UC Riverside

Lacuna is the story of Sam Konwicki, sixteen years old in 1944, obsessed with girls, school, and Nazis. His world becomes infinitely more complex when an alien race takes over the planet, ends the war, and slows human time to a crawl. A single day will now take millions of years to pass. There will be no more aging, no death from natural causes. We will live almost forever. It seems as if a new era of peace and harmony has arrived.

But the aliens install a totalitarian regime. Sam has to choose whether to follow his father and join the repressive Internal Security Police Corps, or to side with his mother's fierce idealism and support the local Resistance fighters. And he's fallen in love. But it's hard to act like a grown-up when you're stuck in the body of a sixteen-year old until the heat-death of the universe.