When I was fourteen, my best friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, introduced me to the science fiction of R. Harrington Folt, whose sophisticated and irreverent spin on time travel made Lem look like the drooling imbecile it turns out he was. Folt’s novel Zahlungsaufforderung, which Gell-Mann gave to me with the inscription, B., You amaze me. And I won a Nobel Prize in physics, for Christ’s sake. Fondly, M., changed my young life. The book, written in prose at once transcendent and second-rate (how does one accomplish this miracle?), draws parallels between cervical and time dilation. Of course, those parallels seem obvious to all now, but Folt was the first person to understand it. As I was able to venture out from under Gell-Mann’s enormous shadow (I’m not saying he was fat, but, well…), I realized that Folt’s revelations were ludicrous and that he was, and remains, a complete fraud (turns out his editor Gordon Lish was the genius in that relationship), and I discovered Pleven, a writer so secretive, even his publisher has never met him (legend has it he lives among the Oromo people of Ethiopia). His recondite theories of time have perhaps been best characterized by literary critic George Steiner as “Chrono-synclastic infundibulum on acid.” Imagine, if you are able, a universe in which not only can an individual be everywhere/everytime, but time itself can be everywhere/everytime and nowhere/notime. Now multiply that by ten. Now unmultiply (or “divide”) it. There you have Pleven in a nutshell, a nutshell that exists in seventeen dimensions. My world was shook. It made Folt’s work appear to have been written by a common garden slug.