Time Pressure

It's easy to get sucked into this story which begins in a cozy rural cabin buried in a blizzard. A great setting for a fantasy tale. The characters are likable, especially for anyone who has been a hippie or had one for a friend. Plain down-to-earth folks make up a tale that lets the reader entertain a new, somewhat comforting paradigm about the purpose of life and the structure of our universe. This is real science fiction; not pointless violence thrown into some horrifying environment like so much 'science fiction' seems to be.

This book gave me hope. It gave me renewed faith in humanity. It's deliberate pacing may take some adjusting to, but the narrative strenghtens as it unfolds. Great characters with warmth and earthy humor. A truly erotic and life loving, hippie-sci-fi odyssey.

This was the first Spider Robinson book I ever read, and it drove me to acquire all the rest! I loved the plot turns, I was utterly surprised by the truth behind it, and I'm one of those people who always knows the plot after 5 minutes into a movie or tv show. I don't want to give anything away, but this book is intelligent, witty, sexy, and made laugh and cry, at different times. (For that matter the line, "From what year" will make me giggle whenever I hear it, just in recollection.) A few of the main chracters are living on a commune, so adult situations. There's a wide variety of character types, and an excellent portrayl of different people with different backgrounds living in a small community.Spider writes very much in the style of Heinlein's adult work, and the same cautions apply. If plain speaking or sex bothers you, don't read it. For adults, this book is a delight.

The best thing about this book for me is how it twists around. For the first half you see everything strictly from the narrator's point of view, and everything he says seems rational and correct. Then you start to have a few doubts, and just as it occurs to you that in fact he's sort of a jerk, the plot twists, you (both) find out that some things weren't at all what they seemed (and others were exactly), and when the dust settles both you and the narrator are seeing things very differently. As SF, this is good and solid (if slightly oldfashioned, being from the 80s), with nice treatments of telepathy, time travel, and the future of humanity. In general setting, I liked the whole Canadian Hippie Commune treatment; it's done convincingly, not as the easy stereotype it could have been.I've seen a couple of people complain about the erotic parts of the book, and I have to admit I don't really understand it; the love scenes aren't particularly pornographic, and they *are* important to the plot. And why would anyone dislike love scenes anyway? But maybe that's just me. *8)