A Second Chance, Measured in Decades
Paul Taylor died at sixty-five. A brilliant physicist, he had changed the world and somehow missed the parts of it worth changing it for. Then a fusion accident in 2033 ended his first life — and he woke on a summer morning in 1979, fourteen years old, with half a century of knowledge crammed into a boy's body.
That is the premise the trilogy runs on. What it becomes is something larger: a decades-spanning story about ambition, love, and the strange arithmetic of getting to try again. Paul knows the future. He knows which ideas will matter, which technologies are possible, which risks are worth taking. What he does not know is that the people he remembers are not memories at all. They are real, changing, and entirely capable of surprising him.
Across three books, Paul builds an empire that reaches from a family farm to low earth orbit, outmaneuvers governments that would rather control him, and discovers that the hardest thing to engineer is a life you actually want to live. The science is real, the stakes climb from personal to geopolitical, and at the center of it all is a love story that refuses to follow his plan.
Part time-travel thriller, part coming-of-age epic, part meditation on what a person would do differently with everything they know — the Another Past trilogy asks whether a second chance is a gift or a test.
Book One — Another Past
A dying physicist gets one last gift: a summer morning in 1979, a teenage body, and fifty years of knowledge he is burning to use. Paul Taylor knows exactly what to do with it. He transfers schools, files his first patents, and starts building from his family's farm the kind of technological future he never had the nerve to attempt the first time around. He also goes looking for Jeryl Salaway, the girl he let slip away in his first life.
The plan works. The patents multiply, the money follows, and by his teens Paul is on the radar of people who do not take kindly to a boy who knows too much. What his plan cannot account for is Jeryl herself — sharp, self-possessed, and unwilling to be positioned like a piece on a board. Paul can outthink institutions. Love is the one problem his future knowledge never solved.
He knew the future. He never knew her.
For fans of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Dark Matter, and Replay.
Book Two — Another Past: Book Two
The empire Paul built in secret has grown too big to hide. By twenty-one he is engaged to Jeryl, running a defense company worth hundreds of millions, and quietly laying the groundwork for something no private citizen has ever done: commercial access to space. The technology is real. The money is serious. So are the people it has drawn to him.
A professional hit team surfaces in Salt Lake City. Soviet intelligence runs an operation against him overseas. In Washington, a nervous Congress debates whether an inventor who knows things he should not is the future of American capability or a threat that needs to be contained. Paul can manage the business. He is still learning to survive the consequences of it. And through the danger, he and Jeryl are becoming what he never wrote into the plan — genuine partners, in the work and in the fight to protect it.
He planned the empire. He didn't plan the enemies.
I loved the book! It has it all -- a logical storyline, action, and likeable characters. I'd give it five stars, but Amazon and Goodreads seem to be having problems with the rating system when it comes to this book. If you enjoyed Ed Nelson's Richard Jackson series, I think you'll like this one also.
For fans of Replay, The Martian, and Cold War thrillers where the history gets rewritten from the inside.
Get Book Two
Book Three — Another Past: Book Three
Paul Taylor stands at the summit of everything he set out to build. He is the wealthiest man alive, with stations in orbit, a foothold on the moon, and Mars finally within reach. He is raising a family alongside the empire, and for the first time the future he remembers has been fully overtaken by the one he made.
Then the world tests how far private power can really reach. A partnership that once looked like the crown of his ambition turns hostile, and Paul is drawn into a confrontation with a nation-state that no company was ever built to fight. As the stakes rise past anything money can settle, the question that has followed him since before he was reborn returns with new weight: what was all of this for, and is there any version of the past he could still reach? The trilogy's final chapter is its most personal — a reckoning with everything a second life can and cannot buy.
He built everything. The one thing he wants can't be bought.
For fans of Contact, grand-scale science fiction, and geopolitical thrillers with a human core.
Get Book Three
Where to Start
Read the trilogy in order for the full arc — Another Past is the place to begin, and Paul's story builds book to book. That said, each volume opens a clear door for new readers, so a reader who picks up Book Two or Three will find their footing quickly.
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