A time bent, morally fraught science fiction novella where a devastated future saves itself by stealing women from the past.
Title: Fractured Echoes
Author: R. Morello
Publisher: Cathedral Rocks Publishing
ISBN: 979-8288332166
Format: eBook & Paperback
Word Count: 20,600
Print Length: 80 pages
Genres: Science Fiction, Time Travel, Dystopian, Moral/Philosophical Sci Fi
In a future where a plague has left women scarce, a time retrieval agent betrayed by his own director must turn the very timeline they exploit against them before their engineered future becomes permanent.
In a world decimated by The Hormonal Plague, ninety percent of women are gone, and with them the balance of civilization. With natural recovery impossible, the solution becomes clear and morally catastrophic: time travel.
The Temporal Retrieval Initiative, once framed as a humanitarian project, now operates as a cold, ruthless machine. Its agents pluck women from the moments just before their deaths across history, transporting them into the future to repopulate a dying world. Officially, it is about saving humanity. Unofficially, it is about power, control, and profit.
Shatner Barnes, a brilliant but disillusioned retrieval agent, discovers that his life and work are built on a lie. The agency’s director, Ramses, sabotaged Shatner’s mission and tried to erase him from existence in order to monopolize time travel for a wealthy elite: men who can handpick women from the past like property.
At the same time, Reed, a desperate man facing the loss of his wife and child, makes a dark bargain with Ramses. In exchange for saving his family from a fatal accident, Reed agrees to tip the future into authoritarianism, helping solidify Ramses’ grip on time itself.
When a figure from a rogue timeline returns, Shatner’s best friend, altered and aged by a life that technically never happened, he brings with him forbidden knowledge and one final chance to set things right. The cost: shattering timelines, rewriting lives, and possibly breaking reality beyond repair.
Armed with the truth about the Initiative and the horrifying exploitation hidden behind its rhetoric of salvation, Shatner must decide how far he will go to stop Ramses, undo Reed’s choice, and reclaim a future that is vanishing under the weight of stolen lives.
Fractured Echoes is a morally charged time travel thriller about power, regret, and the human cost of “fixing” the future by rewriting the past.
The ethics of time travel and consent
Exploitation framed as “salvation”
How grief and desperation can be weaponized
The commodification of women and bodies across time
Free will vs predetermined timelines
The emotional fallout of rewriting history
What makes a future worth saving
A high concept time travel premise with a strong emotional core
Compact, fast paced novella length but with novel sized stakes
Explores ethical sci-fi questions through character driven drama
Strong appeal for fans of Dark Matter, Twelve Monkeys, The Time Traveler’s Wife (darker side), and morally complex SF
Built-in adaptation potential: focused cast, high stakes, morally loaded world building
Fractured Echoes will especially resonate with readers who enjoy:
Time travel stories that grapple with ethical consequences
Dark, bittersweet sci-fi with emotional weight
Stories about compromises made under pressure
Compact, cinematic novellas that feel bigger than their page count
“Very satisfying and unsatisfying in a good way. Love this style of book.”
R. Morello writes psychological and speculative science fiction that turns emotional truths into strange, cinematic realities. His books including Upside Down, Fractured Echoes, the Simulation trilogy, Mind’s Edge, and more: explore grief, identity, memory, and the moral edges of technology.
Writing from New England roots, Morello’s stories often sit at the intersection of human fragility and speculative “what if,” asking not just how worlds break, but how people do and whether they can be put back together.
Author photos (on request)
R. Morello
Cathedral Rocks Publishing
