leftylucyprivateeye's review against another edition
4.0
Unique, if somewhat dated, take on time travel and the singularity. Vinge always has big ideas that make you think outside of the box and while this may not be his strongest effort, I suspect I'll be thinking about it's implications for a while.
thestarman's review
3.0
VERDICT: 3 stars.
REVIEW: Ambitious but ponderous SF/Fantasy. First half cured my insomnia. Second half jumped the time-shark, but was interesting.
REVIEW: Ambitious but ponderous SF/Fantasy. First half cured my insomnia. Second half jumped the time-shark, but was interesting.
chutten's review
4.0
I prefer the Zones of Thought novels, but this was an enjoyable one-two punch. The characters fell a little flat (especially the women), but overall it was quite nice.
ajslater's review
3.0
This is two related SciFi novels published together. The first, _The_Peace_War_ is a fairly standard Heinlenesque smart-boy-makes-good nerd fantasy. Nothing revelatory.
The second, _Marooned_In_Realtime_ is a fantastic look at what can happen in a world with one way (forward) time travel. This is why I picked up Vinge again, for creative, giant scale sci fi. People can travel to the stars in stasis, but they burn megayears of realtime doing so. Ecologists can jump ahead half a megayear at a time and watch evolution. But there's no way to get back. You end up hanging out with whoever is out of stasis in your eon. The mystery of an individual murder drives the plot along along with the greater mystery of why human civilization on earth disappeared abruptly. Good sci fi and good exploration of Vinge's theme of the results of exponential technological progress.
I picked this up because I enjoyed his other Novel _A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep_ and his historically important (to the genre) short story _True_Names_.
The second, _Marooned_In_Realtime_ is a fantastic look at what can happen in a world with one way (forward) time travel. This is why I picked up Vinge again, for creative, giant scale sci fi. People can travel to the stars in stasis, but they burn megayears of realtime doing so. Ecologists can jump ahead half a megayear at a time and watch evolution. But there's no way to get back. You end up hanging out with whoever is out of stasis in your eon. The mystery of an individual murder drives the plot along along with the greater mystery of why human civilization on earth disappeared abruptly. Good sci fi and good exploration of Vinge's theme of the results of exponential technological progress.
I picked this up because I enjoyed his other Novel _A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep_ and his historically important (to the genre) short story _True_Names_.
kejadlen's review against another edition
4.0
Not his best, but still a damned fine read. A little fluffier than I expected, but some great ideas in the second book.
kundor's review
4.0
Brilliant, like all of Vinge's stuff. Written in the mid-80s, these stories include some of the earliest examination of the Singularity (a term Vinge coined in 1983, I think). It's not actually dealt with directly, but it's posed as an apparently inevitable result of advanced civilization. The parallel with the Rapture is made explicit here in its first exposition!
The first story, The Peace War, reads almost like a response to James Blish's They Shall Have Stars: in both, scientists working at government contractors secretly develop new technology capable of overthrowing the current nation-state-based world order and, in response to the dangers of the Cold War, deploy it on their own, resulting in a post-nation-state world. Also, some scientists invent immortality drugs. Whereas Blish depicts this as a good thing, in Vinge it's more complicated: it's posed as definitely bad, with most of the world's population wiped out and the unilateral scientists' organization (The Peace Authority) a tyrannical entity oppressing the remaining population into semi-serfdom.
Yet is it so bad? For the Tinkers and others in the essentially anarchistic North America, where the only government is the distant Peace Authority (which acts only to forbid energy generation, moving machines, governments, etc.) life seems to work pretty well. They are able to invent things and band together to resist the Authority more effectively than they could in a government-based society. As the stories progress, it's clear that the lot of the "ungoverned" is better than that of their governed peers. So ultimately, though the scientists of Lawrence Livermore Laboratories were evil for unleashing the War which destroyed the nation-states, that result was actually a good thing.
Does Vinge think such destruction is a necessary evil for us to "mature" past nationalism? Or does he believe some other, peaceful way can be found to gradually dismantle the state? I'm afraid that abolishing governments would only lead to the bleak corporate-ruled world we find in Snow Crash, Jennifer Government, etc. Abolishing both governments and corporations peacefully is a tall order.
The first story, The Peace War, reads almost like a response to James Blish's They Shall Have Stars: in both, scientists working at government contractors secretly develop new technology capable of overthrowing the current nation-state-based world order and, in response to the dangers of the Cold War, deploy it on their own, resulting in a post-nation-state world. Also, some scientists invent immortality drugs. Whereas Blish depicts this as a good thing, in Vinge it's more complicated: it's posed as definitely bad, with most of the world's population wiped out and the unilateral scientists' organization (The Peace Authority) a tyrannical entity oppressing the remaining population into semi-serfdom.
Yet is it so bad? For the Tinkers and others in the essentially anarchistic North America, where the only government is the distant Peace Authority (which acts only to forbid energy generation, moving machines, governments, etc.) life seems to work pretty well. They are able to invent things and band together to resist the Authority more effectively than they could in a government-based society. As the stories progress, it's clear that the lot of the "ungoverned" is better than that of their governed peers. So ultimately, though the scientists of Lawrence Livermore Laboratories were evil for unleashing the War which destroyed the nation-states, that result was actually a good thing.
Does Vinge think such destruction is a necessary evil for us to "mature" past nationalism? Or does he believe some other, peaceful way can be found to gradually dismantle the state? I'm afraid that abolishing governments would only lead to the bleak corporate-ruled world we find in Snow Crash, Jennifer Government, etc. Abolishing both governments and corporations peacefully is a tall order.
pedanther's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
tense
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
smcleish's review
5.0
Originally published on my blog here in October 2001.
Although presented in this edition as a single entity, Across Realtime is really two novels, as it was originally published: The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime.
Te concept which fuels the plot of the two novels is is an impenetrable sphere of force, perfectly reflective and frictionless, which encloses whatever is within it in a fixed instant of time until the bobble bursts. Not much is said about the physics of these objects, which are basically unexplained plot devices in a traditional science fiction manner. My feeling is that they are impossible, since quantum tunnelling would allow particles to pass through the skin, and this would force a thermodynamic connection between the inside and outside, making time pass.
In the first novel, which has the excellent title The Peace War, the bobbles have been used by the Peace Authority to set up a world wide dictatorship (just bobble any opposition). The plot is about the fight to overturn them, led by the man who invented the bobble and a young boy, his genius apprentice.
The second novel, Marooned in Realtime, is set millions of years later. It is a more successful story than The Peace War, which takes quite a long time to get going. It is a murder investigation, and it has three mysteries at its heart. Wil Brierson is a policeman from the late twenty first century, who was effectively murdered - separated from his family and friends by being bobbled for thousands of years by a fugitive suspect. This crime was punished by the courts by bobbling the perpetrator for the same length of time, and placing this bobble and an account of the crime next to that of the victim so that he could prepare his own vengeance after his release.
This wouldn't be much of a mystery except for the central fact of the novel. The long term bobbled have found themselves in a world with no humans, and a variety of untestable theories are put forward for the disappearance - alien invasion, the second coming, a universal transcendence to some higher level of being. Marta and Yelen, among the last survivors to leave civilisation (and therefore among the most technologically advanced), decide that the only hope for human survival is for all the remaining people to band together, and as part of this they rescue Wil's assailant and give him a new identity.
The third investigation, which is the principal one in terms of the crime plot, is into murder committed with an opposite method to the attack on Wil. To gather as many recruits as possible, Marta's growing community bobbles itself through thousands of years until other bobbles break; but now an enemy hacks her computer system so that she is left outside the bobble, alone on the planet until the end of her natural lifespan away from medical technology.
Wil's investigation into this makes the novel a fascinating mystery, with an interesting background among the animals evolved since the disappearance. Marooned in Realtime is easily the better of the two stories, and The Peace War is really more like an explanation of its background than something similar to it in stature. Both, however, are of interest; Marooned in Realtime is one of the best pieces of eighties science fiction.
Although presented in this edition as a single entity, Across Realtime is really two novels, as it was originally published: The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime.
Te concept which fuels the plot of the two novels is is an impenetrable sphere of force, perfectly reflective and frictionless, which encloses whatever is within it in a fixed instant of time until the bobble bursts. Not much is said about the physics of these objects, which are basically unexplained plot devices in a traditional science fiction manner. My feeling is that they are impossible, since quantum tunnelling would allow particles to pass through the skin, and this would force a thermodynamic connection between the inside and outside, making time pass.
In the first novel, which has the excellent title The Peace War, the bobbles have been used by the Peace Authority to set up a world wide dictatorship (just bobble any opposition). The plot is about the fight to overturn them, led by the man who invented the bobble and a young boy, his genius apprentice.
The second novel, Marooned in Realtime, is set millions of years later. It is a more successful story than The Peace War, which takes quite a long time to get going. It is a murder investigation, and it has three mysteries at its heart. Wil Brierson is a policeman from the late twenty first century, who was effectively murdered - separated from his family and friends by being bobbled for thousands of years by a fugitive suspect. This crime was punished by the courts by bobbling the perpetrator for the same length of time, and placing this bobble and an account of the crime next to that of the victim so that he could prepare his own vengeance after his release.
This wouldn't be much of a mystery except for the central fact of the novel. The long term bobbled have found themselves in a world with no humans, and a variety of untestable theories are put forward for the disappearance - alien invasion, the second coming, a universal transcendence to some higher level of being. Marta and Yelen, among the last survivors to leave civilisation (and therefore among the most technologically advanced), decide that the only hope for human survival is for all the remaining people to band together, and as part of this they rescue Wil's assailant and give him a new identity.
The third investigation, which is the principal one in terms of the crime plot, is into murder committed with an opposite method to the attack on Wil. To gather as many recruits as possible, Marta's growing community bobbles itself through thousands of years until other bobbles break; but now an enemy hacks her computer system so that she is left outside the bobble, alone on the planet until the end of her natural lifespan away from medical technology.
Wil's investigation into this makes the novel a fascinating mystery, with an interesting background among the animals evolved since the disappearance. Marooned in Realtime is easily the better of the two stories, and The Peace War is really more like an explanation of its background than something similar to it in stature. Both, however, are of interest; Marooned in Realtime is one of the best pieces of eighties science fiction.
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