girl goes on with her life. But one day, she discovers that the bracelet grants its wearer the ability to travel through space and time. With the aid of her scientist father, she learns to control its power and soon pops across history and the future. Being young, her first experiments center on jumping back in time to find information on that cute boy in class. As she gets older, Roxanne explores some of her favorite points in history and meets H. G. Wells and the Beatles, among other figures. Each chapter is a separate adventure, giving the book an episodic feel. The range is from the action-oriented, like fighting Nazis, to the elegiac, such as her attempts to use time travel to find a cure for her father's illness. Particularly as a child and young adult, Roxanne is a fun, freewheeling character with whom readers will easily connect. As she gets older, she becomes wiser, a little more reserved, and cautious. But after all she learns, she still searches for the secrets of her own life as well as the enigmatic source of the Sofia. The novel concludes by circling back in surprising ways, giving her the elusive answers for which she longs. Clever, irreverent, and at times touching.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 283 pages
• Publisher: Pyr (April 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591023319
• ISBN-13: 978-1591023319
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #754,844 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Chris Roberson's novels include Here, There & Everywhere, The Voyage of Night Shining White, Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, X-Men: The Return, Set the Seas on Fire, and the forthcoming End of the Century, Iron Jaw and Hummingbird, and The Dragon's Nine Sons. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as Asimov's Science Fiction, Postscripts, and Subterranean, and in anthologies such as Live Without a Net, The Many Faces of Van Helsing, FutureShocks, and Forbidden Planets. Along with his business partner and spouse Allison Baker, he is the publisher of MonkeyBrain Books, an independent publishing house specializing in genre fiction and nonfiction genre studies, and he is the editor of the Adventure anthology series. He has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award three times: once each for writing, publishing, and editing; twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer; and twice for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Short Form (winning in 2004 with his story 'O One').

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Feast For Your Time-Traveling Appetite, October 5, 2005

By 

Brian W. Dow (Boston, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Here, There & Everywhere (Paperback)

Here, There and Everywhere isn't your typical time travel story. No, not by a long shot. Roxanne Bonaventure, with the aid of a mysterious device she calls 'the Sofia', travels backward and forward in time, visits parallel realities and chats with amazing and interesting people. Chris Roberson takes the well-worn premise of time-travel and quite litterally, turns it on it's ear. He has obviously done his homework on the subject. He structures the elements of theoretical time travel and uses them in a very real and dramatic way. This work really stretched the boundries of my understanding of the subject and yet it never reads like a text book although sometimes, the ideas take some time to wrap your brain around. Roxanne is a real, thinking, feeling, breathing human being. Her reactions to circumstances are authentically written and completely believable. She is fun and witty, sly and very intelligent. Though through all the myriad realities she visits, she finds herself more alone than before the Sofia came into her life. This element is the heart of the story. Her yearning for someone to share all this with is, at times, heartbreaking but never falls into melodramatic fluff. It's all very real. A 'What if...' in the best and truest sense.
What I also enjoyed were the pop-culture references that Roberson sprinkles through the story. From H.G. Wells to the Beatles. Great fun. I found myself wishing for a very long rainy day to just sit and read, although I also found myself wanting to savor it while it lasted.
Finally, after reading the last page of Here, There and Everywhere I found myself feeling as if I had just finished a sumptuous meal. Every course included new tastes and new textures. Every succulent morsel filling the tiniest corners. Roberson leaves no dangling plot points and his finale is like a glass of fine wine that finishes an incredible meal. One just sits back and says, 'Now, that was great'. Highly recommended.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars By Her Bootstraps and then some, February 6, 2006

By 

Kevin Murphy (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Here, There & Everywhere (Paperback)

The concept here isn't particularly new, as the author acknowledges with references to both "By His Bootstraps" and "The Man Who Folded Himself." But Roberson manages to find something rather new to say. Not only does he knock most time-travel SF into a cocked hat, by way of modern physics, but his take on the nature of time and the universe is particularly satisfying.

Roxanne Bonaventure is unique in the cosmos, the sole possessor of a 5-dimensional magic bracelet that allows her to move as she will in space, time and probability. The story follows her from the age of 11, when she is granted this "blessing", through the long years of her life. In the vignettes that comprise the novel, we see her learn and change, observing humanity in all its choices, until she finally finds out that what she really wants is the one thing she cannot have.

But sometimes you get what you need.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A mix that doesn't gel, June 19, 2005

By 

AH Reader "AHR" (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Here, There & Everywhere (Hardcover)

Although billed as a novel, the adventures of Roxanne Bonaventure come across as a series of connected short stories. In other words, it's very episodic, and for me this mix just didn't gel as a complete work. Several of the episodes were great (the intro involving the Beatles was nicely done), but others were less so (especially Sandford Blank and the Adventure of the Missing Scientist, yawn).

And in the end I was also troubled by the fact that my empathy for the main character had dissipated. The earlier sections, when she is young, worked well, making Roxanne a fairly believable character. But as the books goes on, and Roxanne just flits about it in time, eventually you come to wonder what is the point of it all. There seems to be no point, except to have some adventures. And that again gets back to the episodic structure and the feeling that it lacks coherence.