© James Pyles

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I forget where I saw Ken Grimwood’s 1986 novel Replay promoted, but it sounded like an interesting story, so I picked up a copy at my local public library. It’s a highly unusual and compelling time travel story.

Jeff Winston is a radio news producer in this late 40s. His job is lackluster as is his childless marriage. He’s at work and gets a phone call from his wife. As she starts speaking, he has a sudden heart attack and dies.

Jeff wakes up in his dorm room, an eighteen-year-old college freshman in the early 1960s. He has all of the memories of his life up to the moment he died twenty-five years in the future. Except that none of that has happened yet. Does it have to happen at all?

The first quarter of the book follows Jeff as he reconstructs his life based on what he knows of the future. In this case, he makes himself fabulously wealthy. Of course he drops out of college. Still feeling like a middle-aged man, the prospect of going through another four-year drudge as an undergraduate looks so depressing. But he does know a lot about major sporting events and which companies are going to be successful in the 1960s and beyond.

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