Marooned Realtime

After hearing Vernor Vinge speak recently, it was no surprise to me that Marooned In Realtime is a thoughtful, intelligent novel. Science fiction that spans great periods of time is often forced to throw characterization overboard as the scope overwhelms individuals (e.g. Stapledon's otherwise excellent Last and First Men reads more like a treatise on the future than a novel). Vinge's tale of a small group of time travelers living in the ruins of a post Singularity Earth is epic in scope but at the core is a compelling personal tale of companions lost in the distant past and hope for the future. This book is an underappreciated classic and one of the best science fiction novels I have read in some time.

A mystery, a tale of survival, the government of New Mexico, the Peacers, bobbles and millions of years in the future. Tinkers, low tech, high tech, ungovs and statists. Wil W. Brierson, a police detective from the 21st Century, had been shanghaied - forced into a bobble against his will. Now he, and the last remains of mankind and culture, were doing all they could to survive. And one of the most important persons on Earth, the one with the plan to save them all, is murdered. So after millions of years he gets a new job. To solve the crime. Set in a Earth far in the future, with advanced techonolgy, interesting characters, realistic problems and new animals the book is a great read. Dogthings, social spiders and fishermonkeys remind me of a Dougal Dixon book. And as Vernor Vinge is a fan of Mr. Dixon there is a reason for that. I don't have the Peace War but I do have the short story The Ungoverned in which Wil stops the NM invasion of Kansas so I did know some of the background of his character and why the New Mexicans dislike him. This book is just great with the first book. In other words, it pretty much stands on its own.

Imagine bouncing forward through time, for millennium, in "bobbles" and the implications. For the mystery fan, there is a murder spanning millennium. For the technologist, there are implications of accelerating technologies, of maintaining personal databases and records through millennium. Vinge's computer science teaching shines through without stifling his imagination. Embedded systems with Intelligence Amplification (as opposed to AI) are explored, as well as wearable (err ..brain-networked) computers. For the historian, there are those groping with the singular change and loss of humanity, and the manner of people dealing with being marooned for millennium (see Albert Camus - the Myth of Sisyphus). For all this is a great story. There are a lot of fun tidbits thrown in, like; "dragon" birds, who are evolving to set fires to get more to eat, people witnessing plate technonics, and interglobal network hacking (recall this was written before the internet!).

This is a whodunnit to beat them all--who murdered the human race? I had some problems with some of the ideas in the book--namely, that humans zapping ahead millions of years into the future would find themselves on an Earth that was compatible with human life every step of the way. That said, this was a terrific read. Vinge is a rare talent--he writes the hardest of hard SF with style and grace. The story is a vehicle to explore Vinge's concept of the Singularity. This is the idea that humanity is on the verge of transcending itself in one blinding step, through artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, or something yet to come. This book is hard to put down, and one of my new favorite SF novels of all time.

Ya know, I've really got to start reviewing more books that I loathed with a passion so that I can't be accused of just handing out five stars to every novel I ever picked up. Yet "Marooned in Realtime" has earned every accolade I could give it. Most books fade rapidly from my memory, providing a passing diversion at best. This one is deep, moving, wrenching, thought-provoking, tragic. If I could only keep, say, ten books, this would be one of them.Vernor Vinge picks up on the milieu he created in an earlier book and expands upon the use of "bobble" technology. The bobbles are stasis bubbles that can be set for durations ranging from hours to centuries. Since nothing inside them experiences the flow of time, they can be used as a kind of one-way time travel ticket to the future. Simply set the parameters as desired, pop up a bobble around you, and see what the world's like in two centuries.This is what a group of men and women are doing on a deserted future Earth, slowly making their way up the timestream to see what lies ahead, and hoping to come back into synch with the rest of scattered humanity. Vinge does a good job of introducing and developing characters, making you identify with or understand them. The key figure is from close to our time and acts as our point of view.He is the one that has to investigate what could only be a murder, when the group bobbles up for another leap and one of their members is left behind. For the others, only an instant passes; for the stranded woman, years of isolation and loneliness go by, with her only hope being to live long enough for the bobble to dissipate and provide her salvation and succor. And...she doesn't make it. She spends months struggling in fear and grief, an arm's length and an eternity away from her friends inside the mirrored bobble, hoping, praying.The tale of her struggle, told in a sort of flashback as the lawman reads her journals, is the heart of the book and is truly heartbreaking. Even knowing that she didn't survive, you find yourself hoping, as you read along with the investigator, that somehow it will all turn out all right. But it won't."Marooned in Realtime" is a minor and overlooked classic by an author who creates rich, vivid, intricately detailed worlds and characters and who excels in exploring the ramifications of advanced technology and social innovations. Vinge only bangs out a book about every three years or so, but they are well worth the wait. This is the best of them; give it a try, and you won't regret it.