Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
One of the earliest Hard science fiction novel that I have read. A mind blowing for a simple reader who just thought faster than light concept was it was moving very fast. A solid gold five star book in idea side.I have read some of author's short stories, and failed read one of his Galactic Center novel. Even with all that negative experience, I could finish read this book. The plot and storytelling is slow, as if confirmed my low expectation before reading this book. But you should read this b...
Couldn't get through it... The science is interesting and clearly written, but it's just background noise to the character drama on the forefront. This novel's big problem is that it has aspirations to be something more: it wants so badly to be Real Literature (tm)... to elevate sci fi out of its genre gutter... but it only rarely reaches that level. The rest of the time is spent fumbling around in an overly wordy mix of boring interpersonal struggles.Every so often it hits the mark. There is a
Peter enters the room, greeted by Bob Slydell and Bob Porter.Bob: Well, Peter, it seems you’ve been missing a lot of work lately.Peter: I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing work, Bob!All laughBob: Peter, we just want to get an idea about what you do here at Initech. Bur first, we wanted to talk about Timescape, the 1980 Nebula Award winner from author Gregory Benford.Peter: Ah, hey, that’s a great book, I really enjoyed reading it.Bob: We did too! I mean, for a science heavy, hard SF book, it had gr...
This is a hard SF novel that won Nebula Award for 1980, which I’ve read as a part of Monthly reads in Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best NovelsAs the title suggests, this book is about time travel. However, unlike the previous stories on the subject it is less interested in adventures in the past/future of time travelers (there will be none) but in actual physics, which theoretically allows sending information to the past by using tachyons (theoretically possible particles that move faster than light).
The Coolness—• This book won the Nebula in 1980! Pretty cool for it and the author, Gregory Benford. It would have been nice for Hilary Foister to share in the credit, though, considering she supposedly co-wrote this with Benford.• It deals with tachyons! (once in a while)• It works well as a mild sedative.The Meh!-ness—• There are some cool bits of forward thinking in this book, although none of them are truly prophetic, and they needed to be if they were going to be better than average. Benfor...
SF Masterworks #27 - On the face of it, a tale of two time-scapes - 1998, where a climate disaster is about to likely destroy the human food chains amongst other things; so a group of Cambridge UK based physicists think they found a way of sending a warning message back in the past ...to - 1962, in an America of Martin Luther King and JFK, a group of scientists are surprised when they start to get, what appears to be messages, turning up in one of their experiments. And if the message is somehow...
For about the first 150 pages, I considered DNFing this novel. But it slowly picked up. While I still think the novel is too long--by at least 100 pages, due to detailed descriptions of building architecture and what characters had for dinner--I ended up giving it 3 1/2 stars. The story came together, becoming quite interesting, and by the end, was exploring the possibility/probability of a (view spoiler)[multiverse (hide spoiler)]. One must remember this was written in 1980! (I wonder if it's t...
Lots of potential but never realized. Too wordy with unintelligable technical jargon. I hated the end, though it was probably more realistic than another scenario.This is the first and only time I ever threw a book in the garbage after reading it. I just couldn't inflict anyone I know with it.
This isn't a bad book, but that's not to say it is entirely a good book, either. There is a weird tension in this novel for me, anyway because what I usually find lacking in science fiction books (e.g. characters) is oversaturated here whereas what I usually find enjoyable in science fiction (e.g. utter wackiness) is here kind of boring and even dull by the standards of the characters dealing with the problems.Spoilers! Follow beware!The premise is clever: peeps in a dying 1998 (the book dates f...
Maybe I’ve read too many time travel books or seen too many Twilight Zone episodes, but when I read a novel that involves time travel and part of it takes place in 1962, I expect to see a message being sent saying TELL KENNEDY NOT TO GO TO DALLAS IN NOVEMBER!! Not a bunch of environmental warnings about the sea that nobody in the past can decipher. OK, so what happens does in an oblique way affect the Kennedy assassination. But I had to wade through 500 pages filled with physics and science desc...
This is it: good, hard science fiction. The science is so hard my head hurts. The fiction is so imaginative that separating fact from fiction requires too much thought, too. Best of all the people and place "ring true" even though you know—don't you?—that some of them can't possibly be factual. With each point of view shift the reader is taken inside the mind and the world of that character.Benford has no trouble recreating southern California in the 60s because he lived it, but his 1998 Cambrid...
Timescape: Intimate but slow-moving story about scientistsOriginally published at Fantasy LiteratureTimescape (1980) has been on my TBR list for 35+ years, and I've long wanted to read the work of physicist Gregory Benford. The book won the Nebula Award, and it deals with time paradoxes, which I find fascinating but invariably unconvincing. First off, most of the book’s considerable length is devoted to a slow-moving and detailed portrait of scientists (mostly physicists, but also some biologist...
It's interesting to read the mixed reviews on this book. Surprising that of those who liked it many felt it was long, dense, too much detail, too much science, or science that was hard to understand. Oddly, my recollection of reading it multiple times back when it first came out was that both the writing and plot development were remarkably elegant and spare. And that surely is one reason it won the Nebula. There was just enough science in my view, described as was fitting for the advancement of...
I enjoyed this one very much. I loved the whole idea of "we" of the future (or rather 'near past' as the story is set in 1998) attempting to communicate with those of the 'more-past' (1962) to warn them of an ecological disaster that could be prevented if certain chemicals are not released into the ocean which will cause devastating algal blooms. If this were possible,could we warn those of the early 20th century not to use asbestos, or discourage the use of disposable plastics or the burning of...
Read for the 12 Awards in 12 Months Reading Challenge, the Apocalypse Now! Reading Challenge, the Hard Core Sci-fi Reading Challenge, and the SF Masterworks Reading Challenge and the Science Fiction Masterworks Book Club.Method of the world's destruction: A major failure of chemical balance in the oceans, mostly caused by an overabundance of hydrocarbons, overwhelms the ecosystem and leads to a toxic ocean bloom.This book won the BSFA, Campbell and Nebula Awards (1981).I am fascinated by the mix...
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1799572...Written in 1980, with storylines set in 1962-63 and 1998, this is a scientists' sf novel, the future 1998 world facing ecological and social catastrophe and its physicists trying to communicate with their predecessors to prevent it from happening.As a Cambridge NatSci graduate I loved the visceral detail of the decaying 1998 setting, though Benford failed to predict one element of real life decay, the extinction of independent bookshops - he still has Bowe...
Timescape is both a fascinating, hard SF book about sending messages backwards through time to save the world and a dull soap opera. The premise is that the world is on the brink of total ecological disaster in 1998, because of the overuse of pesticides. Scientists have discovered how to use tachyons to send a message to the past, with a warning and pointers on how to avoid the catastrophe. The messages are received by a lone scientist in 1963.The SF portions of the book are really well-done. Th...
Okay, this was not for me.The good part was the idea and the scientific approach. It was apparent that the time travel ideas were founded on solid physics science of the time of the writing and not some timey wimey stuff to help the plot.Yet the fascination of the author with the medium turned the scientific parts more or less into lectures that did not help to build an exciting or thrilling plot (which the idea of the narrative would have been wonderful for).Most of the time the actual SF plot
I really enjoyed the book and thought the characters were genuine, believable and also interesting, and then the book ended very suddenly ruining what had been a 5 star book, meaning it only got 4 stars. What happened, did he have to meet a deadline and so cut it short or did he just not know how to end it. Either way I think the last 20/30 pages were rushed and spoiled what was until then a well written book, giving a genuine view of people's personalities. Shame
This book has been called "hard science fiction" by some reviewers as a way to emphasize the accuracy of the author's hard science and to excuse the book's problems as a novel. I don't buy that. The word fiction still lies in the term "hard science fiction" and I'm holding this book to the standards for fiction.By which standards this book fails miserably. The male characters are bland and wonk-y, like talking heads for the author's scientific theories. Each one has a few distinguishing quirks,