Within a week of Vanessa's visit to my office, I found myself, along with my wife Sarah and our four-year-old, Rebecca, being ushered under tight security into a small building on the grounds of the beautiful rural Storm King Art Center in upstate New York.

In addition, I was to be designated as official historian of this extraordinary event, which is how I come to be writing this account now, six years after the bizarre crisis arose. Plainly, notifying six billion people that the end of the world was very possibly at hand – in a way that would minimize panic – would involve a tad more finesse than writing a puff piece announcing that Columbia's garden club had just acquired a new variety of orchid. Naturally, I accepted, flattered by the honor and keen for the challenge. Already, leaders at the highest levels of government and academia throughout the world had been notified, and apparently I, as Dean of Communications, had been recommended as the point man to break the terrifying news to the world at large. Vanessa's frantic visit to my office that afternoon was not just to indulge a taste for sharing sensational news. These disasters included profound climatic and meteorological disruptions, agricultural chaos, and possible orbital collisions. Unless something was done to diffuse or divert it, Maureen, Vanessa and other cosmologists were already predicting, this pair of gravitational tsunamis would cause the orbits of all the planets in the solar system to wobble and change direction, resulting in uncontrollable and calamitous consequences for Earth. Maureen Salton, a 19-year-old astronomy student in her department, had just discovered a heretofore undetected cloud of super-dense particles – a dark matter condensate, they were calling it – surging toward our solar system in a cyclic pattern such that it threatened to affect the gravitational equilibrium of our local cosmos twice before cycling off into the universe at large.Įven though the discovery was less than twenty-four hours old, it had already been dubbed, as is the practice in these matters, the Salton Mass. I poured her a drink and listened, with growing alarm, as she explained. Van, relax, I said, gesturing to a weathered armchair. I was sitting at my desk in my office at Columbia University in New York, where I was Dean of Communications, working on a press release involving a forthcoming fund-raising event, when the chair of our astronomy department, Vanessa Jacumba, banged on my door so urgently I thought I was on the receiving end of one of those mistaken drug raids you hear so much about these days.īill, she panted, having obviously run the two blocks from her own office, we have a problem. IT WAS A DAY like any other – only it wasn't. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this a CUBEWORLD If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to and purchase your own copy. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. License: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataĮvans, Henry (pen name for printed version)Ĭubeworld: An Adventure in Solid Geometry / Henry Evansġ. Mathenauts, 1987, published by Arbor House and Edited by Rudy Rucker Copyright OfficeĪn abridged version of this novel appeared in Published by Hank Gross at Smashwords 2010Īll rights reserved. Recently, I have taken up painting (acrylics), which can be viewed on my website.

I won first prize in the December 1995 Popular Photography contest and was later profiled in the magazine (August 1997). I studied street photography with Randall Warniers at MIT, as well as figure photography. I have also taught English and writing to students from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I have had novels and non-fiction published by major publishers such as Ballantine, World, Arbor House, Peter Pauper Press, and William Morrow, as well as many short stories and articles in major national publications, such as 'The Boy Who Ate New York' in the National Lampoon, 1991. His mother was the sweetest woman and made the best potato salad I've ever had. I also did research and writing for the Reader's Digest (Hell's Angels, Motorcycle Safety) and flew to Louisville to interview (in poetry) Cassius Clay before he won the title and became Ali. I have been a writer and editor for over 40 years, beginning in New York City in the 60's, where I freelanced for various magazines and worked as an editor at the National Examiner tabloid newspaper.

Cube world episode 1