Obviously Not Clairvoyant

Book excerpt: The best-selling tabloid in the solar system, The Galactic Enquirer was a two-person operation comprised of the Editor-in-Chief and the Guy Who Actually Did All the Work (a position held at the time, as it almost always was, by a woman). The Enquirer had long been known as a provider of juicy, titillating, not-even-remotely-true stories. But in this particularly slow year, the biggest story the staff had managed to come up with so far was a piece about a man who had decided to try cantaloupe. "You know," the Chief said, "this hasn't been a very good year for us." "You don't have to tell me," the Guy said. "I'm the head of the Sales Division. We're going to have to come up with something better. More sensational." "More sensational than the cantaloupe story? I don't think that's possible! Like what?" What they come up with relates directly to events on Earth a thousand years later, when the paths of a host of memorable characters are curiously intertwined. Ostensibly a tale of two worlds (three if you consider New York separate from the rest of this one), Obviously Not Clairvoyant explores, with humor and sentiment, what it is to be human.