What historian would not like a time machine, especially if it could bring a guy like Socrates back to help with your work—not to mention prevent the unjust death of one of the world’s most famous philosophers? Paul Levinson’s The Plot to Save Socrates gives Sierra Waters, his graduate student heroine, the chance to do just that. But she may need the help of a few unsavory types, most notably Alcibiades, the Greek general who led troops on both sides of the Peloponnesian War.
I enjoyed all the time travel conundrums, but I wish Levinson did more with the historical politics. ( )

Paul Levinson's time-travel novel The Plot to Save Socrates is that tragic thing: a great concept let down by a middling execution. Time-travelling is always a crowd-pleaser, even if it's a genre that always teeters between the hokey and the convoluted, and Levinson's novel promises, on the face of it, to be a high-brow thriller revolving around the rescue of Socrates, one of the great minds of history, from his unjust death-sentence, when he was condemned to swallow poisonous hemlock for daring to speak against the orthodoxies of the Athenian democracy.

Unfortunately, despite some promise in the opening chapters – not least some successful mimicry of Plato's Socratic dialogues, where Socrates and a mysterious visitor debate the paradoxes of time-travel – the storytelling itself misfires. Characterisation is weak throughout: none of the main players have much in the way of motivation, for all that they leap to their feet to take their part, and those that become the villains of the piece have motives that remain completely inscrutable – in fact, the main villain and orchestrator is all but forgotten by the end. Sierra Waters, the closest we have to a protagonist, could have as her characterisation a post-it note that just says "sexy". The explanation for the time-travel basically amounts to "magical chairs" (pg. 231), and Levinson proves in multiple scenes that he can't write action to save his life. By the end, the novel has failed to avoid that common time-travel trap of "heads chasing tails" (pg. 265) and it degenerates into a hectic, harum-scarum mess, with the only resolutions proving underwhelming.

Some of which would be OK if the novel's promising ideas had been tackled. But we lose the thread of the plot to save Socrates – partly because of the characterisation and storytelling mentioned above, but also because it's never clear why the effort's being made on the elderly philosopher's behalf in the first place. Civilisation "has never fully recovered from the death of Socrates", Levinson writes on page 135, which is stretching it a bit, and besides which is an argument never fully explored in the book itself. Socrates' challenge in the novel – that "it will make no difference, to the present or the future of the world, if I die here or escape with you" (pg. 49) – is given a mundane plot-resolution answer rather than a thematic one that addresses the concepts of messing with history and saving a Great Man for posterity. Questions of fate, paradox and philosophy are raised by Levinson's scenario but never addressed, with the can being kicked down the street until there's no more street. The result is a promising high-concept thriller that is disappointingly unsuccessful, with its events "happen[ing] in a way that makes no impact, in which case we have wasted our time" (pg. 168). ( )

What would you do if you had the chance to save Socrates? What would you do if he refused to be saved?

It's 2042, and Sierra Waters is a graduate student, working on her dissertation on Athens' the adoption of the Ionic phonetic alphabet around 400 B.C., when Thomas O'Leary, a member of her doctoral committee, brings her a fragment of a previously-unknown Socratic dialog. This dialog suggests that Socrates received a visitor from the future, who offered to save him by means of time travel and the substitution of a mindless clone. Socrates refuses, as he refused other efforts to persuade him to save himself. A new Socratic dialog is a major event if it's real—but most likely it's a fake. Nevertheless, Sierra's fascinated, and she calls O'Leary—or tries to. He's vanished.

Recruiting her lover Max Marcus, an assistant professor at Fordham, she starts trying to track down both Thomas O'Leary and the origins of the dialog. The search takes them to the private clubs of New York and London, and into the curious history of a few of those clubs, and eventually the time-travel secret hidden within them. Sierra gets caught up in an ever-more-complicated and dangerous hunt through time, for Thomas, the mysterious Andros, and the origins of the dialog.

Recommended. ( )

An interesting book. A group of future saviours of Socrates plot, scheme and squabble to prevent the execution of the great philosopher. The characters are a little dry (but then I am a fan of Greg Egan), so that does not worry me greatly. It is the story that carries the novel. I had to keep track of the characters and action as the setting changes through several periods in both the ancient and modern world—a complex story. I found the resolution, the death of Socrates in the mid-21st from incurable brian cancer, anti-climatic. This does raise the question, why save Socrates? He was already an old man. ( )

http://www.book-blog.com/2011/07/levinson-paul-the-plot-to-save-socrates.html ( )