My old English teacher once said that the -cide in the word decide is the same as the one in homicide. 'To choose one future is to murder all the rest,' she warned. 'Deciding is a ruthless act.' - Esso

I went in expecting the worst but found a unique sci-fi story complete with equations and expalnations of those equations. So this story is about Esso, his discovery of the "Upper world" and his sort of need to turn back time becasue of a mistake he made. This is also about Rhia on her quest to uncover her lost history. Esso and Rhia are linked by one person who Rhia is trying to find and Esso is trying to save. At the end of the day, they save each other instead.

If you like interpretations of the "Theory of Relativity", The relationship between Time, Distance, Matter and Energy is explored here. I understand how geeky the book sounds and I wish I could say it isn't but it is and that's it's appeal. The storyline itself wasn't something special but the way it got spun into the physics was beautiful. I can't remember reading something that blends it quite well like this. it was refreshing.

This snippet from Esso's dad's book made me close the book and think a little bit

I’ll admit, I didn’t think much about Hidden Energy when the Elders explained this all to me. Not until a few years ago, when my fellowship paid for a trip to Hiroshima – the city where Hidden Energy was first revealed to the world. We had been taught about the first atomic bomb the world dropped on the Japanese in World War II. Our teacher told us it killed around 146,000 people. But she left out one small detail: most of them were kids. They leave out those child-sized details in the textbooks as well. Like the burns. I had heard of first-, second- and third-degree burns before. But visiting Hiroshima was the first time I learnt there is such a thing as fifth-degree burns. That’s when your flesh turns straight into charcoal. They don’t show you the photos of the rain that fell that evening – each drop sticky and soot-black. The kids were so charred and thirsty that they opened their mouths to the heavens, drinking in as much of the radiation-soaked water as they could. Many died from it. The ones who survived suffered from diarrhoea for months. Then they died too. My child, I have read about Japan’s cruelty towards its enemies during war. Believe me. I have heard people say that, by dropping the bomb, we ended the war early, that countless lives were saved. But none of it seems to wash that bitter taste of Black Rain from my mouth. 146,000 people. 146,000 people.146,000 people. If you sat the bodies of those kids in double-decker buses and, starting from Peckham, lined up the buses end to end, you’d get to Piccadilly Circus and back. And it took less than a kilo of nuclear material to erase all those souls. Less than a kilogram. The approximate weight of a human heart.