Slashdot recently linked an article entitled "General Relativity without Black Holes" which apparently appeared in the April issue of the "science fiction and fact" mag Analog. Slashdot's blurb talked a bit about the author, John Cramer, a University of Washington physics prof I happened to have taken a course from. Cramer is also a science fiction author, of Twistor and Einstein's Bridge, the latter of which I actually bothered to read after Cramer announced its publication in class. Check out his Alternate View articles published in Analog.

John Cramer's self-posted plot description of Twistor at Amazon.com:

David Harrison, a young physics postdoc and and Victoria Gordon, a graduate student working together on a "table-top" experiment in a small lab at the University of Washington stumble on a world-spanning breakthrough discovery, the Twistor Effect. Soon, because of dirty tricks by industrial spies, David and two small children are trapped in a "shadow" world, an Eden-like twin of the Earth with its own ecology of strange plants and animals, including a peculiarly colorful "tree-bird", a dextrous six-legged "shadow kitten", and a giant tentacle-mouthed "shadow bear". David has most of a laboratory full of custom-built equipment but no electrical power. Vickie has the technical knowledge, but her hardware has gone with David and the industrial spies are closing in. Can David and the children ever get back to their own world, or are they trapped forever in the the beautiful but dangerous shadow world?

I think I'm gonna write a novel about a University of Washington student who, failing to get admitted into the Computer Science program, eventually drops out and gets a job at an Internet company. While writing innocent-seeming Java apps for what he thinks is merely an entertainment web site, the young man gets swept up in a web of industrial espionage and intrigue after discovering the industry's darkest secret: The Curse of the Golden Chicken.