Christian Sia’s Review from Readers’ Favorite

Alexander Heed’s Pulsar: The Time Traveler plunges the reader into the last days of the galactic war, with enemies of the Nespis Empire bearing down on them. But the evil empire kills as many systems, planets, and innocent people as possible. Young Chase Monadi uses an experimental time machine to escape, leaping 105 Earth-years into the future. He lands on another Earth, disguises himself, and blends in among humans, befriending two college students, Rachel and Jason, and an alien trader, Kaytanalli. In the meantime, he continues to hunt the final component of the time travel device that could let him go backward in time to undo his parents’ deaths. But time travel is the one unforgivable crime of the Empire, and when bounty hunter Botter and his terrifying War Pups track him down, Chase’s friends are swept into the fray along with his long-lost brother, Coba. What follows is a planet-hopping chase through ringed worlds, a drowned underwater city, a space casino, and a daring rescue.

Pulsar is a thrilling sci-fi story that perfectly blends surprising time-travel elements with enthralling space opera. Coronal mass ejections, black hole-powered stations, and relativistic blueshifts share the same page with firesabers and color-coded psionic gifts, and everything is exciting in this action-packed world. Alexander Heed’s characters are larger-than-life yet surprisingly relatable and flawed, and Chase’s desperate hope pulls the story forward. Kay is a broken character who uses joy to mask her wounds, and Coba has the kind of warmth that makes him lovable. Unlike what you would read in most time-travel novels, this author delivers a twist in the genre that transforms the story into a meditation on death, grief, and the freedom of letting go. The exquisite prose, the cinematic storytelling, and the imaginative and intricately developed world make this book a winner.