Retrovision
What if memories could testify?
A novel by Robert W. Termanini, MD
A work of upmarket speculative thriller about a neurosurgeon who, on the night his lover is murdered, preserves not her life but the architecture of her dying mind — and who, twelve years later, grafts that tissue into his own daughter to save her. The child lives, and begins to carry a sensory record of a death she never witnessed, of a woman she never met.
“The medicine is real. The only fiction is that it happened to these people.”
Robert W. Termanini, MD
“What must the child pay for the parent’s sin?”
A medical doctor and neuroscientist. RETROVISION is his debut novel.
The Author
Medicine can name the damage. Fiction is where the damage names itself.
I am a medical doctor and neuroscientist who writes fiction.
My research at BrainWaveTheory examines how sensory stimulation shapes memory, mood, and cognition, including how the brain consolidates emotional memory during REM and slow-wave sleep. I am a peer reviewer for Frontiers in Psychology. I am also the author of the completed scholarly manuscript Neural Rhythms and Mind Mechanics: The Academic Encyclopedia of Brainwave Entrainment, currently in preparation for publication.
More than two decades in neuroscience and human behavior, grounded in my medical training and my expertise in the field of neuroscience, have taught me that the brain is not merely an organ. It is the architecture of the self, the instrument through which experience becomes meaning, and the tissue in which memory, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves to remain coherent are laid down at a level beneath conscious access. I have spent my professional life watching that architecture operate at its limits: under disease, under injury, under trauma, and under the ordinary stresses that test what a person can carry and still remain themselves.
I came to fiction because fiction can enter the human territory that clinical language can only approach. A chart can record the diagnosis, the lesion, the deficit, and the treatment plan. It cannot record what it feels like to lose, find, or remake oneself inside a brain that is no longer cooperating. It cannot hold the private architecture of fear, grief, memory, love, guilt, and survival without flattening it into categories. Fiction can. It is where the unsaid can remain precise, where damage can be rendered without spectacle, and where the interior life of a person can be taken seriously without being reduced.
“The scariest part of writing Samuel was realizing that if my own child were dying, I would probably make the exact same monstrous choice. When you catch yourself agreeing with your villain’s logic, that’s when you know the psychological horror is working.”
My first novel, RETROVISION, is a work of upmarket speculative thriller built at the intersection of neurosurgery, evidence, and inheritance. It asks what a child owes the dead, what the body keeps after the mind has finished forgetting, and what it costs a father to save his daughter when the saving requires an act no profession can sanction. The novel is grounded in clinical neuroscience, medical ethics, surgical context, and the biological language of tissue, memory, and injury. The questions it raises about memory, embodiment, and moral consequence have followed me from the laboratory to the writing desk for the better part of two decades.
I authored Chapter 7, “From Impossible to I’m Possible,” in The Gifts of Pain, Volume 1 (2024), a 31-author collection that debuted as a #1 Amazon Kindle bestseller.
I live and write in Chicago. For agents, editors, press, and speaking inquiries, see .
Retrovision
Upmarket Speculative Thriller
"What if the only living witness to a murder was never there?"
In 1979, neurosurgeon Samuel Becker finds Marta Christensen, the young Danish woman who had nursed his dying mother and whom he has loved in secret, bleeding to death in his family’s greenhouse after an attack no one else witnesses. In the aftermath, with the Becker estate destroyed, Samuel does what no physician should. He removes and preserves a small sample of Marta’s cortical tissue. It violates every ethical line he has sworn to hold, and he does it anyway, unwilling to let her vanish completely, keeping the one part of her that might still hold who she was.
Twelve years later, when his daughter Amelia is six, Samuel discovers a glioblastoma consuming the temporal-parietal cortex of her brain. He performs the resection himself. In the moment when her survival narrows to an impossible choice, he grafts Marta’s preserved tissue into the surgical bed. The procedure is unprecedented, unauthorized, and undocumented. Amelia lives.
After the surgery, Amelia begins producing sensory fragments connected to a night she could not possibly have witnessed. A greenhouse she has never entered. The pressure of a hand at her throat. A Danish word for beloved she has never been taught. The case has been closed for a decade. With her testimony, it begins to come apart, and so does Samuel.
The Book
RETROVISION is a multigenerational work of upmarket speculative thriller about what we save, what we lose in the saving, and what the body keeps after the mind has finished forgetting. It is grounded in clinical realism, surgical anatomy, and the moral pressure of medicine, and built as a slow burn in which the reader knows the killer long before the lawyers do. The medicine in it is not science fiction. The story is.
For Agents & Editors
The full manuscript, a two-page synopsis, and the property’s identity and adaptation materials are available on request to qualified literary agents, editors, and rights professionals.
Request Materials"I have resurrected fragments of a dead woman's mind inside my daughter."
From the Opening Pages
Prologue — The Four Inches · October 1991
Amelia Becker was seven the first time her body remembered dying, and the memory was four inches too tall for her.
Mrs. Kaminski gave the assignment twice, because second graders needed it twice. “Draw a place you remember,” she said. “Your house, your backyard, your grandmother’s kitchen. Any place that is real to you.”
Amelia sat at the third table from the door and flattened her paper with both hands where it wanted to curl. She liked assignments with rules, and this one had a rule, a real place, so she had already chosen the kitchen at home: the window over the sink, the blue tin where Margaret kept the pencils, the four squares of light on the floor in the morning.
She picked up the brown.
Her hand went somewhere else.
The first line came down long and straight and her hand did not stop at the end of it. A second line crossed it near the top. Then a third, slanted, and a fourth to meet it, and she understood she was making a roof. She could feel the crayon between her fingers and the drag of the wax against the paper, and she was not the one choosing where it went.
Verticals. Crossbars. Iron between the glass.
She reached for green without looking in the box and her fingers found it on the first try. Rows of green went along the benches, both walls, and there was a gap in the left row where a pot had been lifted out and not put back, so she drew the gap.
She did not decide how high. Her hand set it there because that was where it was.
If unearthing the truth requires a mythic violation of a child’s bodily autonomy, is it justice, or is it just another crime?
Speaking
“What does it cost a person to speak the truth out loud, and what does it cost them to stay silent? It is the question beneath my fiction, my medicine, and every room I have spoken in.”
I speak to audiences who want intellectual depth delivered with emotional intelligence and narrative force. I have developed a substantial body of public speaking material across medicine, neuroscience, mental health, and human behavior.
Drawing from expertise in medicine, neuroscience, human behavior, and a literary engagement with the human condition, my talks move between scientific insight and human story. They are written for audiences who do not want to choose between rigor and accessibility, and who would rather leave a room thinking than leave it cheered.
Signature Talks
- The Brain as Storyteller: memory, narrative, and the architecture of identity.
- Inherited Trauma and the Body as Archive.
- Forensic Truth and the Architecture of Secrecy.
- The Neuroscience of Grief: what loss does to the architecture of memory.
- Why Physicians Read Fiction, and Why Fiction Reads Physicians.
- The Cognitive Science of Suicide Prevention.
- Physician Suicide, Burnout, and the Long Work of Staying in the Room.
- Attention, Time Blindness, and the ADHD Brain: what the neuroscience actually says.
Available for Booking
Available for universities, medical institutions, literary festivals, professional conferences, and healthcare, technology, and knowledge-sector audiences. Topics can be adapted for keynote lectures, moderated conversations, panels, workshops, and institutional events.
Inquire for BookingPress & Media
"I write for readers who want the crime solved, but also need to know what the crime did to everyone who lived."
Current Work
In Submission
RETROVISION
What if memories could testify?
RETROVISION is a 111,000-word work of upmarket speculative thriller, currently with literary agents. Press materials for RETROVISION are available for advance coverage and interview requests.
Available materials on request include the full manuscript, one-page and two-page synopses, an editorial synopsis, author photographs, biographical material in three lengths, and a one-page property summary suitable for editorial assignment briefs.
Request RETROVISION Press MaterialsFeatured Book
#1 Amazon Kindle Bestseller — February 3, 2024
The Gifts of Pain, Volume 1
Daily Stories, Reflections, and Prompts to Find Hope and Healing in Adversity
“A valuable daily resource for anyone seeking comfort, strength, and wisdom as they navigate life’s hardest challenges.”
A collection of real-life stories from 31 authors of diverse backgrounds, using Elayna Fernández’s S.T.O.R.Y. System to transform painful experience into practical tools for growth and change.
Contribution
Chapter 7 — “From Impossible to I’m Possible”
Reached #1 simultaneously in Personal Transformation, Journaling, and Journal Writing Self-Help on launch day.
View on Amazon →Broadcast Coverage
Syndicated across more than 100 broadcast affiliates nationwide, including FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, and CW stations, plus AP News and regional and international press.
In Progress
Neural Rhythms and Mind Mechanics: The Academic Encyclopedia of Brainwave Entrainment
Full manuscript complete, in preparation for academic press submission.
For Journalists
Robert W. Termanini, MD is available for interviews on the following subjects:
- →The neuroscience of memory and the architecture of experience.
- →Inherited trauma and the body as archive.
- →The forensic and ethical territory at the intersection of medicine and law.
- →The cognitive foundations of narrative and the craft of fiction.
- →Medical ethics and the moral demands of clinical practice.
- →The mind under threat: what neuroscience has taught us about violence, witness, and recovery.
- →Why a physician writes fiction.
Press Resources
High-resolution press photographs, biography in short, medium, and long forms, and a one-page property summary are available on request.
Request Press KitProfessional Links
Contact
Agents, Editors & Rights
For agents, editors, foreign rights, adaptation, press, speaking, and professional inquiries:
robert@drtermanini.comA Note on Correspondence
I read every message that reaches me directly and answer what I can. Response times are typically five to seven days. Inquiries sent to the address above are read with care.
Media on deadline: Journalists with a publication or broadcast deadline should note the deadline in the subject line. Time-sensitive press inquiries receive priority response.