My father, Frank Reynolds, wrote THE LINK in the 1960s. He would have been about 20 years old. He was a voracious reader who loved a good story, and this one lived on his own shelf for decades afterward — one of those books in the house nobody had actually finished, including, for a long time, me.
He tried to get it published. The family lore is that at one point he ran into Ray Bradbury in a bookstore in Los Angeles and, the way any young writer would, pitched his book to him. Bradbury was decent about it — gave Dad his own agent's contact information. Dad sent the manuscript off. He never heard back.
I tried to read it myself more than once over the years — as a kid, and again more than once as an adult. I never got past the first chapter. For a long time I just couldn't get into it.
What changed was, oddly, more technology. As my dad's life was coming to an end, I remembered his manuscript. Out of curiosity I fed an excerpt into NotebookLM and let it generate an audio summary. Hearing someone else narrate the shape of the story back to me is what finally got me to sit down and read it properly, cover to cover, in his own words.
I liked it. I liked what it was actually about — a man who builds something that can think and remember and read faster than he ever could, and has to live with what that does to the people he loves. I couldn't leave it on the shelf again. I decided I was going to publish it.
Every word in this book is his: his typos, his dated phrasing, his sentences, exactly as he left them. Enter your email above and I'll send you the whole story, plus the first two chapters.