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Title: Marooned in Realtime |
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Review of Marooned in Realtime
- Multiple Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge takes readers on a fifty-million-year trip to a future where humanity's fate will be decided in a dangerous game of high-tech survival.
In this taut thriller, a Hugo finalist for Best Novel, nobody knows why there are only three hundred humans left alive on the Earth fifty million years from now. Opinion is fiercely divided on whether to settle in and plant the seed of mankind anew, or to continue using high-energy stasis fields, or "bobbles," in venturing into the future. When somebody is murdered, it's obvious someone has a secret he or she is willing to kill to preserve.The murder intensifies the rift between the two factions, threatening the survival of the human race. It's up to 21st century detective Wil Brierson, the only cop left in the world, to find the culprit, a diabolical fiend whose lust for power could cause the utter extinction of man.
Filled with excitement and adventure, Vinge's tense SF puzzler will satisfy readers with its sense of wonder and engaging characters, one of whom is a murderer with a unique modus operandi.
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Comments for Marooned in Realtime
- Posted on 2008-04-29
Decent
Marooned in Real Time is a kind of sequel to Vinge's The Peace War. It takes place in the same future history, and the basic technological conceit, the bobbler, is at the heart of the story. There is even some overlap in characters. Marooned in Real Time is not as good as The Peace War. Vinge pushes the bobble idea to a logical conclusion, using it as a one way form of time travel over many millenia but the bobble idea doesn't have the same novelty that it had in The Peace War. The plotting in this book, based on a clever inversion of the old locked room mystery idea, is simply not as good as The Peace War. Character development is not as strong either.
Score: 3
- Posted on 2008-02-20
Absolutely Top-flight Sci-Fi
Marooned in Realtime is a superb book. I am not personally an avid reader of mysteries, but this is a truly grand and imaginative piece of science fiction storytelling. There are actually two mysteries here - a heart-wrenching murder mystery and the abrupt disappearance of almost the entire human race! MIR is contemplative and intelligent sci-fi. I'm not sure you can really call it hard sci-fi, but it has that mind-expanding hard sci-fi FEEL. The consequences of new technology are carefully explored and mulled over, with some grand ideas about what progress actually means and where civilization is headed.
MIR is not perfect. I don't want to oversell it. It starts a bit slow and the overall novel a not very long. But that doesn't change the fact this is flat-out required reading for fans of science fiction. Nominally, it is a sequel to The Peace War, but really, it stands completely alone.
Score: 5
- Posted on 2008-01-30
Awesome book!!
A truly great science fiction book in the tradition of the Masters..
Vinge created a scientific concept and built a "whatif" story around it. It's even better since he made it a detective story.
I'm in awe. I don't say this about very many science fiction books.
Score: 5 - Posted on 2007-10-26
Vintage Vinge
MAROONED IN REALTIME's author Vernor Vinge was my PDP-11 Assembly Language Professor at SDSU in late 1980, and was extremely influential on my early career as a Computer Scientist (which has now evolved into Aeronatical Systems Engineering). Strangely enough, though I've read hundreds of SciFi books over the years, this is the first Vinge book I've read.
I found MAROONED IN REALTIME(1986) a bit anachronistic, as the year 1997 was routinely mentioned as the year in which "devastating plagues" were released on humanity. I would simply substitute the date 2017 for 1997, and this made it fairly easy to "suspend disbelief".
The concept of "Singularity" that Vinge introduced in this and other books of his in the 80's was quite unique at the time, and has now become a foundation idea in the SciFi genre. However, Vinge's unique, but less important, "Bobbling" technology is actually what gets the most attention in MAROONED IN REALTIME, and "the Singularity" is virtually unexplored, and "left to the reader" to surmise the real causes.
The main and minor characters in this "Ellery Queen novel set in the far future" are, for the most part, believable and fairly interesting. The only exception was near the end of the book, when - in true Ellery Queen style - all the possible "murderers" are gathered in a room, so the detective can unmask the culprit in front of all the other suspects... Well, the scene leads to the two most technologically advanced high-tech antagonists leaving the room and racing off into space to "fight it out" for all eternity - which went a bit too far for my belief.
The book comes in at over 250 paperback pages, which was substantial for 1986, but somewhat on the small side when compared to today's SciFi behemoth Novels.
I'm looking forward to reading some of Mr. Vinge's more recent works.
Score: 4
- Posted on 2007-09-03
Not Free SF Reader
An interesting murder mystery. Using statis bobbles, time can pass at a
different rate for those outside. Therefore, being kicked out of one
effectively strands you from your fellows, forever. Is this murder?
Millions of years after an event, a police officer must try and work
out why this happened and who did it.
Score: 3