Story Synopsis:

Robert, an introverted young man living in Lawrence, Kansas in the year 2051, just can’t seem to catch an even break. While he had finally made it to his nineteenth birthday, not much else was happening in his life. Robert was not born with a handsome face, nor was he gifted with a magnificent mind. But his problems didn’t stop there. His school is filled with assorted sadistic bullies that have put him on the top of their thump lists. His stepfather left town months earlier with a “despicable little trollop,” while his characterless mother was too absorbed in her own world to care much about his needs and wants. Robert’s only happy thought was his very special Phoenix Obscura camera that took extraordinary three-dimensional ‘pictures.’ By beaming adherence radiation over an object, it created a unique pattern of energy that was captured in a recyclable plasticoid cube for Robert to cherish. Robert’s mother didn’t see things exactly that way, however. The camera is worth a lot of money. The pawnshop is still open. And the liquor store delivers.

While Robert thought that life couldn’t get much worse, things were about to head south in a big way as his conniving uncle, Mallory Carpenter, a powerful member of the U.S. State Department, hid a top-secret quantum time machine in Robert’s beloved camera, and was powering it up to send him back through the decades to correct a fundamental strategic historical anomaly that could prevent America from entering into the World War Two theater, allowing Germany to train their hostilities eventually to the U.S. soil. Carpenter plans to send Robert on a fantastic journey to the torrid Jornada del Muerto desert during the American Trinity nuclear weapon tests in 1945, to World War Two France during the bloody Battle of Paris, and to 1920s England and Lawrence where additional overwhelming challenges await him. There’s only one problem with Carpenter’s master strategy, though – Robert doesn’t want to go!

In his wily tribute to the movies, books and magazines from the 1940s and 1950s, author Douglas Parker’s Pulp Science Fiction Book One: Timed Out, a fantastic return to the golden age of science fiction, is a coming-of-age adventure story that chronicles what could happen when a simple schoolboy from an eccentric future is physiologically fused with some of the most complicated figures from the troubled past and cast off to become an adult while challenging the essential moral and ethical dilemmas of his day, and of his tomorrow.

“Break out the popcorn!  Pulp Science Fiction reads like a wild Saturday afternoon sci-fi double feature matinee from the 1950s”