We First Met in Ithaca, or Was It Eden?

Honorable Mention! Novels Category in the 2023 Connecticut Press Club Communications Contest.Elle and Oz, strangers ready to restart their lives, meet by chance and flirtatiously swap stories in a dark abandoned house. They soon sense that these stories are coming from an unknown source. It’s as if they are watching the stories rather than telling them. Then they become actors inside the stories, seeing and hearing as if they were the characters, affecting outcomes but still conscious of their separate contemporary selves in the dark abandoned house, their attraction heightened by this mysterious adventure. The stories transform: the two become characters from the Odyssey and Genesis, facing challenges in previous lives, challenges that they meet head-on . Finally, and they find themselves in a future where whole populations have transferred themselves to (or been absorbed into) a massive computer network. The human cycle of birth, death, and rebirth will end. They will live in that network forever. But Elle and Oz have a choice.