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2019 reread. This 1986 novel holds up really well, almost 35 years on. Jo Walton's is the review to read: https://www.tor.com/2009/08/07/vernor...Back already? OK, what she said. The Singularity stuff: the idea that it might actually happen in RL is less popular now, but as an sfnal plot device, it's brilliant. And Vinge sets his fictional singularity in the early 23rd century, far enough off that, who knows? The bobbles, spherical stasis-fields that stop time inside them for a preset length (if...
If you like very good Sci Fi and a detective story, this is the one for you.It kept my interest and ended well too.
The sequel to the peace war, this is very definately a different book to it. In the Peace War Vinge introduced us to the bobble and showed how it completely transformed / destroyed society. In Marooned, that entire episode in human history has gone, and we are now travelling with a bunch of survivors from and Earth that was destroyed in some mysterious fashion (none of the survivors know how), towards an unknown future using the same technology as a lifeboat.In the midst of this, as people bobbl...
I clicked on 3 stars for the rating, but it deserves a bit more than that.The book has interesting portrayals of how different groups of people might perceive and choose to exist in a far future.I had a number of reservations about it. First, I read it as part of Across Realtime (an omnibus of The Peace War, The Ungoverned and Marooned In Realtime). Each of the works in omnibus had some threads connecting them to the other, but I didn't think they made a cohesive unit. Rightly or wrongly, I was
I first have to say, this book is going straight to the poolroom Best Books I Every Read Ever Ever list, because I love it. The premise is brilliant and the prose is so smooth, it just poured off the page. A book like this is far too rare these days.It's a sequel to The Peace War only in so far as it's set in the same world, so same tech, same history etc. But it is otherwise completely at right angles to the first book, which is an "Orphan Child is the TechnoJesus" adventure with observant but
This was a fantastic little book. Curious - i was taken in by a little glitch in the system because in our library catalog, the book has a pub date of 2006, which i completely believed, all through the book. Actually, it was written in 1986, prior to many of the most significant developments of the internet age. Yet Vinge's predictions as to the development of technology over the course of time seemed right on track. Part of the history of the story involves a war that took place in 1997 - a fac...
This one hit the sweet spot for me. An imaginative tale of desperate missions of individual lives colliding with the compelling need to work collaboratively to save the human race, all placed in the frame on an unusual murder mystery. Vinge had already used the concept of stasis fields, called bobbles, as a one-way time machine to the future to good effect in his “The Peace War”. The plot there involved a government, the Peace Federation, taking over by bobbling up armies, nukes, government head...
Vernor Vinge's MAROONED IN REALTIME is a murder mystery set in a strange far-future earth. Not long after our time, scientists had discovered a way to create "bobbles", indestructible stasis fields in which time doesn't pass. (For science-fiction aficionados, these are similar to the Slaver stasis fields in Larry Niven's Known Space books.) Bobbles were used to send a variety of people into the future: investors who wanted to "instantly" get rich by taking advantage of centuries of economic grow...
Why I Reread This Book: I enjoyed rereading The Peace War for the SFDG.Wow. An amazing work indeed.The Bobble series (for want of a better label) consists of The Peace War, a novella titled "The Ungoverned", and the present book. I reread "The Ungoverned" just before this, and I'm glad I did; it introduces the protagonist, Wil Brierson.When I first read this book, which I believe I did shortly after it first was first published, I loved it for the ideas but didn't see it as strongly connecte...
Full review on my podcast, SFBRP episode #364.
What if we could place people, buildings, or whole cities in frozen balls of time to open years, centuries, even hundreds of thousands of years in the future as if no time had passed for them at all? In MAROONED IN REALTIME (and the preceding THE PEACE WAR), this technology exists in the form of "bobbles". A private investigator is bobbled in to the future by a panicked criminal. Years later (in what feels like moments later to him) he finds himself in a world where all but a couple hundred of t...
Storyline: 3/5Characters: 2/5Writing Style: 3/5World: 3/5This is a book that starts with surprises. Surprise one was that it didn't do what sequels normally do: follow up on the foreshadowed crises of the last book. What it did instead was rather fun. Vinge gave consideration to the repercussions of the technological introductions he made in the first book. One can generally criticize authors for plotholes and overlooking details when they introduce technology; it is difficult to see the unexpec...
Only three hundred humans left on earth. A murder mystery across fifty million years. A meditation on deep time and evolution, on civilization and intelligence.What more could you want?A very good book.
Sharing a fair similarity in style and content to Asimov's classic Robots of Dawn, a far future human colony requires a famous detective to investigate the murder of one of their founders and is loosely partnered with a nine thousand year old partner. It meanders a bit but has a lot of interesting world descriptions, the characters are not exactly rounded but the protagonist is at least interesting. Vinge merges the golden age mystery with far future science fiction very well but I found myself
Nice to go back and revisit a favorite book from when I was younger. Great central SF concept, somewhat interesting mystery, fairly uninteresting characters. Probably 3.5 stars for me.
Enjoyed the first book, rating brought down by several elements that didn't belong. Those are gone here, but this murder mystery isn't as good. Both books were released together (adding a short story between) in one volume later on. Unlike the other two, this novel would not stand on its own.The tale kicks off with little introduction, nearly in media res. I fumbled to figure out whether Will was Wili (no) and Della was Della (yes), and where they fit in this timeline. Turns out they are now a L...
Marooned in Realtime takes the premise, ideas and some of the characters established in The Peace War and expands on them to create a fascinating novel which is much better than its predecessor in terms of pacing and character development. And of course, what makes Marooned so effective is the fact it revolves around a murder mystery which is the linchpin that ties it all together. Wil Brierson is a "low-tech" (basically an ordinary citizen like you and me) who served as a cop in a previous life...
Wil Brierson is a detective, maybe the last one. Sometime in the twenty-second century, every human on Earth disappeared. The only ones left are those who were, at the time, encased in "bobbles", spheres of absolute stasis that many used to jump ahead through the years... and there are only a few hundred people left, trying to build what society they can by jumping further and further ahead to collect more stragglers. Nobody knows what happened to the rest. But that's not Wil's case. Nor is it h...
I really enjoyed Marooned in Realtime. The premise is that time travel is possible, but only in one direction - forward. The mechanism is called bobbling and it puts a whole area and everything inside it in statis . The statis area is protected by a non-permeable bubble that has a mirror finish. The technology in this world has been around since the early 2050s. It has been used by various people to escape their present fates, make money or to get rid of people. At the present is this book, the
It is ironic that I read the The Peace War by Vinge so that I could read this book, a sequel, because I heard that this book was great. But I liked the Peace War much more. You could call them the Bobble series. Marooned was interesting, and I think I would read it again if I could go back in time. The use of bobbles was extremely imaginative. But the story was a bit flimsy, and the characters were not really developed. I felt like I hardly knew the villains, and they were interchangeable. Never...